LAist: Court Auditors Say LA Homelessness Services Are 'Extremely Broken'
Los Angeles’ system of addressing homelessness is “extremely broken" and cannot be fixed in patches, court-appointed auditors said during a hearing on Thursday. The city is under various court-enforced agreements to create more shelter for unhoused people, but the auditors have been unable to verify the number of beds the city claims to have created to comply with those agreements, according to a review finalized Wednesday by consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. (Gerda and Sievertson, 5/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: Controversial S.F. Housing Project In The Mission Gets Green Light
The site of a Mission District fire that killed a resident and displaced dozens of low-income tenants and small businesses a decade ago is set to become a 181-unit apartment building despite community efforts to derail the project. In a 4-3 vote, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved the 10-story apartment complex at 2588 Mission St., a project opponents called “La Muerte de la Misíon,” referring to the 2015 fire that killed the tenant, injured six others and displaced 60 tenants and 26 businesses. (Dineen, 5/15)

Modesto Bee: Newsom Calls To Clear Camps, Bavaro Raises Concerns
Earlier this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom called on cities to crack down on homeless encampments, but one Modesto City Council member said the governor’s approach “will not work.” On Monday, Newsom unveiled a model ordinance for cities to use as a framework to clear homeless encampments from city streets “without delay.” The model ordinance builds on Newsom’s executive order last year, which called for the same thing. (Morgan, 5/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: New Data Reveals How Many Serious Drug Users At Risk Of Overdose In SF
Kevin Monroe first tried methamphetamine 25 years ago and he’s been battling addiction ever since. Over that time, the 47-year-old has been to treatment programs a half-dozen times, secured stable housing at a city-subsidized hotel and achieved several longer stints of sobriety, including 10 years, five years and most recently, a year and a half. But each time, the pull of meth and crack — both highly addictive stimulants — has proved too strong to shake. (Angst, 5/16)

The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat: Santa Rosa’s Crisis Response Team, At Risk Of Significant Cuts, Receives Financial Lifeline
Santa Rosa’s crisis response team, lauded as a local model for an alternative police response to mental health and substance use calls, is set to receive a financial lifeline from Sonoma County. (Pineda, 5/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: FDA Warn Older Adults To Avoid New Mosquito-Borne Disease Vaccine
Federal health authorities are advising older adults to avoid a vaccine that protects against a widespread mosquito-borne illness after reports of serious side effects, including two deaths. In a joint alert issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, officials warned that individuals age 60 and older should refrain from receiving the Ixchiq vaccine, developed by the pharmaceutical company Valneva against the chikungunya virus. (Vaziri, 5/15)

Times of San Diego: Salmonella Cases Mount As Café Linked To Outbreak Re-Opens
Nearly 100 people have shown symptoms after dining at a Clairemont restaurant suspected in a salmonella outbreak, San Diego County health officials said Thursday. Aladdin Mediterranean Café, which closed May 1 after patrons started to show signs of sickness, reopened Tuesday. Proprietors voluntarily had shuttered the eatery to allow the county to conduct testing and determine when it would safe to resume operations. (Vigil, 5/15)

AP: The US Has 1,001 Measles Cases And 11 States With Active Outbreaks
New Mexico announced two new measles cases Thursday and North Dakota added one. The U.S. surpassed 1,000 measles cases Friday. Texas still accounts for the vast majority of cases in an outbreak that also spread measles to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. Two unvaccinated elementary school-aged children died from measles-related illnesses in the epicenter in West Texas, and an adult in New Mexico who was not vaccinated died of a measles-related illness. (Shastri, 5/15)

NBC News: Senate Republicans Put House On Notice: We Won't Accept Your Trump Agenda Bill Without Changes
As House Republicans scramble to corral the votes to pass a massive bill for President Donald Trump's agenda, their Senate counterparts are making clear the emerging package won’t fly as written when it reaches them. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., was categorical that the product coming out of various House committees cannot pass the Senate as it currently stands. “No. We’ll make changes,” Hoeven said. “We’ve been talking with the House and there’s a lot of things we agree on. … But there’ll be changes in a number of areas.” (Kapur, Tsirkin and Thorp V, 5/15)

The Hill: GOP Leaders To Accelerate Medicaid Work Requirements
Republican leaders intend to accelerate new work requirements under Medicaid as they scramble to secure the support of GOP holdouts for President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Thursday that GOP leaders “absolutely” intend to speed up the implementation to ease the concerns of the Republicans threatening to sink the package if changes aren’t made. (Lillis, 5/15)

Modern Healthcare: UnitedHealth Group To Cut Medicare Drug Plan Commissions 
UnitedHealth Group plans to stop paying commissions next month to brokers and sales agents who sell new Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. The insurer, which has had a rough week that's included a new CEO and reports of a federal investigation, on Thursday notified companies that market its plans of the change. (Tepper, 5/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: California Earthquake Retrofit Program Stalls As Federal Funds Nixed
The federal government canceled more than $30 million in grant funding for seismic retrofits slated to help thousands of California families who live in buildings that could collapse in a major earthquake. The retrofit program was set to open applications this winter to eligible building owners across 11 California cities including San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency canceled the grants last month. (Ellis, 5/15)

The Wall Street Journal: RFK Jr’s HHS To Stop Recommending Routine Covid Vaccines For Children, Pregnant Women
The Trump administration is planning to drop recommendations that pregnant women, teenagers and children get Covid-19 vaccines as a matter of routine, according to people familiar with the matter. The Department of Health and Human Services, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is expected to remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for those groups around the same time it launches a new framework for approving vaccines, the people said. (Essley Whyte, 5/15)

