With a new Louisiana law reclassifying two drugs that can be used to induce abortions as controlled substances set to take effect Oct. 1, doctors are practicing how quickly they can get their hands on the lifesaving medication while also abiding by new state guidance, reports say.
Why it matters: "Most patients would likely make it," New Orleans Department of Health director and emergency medical doctor Jennifer Avegno told the Washington Post of the delays caused by added restrictions to the drugs, which have uses beyond abortion. "But I've seen myself what can happen when someone is bleeding out from a miscarriage. And a few minutes could mean life and death in some cases."
All seven independent directors of 23andMe resigned on Tuesday night, in a stunning rebuke of CEO Anne Wojcicki's efforts to take the genetic testing company private.
Zoom in: Among those quitting were longtime VC backers of 23andMe, like Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha and xFund's Patrick Chung.
Private equity's expanding role in billing, tracking and collecting payments for health care is exacerbating America's medical debt problem, a new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project concludes.
Why it matters: PE-owned "end-to-end" service providers squeeze consumers at both ends, pushing medical credit cards and installment payment plans while aggressively pursuing debt collection.
Health care providers and telehealth vendors are pressing Congress to break an impasse over the virtual prescribing of controlled substances that could affect access to drugs like Adderall, along with medical marijuana and testosterone.
Why it matters: Pandemic-era telehealth prescribing allowances expire at the end of the year and the Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Health and Human Services are reportedly at odds over whether to continue to make controlled substances available without an in-person doctor's visit.
Driving rates are above pre-pandemic levels in almost every major U.S. metro, a new analysis finds.
Why it matters: The COVID-19 pandemic, when driving plummeted as people sought to "stop the spread," was a unique chance for cities to get a lasting handle on transportation-related emissions.
Democratic lawmakers, including Vice President Kamala Harris, are blaming abortion bans for the death of a Georgia woman who was denied immediate care due to the state's restrictive laws.
Cigna's Express Scripts filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a federal report that places the blame for rising drug prices on pharmacy benefit managers, describing it as "seventy-four pages of unsupported innuendo" and calling for a retraction.
Why it matters: Experts say the lawsuit is legally dubious but represents significant pushback from pharmacy middlemen "to counterbalance the narrative" from regulators.
Repeated scans revealed how a woman's brain underwent significant and sometimes lasting neurological changes during pregnancy that may help build parental instincts.
Why it matters: The findings published Monday in Nature Neuroscience could help researchers understand why some new parents develop postpartum depression and other neurological conditions that appear during or are worsened by pregnancy.
The summer surge of COVID-19 is receding in more than half of the states, though wastewater surveillance indicates high or very high levels of virus continue to circulate in much of the country, according to the CDC.
Why it matters: With peak summer travel over and mild temperatures keeping people outdoors in many regions, the country could get a respite before the traditional fall-winter surge kicks in.
More than 39 million people could die between now and the middle of this century due to infections stemming from superbugs that are resistant to widely used antibiotics, a new study in The Lancetprojects.
Why it matters: It's billed as the first in-depth analysis of the global health impacts of antimicrobial resistance and reinforces earlier findings that superbugs can be more fatal than diseases like HIV/AIDS.
The Trump campaign's populist rhetoric on drug pricing is colliding with more traditional GOP concerns in Congress about heavy-handed government squelching pharmaceutical innovation.
The big picture: The tension surfaced this week when multiple high-ranking Republicans told Axios they want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act's Medicare drug price negotiations next year if they prevail in the elections.
U.S. students have made up for some pandemic-era learning losses in math and reading — but the recovery has been slow and uneven, especially among students of color, per a new report.
Why it matters: The pandemic exposed deep racial and income inequalities in the nation's public school system, and the uneven recovery is showing few of those inequities have been addressed enough.
