Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: The Kids Are Struggling Because The Adults Are; Could Abortion Lead To Murder Charges?
The New York Times: What If Kids Are Sad And Stressed Because Their Parents Are?
Just as there is a depressing familiarity to parents’ conversations about their children, there is a similar familiarity to kids’ conversations about their parents. I spend much of my time traveling to college campuses, both secular and religious, and I hear a similar refrain all the time: “Something happened to my parents.” (David French, 3/19)
The Washington Post: Women Who Have Abortions May Be Headed To Prison - Or Worse
The South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act (H.3549) would “afford equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization,” and reclassify any act that ends a pregnancy as “wilful prenatal homicide.” This means that an abortion could be punished like any murder, with sentences at a minimum of years in prison to, conceivably, the death penalty, though the latter isn’t spelled out in the bill. (Kathleen Parker, 3/17)
The New York Times: Women’s Health Care Is Underfunded. The Consequences Are Dire
When it comes to women’s reproductive health, she said, “there’s been a more complicated dynamic” because there’s been a history of looking at women’s biological functioning “as sort of inherently pathological.” Menstruation, childbirth and menopause were seen as a kind of permanent sickness or weakness, which (conveniently, for some) prevented women from fully participating in public life. (Jessica Grose, 3/18)
The New York Times: How To Prepare For The Next Pandemic
We need to prepare to fight disease outbreaks just as we prepare to fight fires. If a fire is left to burn out of control, it poses a threat not only to one home but to an entire community. The same is true for infectious diseases, except on a much bigger scale. As we know all too well from Covid, an outbreak in one town can quickly spread across an entire country and then around the world. (Bill Gates, 3/19)
Stat: Med Students Are Avoiding Emergency Medicine Residency
In the emergency room today, everyone is suffering. Many emergency medicine physicians are struggling to provide quality care amid staffing shortages, increased pressure to meet productivity metrics, and frustrated patients battling prolonged wait times. Medical students have picked up on the chaos within the emergency medicine physician community — and it’s making them less interested in entering our specialty. (Christian Rose, Adaira I. Landry and Kaitlin M. Bowers, 3/20)
NPR: Remembering Dr. Jiang Yanyong, Who Exposed Chinese Government Lies About SARS
The news Jiang made that year was exposing the Chinese government's cover-up of Beijing's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Just as COVID-19 would be in 2020, SARS was a deadly respiratory illness caused by a then-novel coronavirus. (Susan Jakes, 3/18)
San Francisco Chronicle: To Make More Doctors, The U.S. Needs More Residency Spots
On Friday, nearly 40,000 soon-to-be medical school graduates will learn which hospital-based residency program they will be joining as part of the required rite of passage toward becoming a fully licensed independent doctor. With an aging physician community and rising reports of physician burnout, the country needs these newly minted doctors now more than ever. (Jason Gomez, 3/17)
Chicago Tribune: The Health Of Americans Is A Big Reason For Our High COVID-19 Death Rate
For the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate in the future, that America is one of the unhealthiest countries in the industrialized world. Critics on the right and left harp on how the pandemic was handled, but in fact the dismal outcomes in the U.S. do not reflect management of the crisis so much as our underlying health as a country. (Cory Franklin and Robert Weinstein, 3/20)
Houston Chronicle: 'It's OK If You Die' — Why Ben Taub Is The People's Hospital
Early in my career, during my internship, I was slated to take care of patients on Ben Taub’s general wards, meaning those hospitalized for some degree of organ dysfunction — kidney disease, liver cirrhosis, pneumonia, infections of the skin. Every morning, I pulled into work listening to a Wilco song. (Ricardo Nuila, 3/19)
Modern Healthcare: Health Disparities In Cancer Cases, Deaths Reveal Social Inequities
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that U.S. life expectancy dropped for the second consecutive year in 2021, to 76.4 years from 77 the prior year. The change was largely driven by COVID-19 and drug overdoses, but cancer remains the second-leading cause of death. (Dr. Wayne Frederick and Nancy Brinker, 3/20)
