Los Angeles Times: South L.A.'s MLK Community Hospital Could Soon Be Unable To Pay Its Bills
MLK Community Hospital, a crucial safety-net facility serving the South Los Angeles area, may run out of money to pay its bills as soon as next year, hospital leaders are warning. The nonprofit hospital, which was established to replace the closed King/Drew Medical Center, lost more than $42 million in the budget year that ended in June, according to officials at the privately run facility. (Alpert Reyes, 11/10)

Becker's Hospital Review: California System Eyes Bankrupt Hospital Takeover
Salinas (Calif.) Valley Health and San Benito County have submitted a joint proposal to the San Benito Healthcare District to govern, operate and finance Hollister-based Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital, its skilled nursing facilities, and physician clinics. The healthcare district has been soliciting proposals from buyers or future partners — to help secure access to services in a financially viable way — after declaring a fiscal state of emergency earlier this year. The district voted May 22 to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy and tackle the "systemic challenges" Hazel Hawkins continues to face. (Condon, 11/10)

San Gabriel Valley Tribune: 85,000 Kaiser Permanente Workers Ratify Contract That’s Boosting Wages 21%
More than 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers have voted to ratify a new labor contract that will boost wages, promote increased hiring and give front-line healthcare employees a stronger voice on the job. The workers, represented by the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, voted 98.5% in favor of the four-year labor agreement that runs from Oct. 1, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2027. ... “When healthcare workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder to fight for our patients and our jobs, we can win.” (Smith, 11/9)

AP and California Healthline: New California Law Offers Fresh Protection From Steep Ambulance Bills
Last year, Jennifer Reisz’s college-age daughter, Megan, was kicked in the chest multiple times by the family’s horse. Megan fell to the ground, unable to move or speak. Though she was alone, her Apple Watch detected her distress and called 911. (Wolfson, 11/13)

The Daily Beast: Getting An Itemized Hospital Bill Is Basically Impossible
I know that I am not alone in this experience, and horror stories about medical billing abound, but they’re reaching such new levels of absurdity that when I described my ongoing experience to Anthony Wright, the Executive Director of Health Access California, a healthcare consumer advocacy organization, he burst out laughing, and said “this is a more extended and comical version of the normal Kafka-esque version of our healthcare system, but it’s in line with what happens.” (Masnick, 11/10)

California Healthline: Why It’s So Tough To Reduce Unnecessary Medical Care
Treatments that don’t help patients, and may even harm them, are difficult to eliminate because they can be big sources of revenue. (Hawryluk, 11/13)

Bay Area News Group: COVID Protection And Treatment May Cost Now Californians. See How Much You Might Have To Pay
Starting this weekend, Californians may face additional costs for COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and testing outside their health plan network — a potential unwelcome surprise for those who’ve put off that shot but plan to get it before Thanksgiving. Under the federal public health emergency, medical plans were required to provide the shots, treatments and tests to people without added costs. That federal health emergency ended May 11, but California law required plans to continue covering COVID vaccines, treatments and testing even outside their networks for six months after the health emergency expired. (Woolfolk, 11/13)

NPR: Long COVID's Effects On The Brain Help Explain Many Long-Haulers' Symptoms
Michelle Wilson got COVID three years ago. She's still waiting for her brain and nervous system to recover. Wilson's memory is spotty, she's frequently in pain, and even a short walk leaves her exhausted. "I actually bought a cane that turns into a seat so I can go to the botanical garden," she says. It's a big change for Wilson, 66, who had worked as a nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. But after years of waiting to get better, she says she's realized something: "This might be as good as it gets." (Hamilton, 11/13)

The Washington Post: How CDC’s New Director Is Trying To Regain Trust Shattered By Covid
The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had spent days on television and social media urging Americans to get the updated coronavirus vaccine. The new shot is the most effective protection for the looming virus season, she said. And it’s free. But by the afternoon of Sept. 21, it was becoming clear to Mandy Cohen that the nine-day-old vaccine rollout was stumbling, with many Americans unable to promptly get shots at pharmacies, insurers making erroneous claims about who would have to pay, and little explanation from the government. (Sun and Diamond, 11/12)

