Berkeleyside: Walgreens On Shattuck Avenue In Berkeley Will Close Next Week
After about 30 years at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Allston Way, Walgreens will be closing the location’s sliding doors for good on Aug. 23, leaving its pharmacy customers with fewer options in Berkeley. The building is slated for demolition to make way for a 25-story, 326-unit apartment building, Berkeley’s tallest apartment building to date.  (Furio, 8/14)

San Diego Union-Tribune: San Diego's Illumina Discloses New SEC Investigation Into Its $7.1B Acquisition Of Grail 
This marks the latest speed bump in Illumina’s quest to close the loop on its merger with Grail, a startup that developed a diagnostic test to detect up to 50 different kinds of cancer from a single blood draw. (Rocha, 8/14)

Axios: Hospitals Push Back On Safety-Net Payment Cuts
Hospitals are scrambling to halt a nearly $1 billion cut the Biden administration made to their Medicare payments for treating low-income and uninsured patients. Why it matters: The reduction to fiscal year 2024 payments announced earlier this month was far larger than what Medicare had originally proposed, catching hospitals by surprise. And though Medicare already finalized the cuts, hospitals say the agency must reconsider its decision to avoid jeopardizing care for disadvantaged patients. (Goldman, 8/15)

ProPublica: Fees For Electronic Payments Eat Into Health Care Budgets
Such fees have become routine in American health care in recent years, according to an investigation by ProPublica published on Monday, and some medical clinics say they'll seek to pass those costs on to patients. Almost 60% of medical practices said they were compelled to pay fees for electronic payment at least some of the time, according to a 2021 survey. With more than $2 trillion a year of medical claims paid electronically, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars that could be spent on care but instead are going to insurers and middlemen. (Podkul, 8/15)

Los Angeles Times: Beverly Hills 'Conspired' With Antiabortion Group, Clinic Alleges
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade last summer, Beverly Hills officials protested by lighting up the plaza in front of City Hall in a glow of pink. Council members had already voted 5 to 0 for a resolution backing abortion rights. “We have stood up and spoken out when we’ve seen human rights taken away,” then-Mayor Lili Bosse stated after the vote. “This is something I wholeheartedly support with all my soul.” But little more than a year later, the affluent city has become a battleground over reproductive rights. (Jarvie, 8/14)

The Atlantic: The Abortion-Housing Nexus
Abortion access. Gun safety. The treatment of immigrants. The size of the safety net. Ease of voting. LGBTQ rights. On any number of policy issues, red states and blue states have drifted apart from each other over the past three decades, widening the gaps between what families in different parts of the country pay in taxes, receive in benefits, and experience when interacting with the government. At the same time, the cost of housing in these states has diverged, too. Blue states have throttled their housing supply, leading to dramatic price increases and spurring millions of families to relocate to red states in the Sunbelt. (Lowrey, 8/15)

The Wall Street Journal: More Americans Are Ending Up Homeless—At A Record Rate 
The U.S. has seen a record increase in homeless people this year as the Covid-19 pandemic fades, according to a Wall Street Journal review of data from around the country. The data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7% jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions. (Kamp and Najmabadi, 8/14)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Will Chula Vista Be Next To Adopt A Homeless Camping Ban? 
All eyes are on San Diego as it enters its third week of enforcing its controversial new camping ban, but Chula Vista, the county’s second-largest city, may soon follow suit. (Murga, 8/14)

Bay Area News Group: Mold, Roaches, Security Issues At San Jose's Homeless Housing Sites Raise Broader Concerns
After five years of living on the streets of San Jose, Cecilia Martin couldn’t believe her luck in landing an apartment at the city’s first long-term homeless housing site. But it didn’t take long for the new facility, which opened in 2019, to fall into disrepair. Flooding, fires and cockroaches have since inundated the property, but her biggest worry is the intruders who stalk the hallway to her studio, said Martin, 53, a San Jose native. “I gotta watch my back all the time because you never know,” she said. (Varian, 8/14)

San Francisco Chronicle: Woman Found Dead In Duffel Bag In S.F. Identified
After being diagnosed with a slew of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and catatonia, Kelly Koike wound up living on the street in San Francisco, said her mother, Roya Koike. (Vainshtein and Swan, 8/14)

CapRadio: After Months Of Delays, Sacramento County To Open 100-Unit Tiny Home Village
A door to a small, cabin-like home that closes and locks. Showers and restrooms onsite. A place for partners and pets. And air-conditioning to survive the sweltering summer heat. These are some of the amenities at Sacramento County’s first “Safe Stay Community” at Florin and Power Inn roads in South Sacramento. (Nichols, 8/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: SF's Best New Homes Are Meant To Support The Formerly Homeless
The need to build new housing in cities tends to be discussed in simplistic terms — for or against, tall or short, market rate or affordable. Three recently completed complexes in San Francisco illuminate the core issue that too often gets lost: Such housing should be measured by its capacity to improve people’s lives. (King, 8/14)

