The Associated Press: California Speaker Recall Effort Reflects Democratic Tension
Democrats control every lever of power in California state government, and free from worrying about major losses to Republicans, they’re training fire instead on each other. The latest example is a recall effort against Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a strong progressive now targeted by party activists upset that he derailed a bill seeking government-funded health care for all. (Cooper, 8/5)

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Sonoma County Struggles To Fill Gaps In Crisis Care For Mentally Ill 
When a psychiatric patient shows up at the emergency room at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the staff quickly removes anything dangerous before placing them in a treatment room. Cables and heavy objects are stowed away. A cart with essential instruments — scalpels, needles, sutures and commonly used drugs — is wheeled out. ...A “sitter” or security guard is placed near the doorway to watch over the patient 24 hours a day. If the patient can’t be managed with medication, they are restrained to prevent them from harming themselves or others. This scene is repeated more than six times a day, on average, at Memorial — Sonoma County’s largest hospital — which logged nearly 2,500 encounters with psychiatric patients in its emergency department last year. (Espinoza, 8/5)

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Most Of Sonoma County Psychiatric Patients Sent Out Of County For Hospital Care
Buried in the U.S. Senate’s now-stalled effort to repeal and replace Obamacare is legislative language that mental health care professionals have been seeking for years — an exemption to a rule that prohibits federal dollars from being spent on “Institutions For Mental Disease.” It’s a rule as old as the landmark 1965 program establishing Medicaid — the government-provided medical insurance for the poor and disabled — and it bars federal dollars from being used for adult patients treated at certain kinds of psychiatric facilities. Known as the IMD Exclusion, the rule was drafted at a time when mental health professionals, advocates for patients and some federal lawmakers were trying to end the notorious era of psychiatric asylums. (Espinoza, 8/5)

Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Was Quoyah Carson Tehee Failed By Sonoma County’s Mental Health Care System? 
Untreated, Quoyah Carson Tehee’s schizophrenia was essentially a death sentence. The night before he hanged himself at his home in Cloverdale on Dec. 10, 2015, Tehee was plagued by paranoid delusions. The 37-year-old stood in the rain with no shirt and shoes, wielding a pitchfork over his head, screaming and yelling. He threatened his neighbors and accused them of taking his cigarettes. He threw a rock through their car window and assaulted a cyclist after knocking him off his bike. ...His life and death illustrate the challenges of caring for people with severe mental illnesses in Sonoma County, as well as the toll it takes on the people who love them. (Espinoza, 8/5)

In other mental health news —

Los Angeles Times: Mental Illness And Homelessness Are Connected. But Not How You Might Think
Even as Los Angeles starts a $1.2-billion homeless housing construction program, residents from Temple City to Venice are fighting to keep homeless projects out of their neighborhoods. But since 1995, chronically homeless mentally ill people — a widely shunned subgroup — have been living in Santa Monica’s Step Up on Second apartments, a block from the tourist-friendly Third Street Promenade and close enough to the beach to feel the salt air. (Holland, 8/7)

San Jose Mercury News: Santa Clara: Family Sues City After Police Killed Their Son
Underneath the red, purple and yellow poncho from Colombia bearing the name of her slain son, Amanda Sommers’ shoulders trembled. The mother of Jesús A. Geney, a 24-year-old man killed by Santa Clara police while suffering a mental breakdown, stood in front of Santa Clara City Hall on Saturday to announce her family is suing the city. (Giwargis, 8/5)

Capital Public Radio: Why Are Alzheimer’s Rates So High Among Latinos?
Latinos are California’s fastest-growing ethnic group. They’re also among the most likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. A new five-year study out of UC Davis will investigate why. (Caiola, 8/4)

In other public health news —

KPBS: How Community Members Can Help Their Neighbors Thwart Chronic Diseases
Project Concern International's community health worker program aims to plant knowledgeable neighbors in ethnic communities where rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke may be high. Program Director Connie Lafuente said the initiative focuses on reaching diverse immigrant and refugee populations in the region's low-income neighborhoods, including City Heights. (Mento, 8/4)

KPCC: Like In Middle School, Charter Schools' Kindergarten Vaccination Rates Trail District-Run Schools
Seventh graders in California charter schools were significantly less likely than their peers in district-run public schools to have received all of the vaccinations state law requires last year, KPCC reported last week. Now, a follow-up analysis of state Department of Public Health data revealed roughly the same gap between charter schools — publicly-funded, but run by independent boards and non-profits — and their district counterparts in another grade: kindergarten. (Stokes, 8/7)

Los Angeles Times: What We Know About California's Largest Toxic Cleanup: Thousands Of L.A. County Homes Tainted With Lead
By this fall, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control plans to begin removing lead-tainted soil from 2,500 residential properties near the shuttered Exide Technologies battery recycling plant in Vernon. The cleanup — the largest of its kind in California history — spans seven southeast Los Angeles County neighborhoods, where plant operations have threatened the health of an estimated 100,000 people. (Barboza and Poston, 8/6)

In other environmental health news —

KPCC: Lingering Leak Woes: 'An Extraordinary Number Of Lawsuits' For SoCal Gas
Share Share via Email Share on Twitter Share on FacebookThe state decision clearing Southern California Gas Co. to resume limited operations at the Aliso Canyon gas storage field was touted Friday as good news during the company’s quarterly earnings call. But the legal and regulatory challenges from the massive gas leak at the facility are not over and could drag on for years. (McNary, 8/4)

