Trump Administration Mulls Rule That Would Eradicate Government Recognition Of Transgender Americans

The New York Times: ‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out Of Existence Under Trump Administration
The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed. (Green, Benner and Pear, 10/21)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Health Department Takes Aim At Transgender-Rights Rules
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services had sought to push through changes to Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting gender discrimination in education, according to a story Sunday in the New York Times. While Title IX doesn’t directly govern sex discrimination beyond education, other civil rights laws generally base their definition of such discrimination on Title IX. But Education Department officials have been drafting their own changes to Title IX, focused on the process for adjudicating campus sexual assault. And those officials, particularly Secretary Betsy DeVos, have resisted including a broad redefinition of gender in those changes, preferring to keep the focus limited. (Armour and Hackman, 10/21)

In other national health care news —

The Associated Press: Hackers Breach HealthCare.Gov System, Get Data On 75,000
A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of some 75,000 people, officials said Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot agencies often use to release unfavorable developments. (10/19)

The Washington Post: Consumer Data Compromised In Affordable Care Act Enrollment Portal
The breach, involving a system used by agents and brokers as part of the insurance program, exposed credit and other personal information. It throws into turmoil one aspect of the ACA’s insurance-signup process less than two weeks before the start of the annual enrollment period for coverage created by the 2010 health-care law. According to a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the online pathway for agents and brokers into the federal insurance exchange was shut down earlier this week, though officials hope to reopen it a few days before the Nov. 1 start of the six-week enrollment period. (Goldstein, 10/19)

The Wall Street Journal: Agent Orange Concerns Joined By Worry Over Modern-Era ‘Burn Pits’
Members of Congress and veterans advocates are mounting a push to get the Department of Veterans Affairs to increase aid to former service members with health problems blamed on toxic exposures, a move the VA secretary has publicly fought since taking over the department. Secretary Robert Wilkie opposes legislative proposals to expand benefits to thousands of Vietnam War veterans who served at sea and claim exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant. The VA also opposes new benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan troops exposed to burn pits until the issue can be studied in depth. (Kesling and Armour, 10/21)

The New York Times: Immune-Based Treatment Helps Fight Aggressive Breast Cancer, Study Finds
Women with an aggressive type of breast cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy plus chemotherapy, rather than chemo alone, a major study has found. The results are expected to change the standard of care for women like those in the clinical trial, who had advanced cases of “triple-negative” breast cancer. That form of the disease often resists standard therapies, and survival rates are poor. It is twice as common in African-American women as in white women, and more likely to occur in younger women. Researchers said the new study was a long-awaited breakthrough for immunotherapy in breast cancer. (Grady, 10/20)

The Associated Press: AP Analysis: 'Obamacare' Shapes Opioid Grant Spending
An Associated Press analysis of the first wave of emergency money targeting the U.S. opioid crisis finds that states are taking very different approaches to spending it. To a large extent, the differences depend on whether states participated in one of the most divisive issues in recent American politics: the health overhaul known as "Obamacare." (10/22)

The New York Times: Miscarrying At Work: The Physical Toll Of Pregnancy Discrimination
If you are a Verizon customer on the East Coast, odds are good that your cellphone or tablet arrived by way of a beige, windowless warehouse near Tennessee’s border with Mississippi. Inside, hundreds of workers, many of them women, lift and drag boxes weighing up to 45 pounds, filled with iPhones and other gadgets. There is no air-conditioning on the floor of the warehouse, which is owned and operated by a contractor. Temperatures there can rise past 100 degrees. Workers often faint, according to interviews with 20 current and former employees. (Silver-Greenberg and Kitroeff, 10/21)

The Washington Post: As U.S. Fertility Rates Collapse, Finger-Pointing And Blame Follow
As 2017 drew to a close, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) urged Americans to have more children. To keep the country great, he said, we’re “going to need more people.” “I did my part,” the father of three declared. Ryan’s remarks drew some eye rolls at the time, but as new data about the country’s collapsing fertility rates has emerged, concern has deepened over what’s causing the changes, whether it constitutes a crisis that will fundamentally change the demographic trajectory of the country — and what should be done about it. (Cha, 10/19)

The New York Times: A National Goal: Prevent A Million Heart Attacks And Strokes By 2022
Attention all Americans: Too many are at risk of succumbing before your time to the nation’s leading killer, cardiovascular disease. Translation: heart attacks and strokes. After a decades-long drop, the cardiovascular death rate has all but stalled and, frighteningly, has even reversed in a young group of people — adults aged 35 to 64, among whom deaths from heart disease are now rising. (Brody, 10/22)

The New York Times: Hurricane Michael Victims’ Biggest Fear: ‘People Are Going To Start Forgetting’
After two weeks of working grueling hours on hurricane response and sleeping fitfully under a tatty Auburn University fleece in his office, Rodney E. Andreasen, the emergency management director for Jackson County, Fla., decided on Friday that it was time to nudge his neighbors back to normalcy. He started by scaling back on round-the-clock staffing. Then he turned to the county’s eight multiagency “points of distribution” — known as PODs — which have been handing out free drinking water, ice, canned goods, hot meals, diapers, garbage bags, and the most coveted item of all, toilet paper. (Thrush and Blinder, 10/21)