Bay Area News Group: FBI-Led Task Force Targeting Major Bay Area Fentanyl Operation Underway
An FBI law enforcement task force has thus far seized at least 14 pounds of fentanyl and $28,000 in cash, and arrested a 29-year-old man believed to be a supplier to other Bay Area dealers who sell the deadly drug by the ounce, according to multiple law enforcement sources. The FBI Safe Streets task force operation has focused on the East Bay, with an eye on arresting people who are supplying drug dealers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, according to court records. In addition to the fentanyl, authorities one pound of cocaine, six ounces of heroin, three ounces of methamphetamine, and an unregistered firearm, authorities said. (Gartrell, 8/14)

The New York Times: Opioid Settlement Money Is Being Spent On Police Cars And Overtime
After years of litigation to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable for the deadly abuse of prescription painkillers, payments from what could amount to more than $50 billion in court settlements have started to flow to states and communities to address the nation’s continuing opioid crisis. But though the payments come with stacks of guidance outlining core strategies for drug prevention and addiction treatment, the first wave of awards is setting off heated debates over the best use of the money, including the role that law enforcement should play in grappling with a public health disaster. (Hoffman, 8/14)

The Press-Enterprise: Gov. Newsom May Respond To Chino Valley, Murrieta Policies Outing Transgender Students
Another showdown could be brewing between Sacramento and Inland school boards, this time over policies outing transgender students to their parents. At a Monday, Aug. 14, news conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’s “working with legislative leaders” regarding the policies recently approved by school boards in Chino Valley and Murrieta. (Horseman, 8/14)

AP: States That Protect Transgender Health Care Now Try To Absorb Demand 
States that declared themselves refuges for transgender people have essentially issued an invitation: Get your gender-affirming health care here without fearing prosecution at home. ... Already-long waiting lists are growing, yet there are only so many providers of gender-affirming care and only so many patients they can see in a day. For those refuge states — so far, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington and Vermont, plus Washington, D.C. — the question is how to move beyond promises of legal protection and build a network to serve more patients. (McMillan and Schoenbaum, 8/15)

Healthline: New Study Finds 47% of LGBTQ People Experience Medical Gaslighting
New research finds a large number of LGBTQ people say they’ve experienced discrimination and medical gaslighting from healthcare providers. (Mastroianni, 8/13)

The 19th: Veterans Push For IVF Coverage Beyond Heterosexual Married Couples
Amber Bohlman tried almost everything to get pregnant. For five years, she took hormones that gave her headaches. Bohlman underwent three rounds of intrauterine insemination (IUI), in which her partner’s sperm was directly implanted into her uterus. Though Bohlman, who did two tours in Iraq in her 20s, grew increasingly worried that she would run out of chances to get pregnant. Still, there was one method she still hadn’t tried: in vitro fertilization (IVF), which is generally considered to be the most effective form of assisted reproductive technology. (Luthra, 8/14)

CIDRAP: Case Report Details 'Blue Legs' In Long-COVID Patient
Acrocyanosis, venous pooling of blood in the legs that causes them to turn blue, may be yet another symptom of long COVID, according to a case report published in The Lancet. The case report features a 33-year-old man who for 6 months experienced blue legs after 10 minutes of standing, accompanied by a heavy, itching sensation. The legs returned to a normal color after 2 minutes of lying down. (Soucheray, 8/14)

The Desert Sun: EPA Sues Over Years Of Unsafe Drinking Water At Oasis Mobile Home Park
A federal lawsuit accuses the owners of Oasis Mobile Home Park of failing to fix drinking water problems despite years of EPA orders. (Damien, 8/14)

CBS News: Air Pollution May Be To Blame For Thousands Of Dementia Cases Each Year, Researchers Say
Nearly 188,000 dementia cases in the U.S. each year may have been caused by air pollution, researchers estimate, with bad air quality from wildfires and agriculture showing the strongest links to a person's risk of Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia later in life. Published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, the new estimates are the latest to underscore the range of health risks scientists have long warned are being driven by air pollution. (Tin, 8/14)

Pasadena Star News: Another LA County Juvenile Facility Found Deficient By State Regulators 
Less than a month after state regulators forced the closure of two of its juvenile halls, Los Angeles County has once again failed a critical inspection that could lead to the shutdown of another juvenile facility by early next year. (Henry, 8/14)

The Desert Sun: Nudj Health Programs Target 6 Lifestyle Areas To Improve Patient Lives
Nudj Health targets six lifestyle areas: nutrition, stress management, physical activity, sleep, social support and risky behaviors. (Sasic, 8/14)

The Oaklandside: At This East Oakland Salon, Violence Prevention Starts With Self-Care
One recent Monday, Britney Freeman’s back hurt. So did her muscles, her joints—everything in her body. The single mom and professional matchmaker didn’t know if she’d make it to The Self-i.s.h. Society, a hair salon and community space in East Oakland, where she’d been practicing vulnerability within a group of relative strangers all summer. But she did some stretching and deep breathing exercises at home, even danced a little, and showed up. Freeman and other participants sat close together on plush couches and chairs, forming a healing circle as part of the nonprofit’s Get Self-ish Project. (Dennis, 8/14)