Bloomberg: Hospitals Could Make More Drugs In-House Under Trump Proposal
The Trump administration wants to bring the production of more drugs, including medicines like antibiotics that may be in short supply, closer to the patient — including inside the hospital. The partnership between some of the nation’s top health agencies and a handful of companies, including the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, is intended to use artificial intelligence and other tools to make eight drugs in the places where people actually get medical care. (Nix, 5/15)

AP: Military Commanders Will Be Told To Send Transgender Troops To Medical Checks To Oust Them
Military commanders will be told to identify troops in their units who are transgender or have gender dysphoria, then send them to get medical checks in order to force them out of the service, officials said Thursday. A senior defense official laid out what could be a complicated and lengthy new process aimed at fulfilling President Donald Trump’s directive to remove transgender service members from the U.S. military. The new order to commanders relies on routine annual health checks that service members are required to undergo. (Baldor, 5/16)

Bay Area Reporter: Congressmembers, Senators Ask RFK Jr. To Continue Funding Services For Queer Callers To Suicide Hotline
Over one hundred members of Congress signed a letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urging the administration not to end specialized services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide hotline. A similar separate May 7 letter to Kennedy from seven U.S. senators was led by lesbian U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), her office stated in a news release. The national 988 crisis line was designated by 2020 legislation passed by Congress and signed into law during President Donald Trump’s first term, as the Bay Area Reporter reported at the time. (Ferrannini, 5/15)

Becker's Hospital Review: Providence Hospital To Establish Cardiac Center With $10M Gift
Santa Rosa (Calif.) Memorial Hospital, part of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, will establish cardiology and imaging centers through a $20 million fundraising initiative led by the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital Foundation. The initiative will complete construction on the newly named Hansel Family Care Center, which was built in 2020. (Gregerson, 5/15)

Becker's Hospital Review: Women In Health Administration To Honor 8 Executives
Women in Health Administration, a nonprofit association for women in healthcare leadership, has named its honorees for the 2025 Woman of the Year and Legacy Award for Lifetime Achievement. June Simmons, founding president and CEO of San Fernando-based Partners in Care Foundation, was selected as the 2025 Woman of the Year. ... Rhoda Weiss, PhD, a healthcare executive, educator, author and consultant, was named the Legacy Award for Lifetime Achievement honoree. (Kuchno, 5/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: Study Finds Men Face Higher Risk Of Death From ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’
Men are more than twice as likely as women to die from takotsubo cardiomyopathy, commonly known as “broken heart syndrome,” a condition triggered by intense emotional or physical stress, according to a new study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The nationwide study examined nearly 200,000 U.S. hospital patients over the age of 18 who were diagnosed with the syndrome between 2016 and 2020. (Vaziri, 5/15)

CIDRAP: Woman Dies Of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Almost 50 Years After Taking Prion-Contaminated Growth Hormone
A University of California–led case report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, describes a 58-year-old woman who, an estimated 48 years after treatment with cadaver-derived human growth hormone, died of iatrogenic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (iCJD), a prion disease. The patient, who sought care after developing gait imbalance and tremors 2 weeks earlier, had received prion-contaminated cadaveric human growth hormone (chGH) for 9.3 years starting at age 7. (Van Beusekom, 5/15)

Capital & Main: Innovative Medi-Cal Expansion Threatened By Budget And Trump Pressures
One of the great ironies of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s on-again, off-again push to make health care available to all Californians is that, to hear him tell it, it worked too well. That success — an unexpectedly high number of Californians who signed up to see a doctor under Newsom’s expansions of Medi-Cal — is now cited as one of the reasons Newsom wants to back away from the program he loudly championed — a cornerstone of his election and re-election campaigns. The proposed move to roll back Medi-Cal access, announced Wednesday as part of the governor’s revised 2025-26 state budget, will have profound repercussions for many of the estimated 1.6 million undocumented immigrants who use the safety net program. (Mark Kreidler, 5/15)

Orange County Register: California’s Medicaid Corruption Costs Us All
Imagine if you told your kid they could have dessert, but only if they ate all of their vegetables. Then, as you looked away, they quietly slipped their spinach to the dog before reaching out to receive dessert. Here you have what California is doing with Medicaid funding, and the whole country is paying for it. For years, states have found creative ways to game the federal Medicaid system, such as using questionable financing mechanisms that artificially inflate what they claim to spend, resulting in pulling more federal funds than they should. (Elizabeth Hicks, 5/12)

San Francisco Chronicle: Newsom’s New Homeless California Encampment Plan Is Just Cheap PR
If you skimmed the national headlines on Monday, you might come away thinking that Gov. Gavin Newsom had just unveiled a bold, aggressive new policy for dealing with the homeless encampments that have proliferated across California. ... Look closer, however, and Newsom’s announcement contained little news. It was mostly a regurgitation of guidance he’d given local governments about a year ago after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave cities broad power to clear homeless encampments and confiscate property from individuals living in them. (Emily Hoeven, 5/12)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Appreciate Military By Protecting Members, Veterans From Toxins 
California is home to 1.8 million veterans, the largest population of former military personnel in the nation. Over 189,000 of these veterans live in the San Diego region, which has an impressive number of active-duty staff, counting more than 110,700 people. (Cristina Johnson, 5/15)

Capitol Weekly: California Must Level Playing Field On Pain Management
In communities across California, patients count on their local pharmacists to be an accessible point of care. Pharmacies are open when many doctors’ offices are closed and patients don’t have to face long wait times to speak with their pharmacist. We’re often the first people to come to for help treating minor aches or injuries, but our roles are much more than that. We’re the ones responsible for making sure patients get the medications they need, and counseling them on best practices to ensure their safety. (Heather Warren, 5/13)