Los Angeles Times: Rich And Powerful Figures Will Set USC Course In Wake Of Scandal, From Behind Closed Doors
How USC handles one of the biggest scandals in its history will be decided behind closed doors by a small group of wealthy and powerful people. Composed of 57 voting members, USC’s board of trustees includes noted philanthropists, accomplished alumni, Hollywood insiders and industrial tycoons. ... It is this elite group that is overseeing the investigation into how the university handled the case of former medical school dean Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito. The Times reported last month that Puliafito, while leading USC’s Keck School of Medicine, partied with a circle of addicts, prostitutes and other criminals who said he used drugs with them, including on campus. (Kohli, Parvini, Hamilton and Elmahrek, 8/6)

The Washington Post: The First Affordable Care Act Enrollment Season Of The Trump Era Is Still A Mystery
As the fate of the Affordable Care Act dangled dramatically in the Senate last month, the Trump administration abruptly canceled contracts with two companies that have helped thousands of Americans in 18 cities find health plans under the law. The suspension of the $22 million contracts, which ends enrollment fairs and insurance sign-ups in public libraries, is one of the few public signs of how an administration eager to kill the law will run the ACA’s approaching fifth enrollment season. (Goldstein and Winfield Cunningham, 8/6)

The Associated Press: Trump's Role Shifts To Caretaker As Health Repeal Stalls
With Republicans unable to advance a health care bill in Congress, President Donald Trump's administration may find itself in an awkward role as caretaker of the Affordable Care Act, which he still promises to repeal and replace. The Constitution says presidents "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." So as long as former President Barack Obama's law is on the books, that doesn't seem to leave much choice for Trump, even if he considers the law to be "a disaster." (8/7)

The Associated Press: McConnell To Consider Bipartisan Plan To Pay Health Insurers
A week after an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he'd consider a bipartisan effort to continue payments to insurers to avert a costly rattling of health insurance markets. McConnell told reporters Saturday there is "still a chance" the Senate could revive the measure to repeal and replace "Obamacare," but he acknowledged the window for that is rapidly closing. (8/5)

Politico: GOP Efforts To Stabilize Obamacare Markets Might Come Too Late
Republicans now say they want to stabilize the distressed Obamacare markets for 2018, but it may be too late. Insurers have warned for months that they need certainty from Washington in order to decide where they will sell Obamacare plans and how much to charge. But after months of fruitless repeal efforts and growing unease over White House threats about pulling funding and undermining the law, the damage may be done. Lawmakers can’t simply flip a bipartisan switch and pass a stabilization plan, particularly since they won’t return to Washington for a month. (Demko, 8/4)

The Wall Street Journal: Congressional Recess, Full Plate Keep The Heat On GOP Lawmakers
Congressional Republicans plan to use the next four weeks away from Washington making a public case for a sweeping rewrite of the tax code, an ambitious legislative undertaking they hope will heal divisions that opened when the party’s signature health-care bill collapsed. But at home in their districts, they face pressures that could make it hard to focus on taxes. Many of their constituents and party activists blame Congress, more than President Donald Trump, for the health-care stalemate and are pressing them to find a resolution. And before they can do anything, lawmakers face a load of time-sensitive fiscal business: hashing out a budget, funding the government and raising the federal debt limit. (Hughes and Hook, 8/6)

Politico: Tax Writers See Peril In Trump's Obamacare Persistence
Republicans acknowledge that the aggressive timeline they have set up for overhauling the tax code this fall leaves them little room for error. There could be one problem with that: Obamacare isn’t going away. ... That’s left key Senate tax writers frustrated that there’s potentially another issue to take precious time away from their tax reform efforts. (Becker and Lorenzo, 8/7)

The Washington Post: FDA To Step Up Targeting Of Fentanyl, Other Synthetic Opioids At Postal Facilities
The Food and Drug Administration is strengthening efforts to detect opioids illegally entering the country through the mail, reflecting heightened concerns about the flood of synthetic fentanyl and similar drugs being shipped from China and elsewhere. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, in internal remarks to a group of senior managers Thursday, said he was deploying about three dozen employees to international mail facilities run by the U.S. Postal Service to help detect and analyze suspicious packages, as well as to the FDA’s cybercrime and forensic-chemistry units. (McGinley, 8/4)

In other national health care news —

USA Today: Troops At Risk For Suicide Not Getting Needed Care, Report Finds
Pentagon health care providers failed to perform critical follow-up for many troops diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome who also were at high risk for suicide, according to a new study released Monday by the RAND Corp. Just 30% of troops with depression and 54% with PTSD received appropriate care after they were deemed at risk of harming themselves. The report, commissioned by the Pentagon, looked at the cases of 39,000 troops who had been diagnosed in 2013 with depression, PTSD or both conditions. USA TODAY received an advance copy of the report. (Brook, 8/7)

The Washington Post: Convicted ‘Pharma Bro’ Has An Image Problem, Lawyer Concedes
Martin Shkreli, the eccentric former pharmaceutical CEO notorious for a price-gouging scandal and for his snide “Pharma Bro” persona on social media, was convicted Friday on federal charges he deceived investors in a pair of failed hedge funds. A Brooklyn jury deliberated five days before finding Shkreli guilty on three of eight counts. He had been charged with securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Hays and Neumeister, 8/4)

The New York Times: Gene Editing For ‘Designer Babies’? Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say
Now that science is a big step closer to being able to fiddle with the genes of a human embryo, is it time to panic? Could embryo editing spiral out of control, allowing parents to custom-order a baby with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s imagination or Usain Bolt’s speed? (Belluck, 8/4)