Bloomberg: Covid Loss Of Smell Takes Up To Three Years To Return, Study Finds
The loss of taste and smell — hallmarks of a coronavirus infection early in the pandemic — became a stubborn blight for many long Covid sufferers, but new research shows that the sensory problems gradually abate. Smell and taste disturbances were reported in almost two-thirds of the 100 people who had caught a mild case of Covid-19 in the fall of 2020 in Trieste, Italy, and were randomly selected for studying alongside 100 uninfected people for comparison. Both groups were followed for three years. (Gale, 11/10)

Sacramento Bee: Think You Can’t Afford Health Insurance? Check Out Financial Help At Covered California For 2024
If you were discouraged last year by the costs for health insurance, don’t let that experience keep you from shopping and comparing prices during this year’s open enrollment because there’s more financial help than ever, consumer advocates said Thursday. More than 1.3 million Californians go uninsured, even though they’re eligible for subsidies through Covered California or no-cost coverage from Medi-Cal, Covered California Executive Director Jessica Altman reported. (Anderson, 11/10)

Sacramento Bee: Tech Giant Amazon Now Has A Health Care Service Operating In California. Here’s What To Know
Caught a cold? Battling allergies? Your Amazon Prime membership could help you with that now, too — and you don’t have to worry about shipping. The tech giant has a new members-only benefit: Health care. In-person options for One Medical are available in only a handful of states, including California. The Federal Trade Commission previously raised privacy concerns about the company’s new partnership with the health care service. Here’s what to know. (Stark and Sum, 11/13)

Stat: What Amazon Prime’s New One Medical Offering Reveals About The Future Of Health Care
Amazon Prime members have a new offer in addition to the usual delivery and streaming services: Access to One Medical, the Amazon-owned primary care company. Members have the option, announced Wednesday, to pay an additional $9 per month, or $99 per year, for One Medical’s telehealth services and in-office appointments at a discount of about half its typical $199 yearly cost. (Merelli, 11/10)

Reuters: AstraZeneca Prioritizes US For RSV Drug Amid Surge In Cases
AstraZeneca on Friday said it was prioritizing the U.S. market for additional doses of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) drug Beyfortus, which was approved in July to prevent the disease in infants and toddlers, as a surge of cases is outpacing supply. AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot in an interview at the Reuters office in New York said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been asking for more of the antibody therapy that was co-developed with French drugmaker Sanofi. (Wingrove and Fick, 11/10)

Stat: Weight Loss Drug Wegovy Cuts Risk Of Heart Attacks In Milestone Trial 
Novo Nordisk’s obesity drug Wegovy notably cut the risk of heart attacks in a landmark cardiovascular trial that affirms the treatment offers health benefits beyond weight loss. The company in August had announced that in this trial, called Select, Wegovy reduced the overall rate of major heart problems — heart attacks, stroke, or cardiovascular-related death — by 20%. That finding, which was the primary outcome the trial set out to study, was stronger than many were expecting and led Novo’s stock to surge. (Chen, 11/11)

Bloomberg: AstraZeneca Eyes Market For Cheap Ozempic-Like Drug In Pill Form
AstraZeneca Plc Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot envisions his company bringing more affordable drugs to people who need to lose a modest amount of weight for health reasons but don’t necessarily have obesity. One day after the UK drugmaker announced a deal to develop an obesity pill with a Chinese biotech, Eccogene, Soriot said the company is aiming for a once-daily pill that’s less costly to produce than injectable obesity medicines. (Langreth and Cattan, 11/10)

The Wall Street Journal: Wegovy Maker Novo Nordisk To Spend $6 Billion Boosting Production Capacity
Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant that makes the blockbuster Wegovy obesity drug, said it will invest more than $6 billion to boost production capacity. (Chopping, 11/10)

Boston Globe: Can Magic Mushrooms Help Dying Patients?
Sixty years after Harvard fired Timothy Leary over his experiments with psychedelic drugs, a hospital affiliated with the university has reopened the door on such research by testing whether hallucinogenic mushrooms can help dying patients face death. (Saltzman, 11/10)

The New York Times: New Gene Editing Treatment Cuts Dangerous Cholesterol In Small Study
The handful of patients had severe heart disease that had caused chest pain and heart attacks. After trying available cholesterol-lowering medications, they could not get their cholesterol as low as cardiologists recommended. So they volunteered for an experimental cholesterol-lowering treatment using gene editing that was unlike anything tried in patients before. The result, reported Sunday by the company Verve Therapeutics of Boston at a meeting of the American Heart Association, showed that the treatment appeared to reduce cholesterol levels markedly in patients and that it appeared to be safe. (Kolata, 11/12)

The Hill: Biden Expands Veterans’ Health Care Coverage
The White House on Friday announced the expansion of health care coverage for the nation’s veterans, creating a no-cost system for World War II veterans seeking care and accelerating enrollment for all veterans applying for benefits after exposure to toxins. Starting this month, all living World War II veterans can access health care services from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) at no cost, including nursing home care, the White House said in a press release. (Dress, 11/10)

Axios: VA "Committed" To Studying Psychedelics For PTSD
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it's committed to studying whether psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin are effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder ahead of a House hearing expected to touch on the substances. It shows growing recognition that hallucinogenic drugs, when paired with psychotherapy, could potentially have mental health benefits. (Millman, 11/13)

Fox News: Military Mental Health Is Focus As AI Training Simulates Real Conversations To Help Prevent Veteran Suicide
A new product by ReflexAI called HomeTeam was just released this week, with the goal of preventing veteran suicide. Each day, 17 veterans die by suicide, according to the company, amid an ongoing mental health crisis across the country. ReflexAI found that 92% of veterans are open to supporting or being supported by another veteran when they're in crisis — yet only 25% are prepared to do so. (Stabile, 11/13)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Suit Over San Diego Jail Conditions Wins Class-Action Status 
What began as a federal lawsuit accusing the San Diego Sheriff’s Department of discriminating against a dozen or more people in county jail with various disabilities has expanded into a case that now involves thousands of current and future detainees. (McDonald, 1/12)

San Diego Union-Tribune: As Deaths And Lawsuits Pile Up, Sheriff Releases A 10-Year Plan To Modernize Aging San Diego Jails. Here's What's In It.
Faced with multiple lawsuits, a brutal state audit and a growing number of deaths inside San Diego County jails, Sheriff Kelly Martinez has introduced an ambitious — and costly — 10-year plan to upgrade the region’s aging detention centers. (McDonald, 11/12)

Pasadena Star News: How LA County Is Fighting Drug Smuggling Into Juvenile Halls 
Six months after the fentanyl-related death of an 18-year-old detainee, the Los Angeles County Probation Department plans to create an investigative team to trace the flow of drugs into the county’s juvenile facilities. (Henry, 11/12)

The Mercury News: San Francisco Bay Area Doctor Claims No Evidence Of Harm From Allegedly Racist Experiments On Inmates
A San Francisco Bay Area dermatologist and university professor accused last year of using state prisoners in decades-old experiments that included pesticide injections has denied in a legal filing that his accusers had any evidence he caused harm. (Baron, 11/11)

San Diego Union-Tribune: After Years Of Sharp Increases In Fatal Overdoses In San Diego, Something Changed. Will The Trend Reverse? 
For years, the number of people fatally overdosing in San Diego County kept rising. But recent numbers might offer a bit of hope. The number of people who died from a drug or alcohol overdose in San Diego County plateaued in 2022. (Figueroa and Kucher, 11/12)

The Mercury News: Baby's Fentanyl Death: Santa Clara County Knew Of Parents’ Drug Use, Neglect
Looking back, it was hard to miss the signs that foretold the tragedy of Phoenix Castro’s short life. Two months before the baby’s birth, her pregnant mother and father submitted to a drug test as part of a safety plan to get their two older children back from Santa Clara County’s child welfare agency. Their tests both came back positive — for opiates, cocaine and methamphetamine. (Sulek and Nickerson, 11/12)

Los Angeles Daily News: New LA County Office Of Food Equity To Address Rising Rates Of Hunger, Food Insecurity 
During the pandemic, Los Angeles County and its nonprofit partners supplied food and meals to an expanding number of residents who couldn’t afford groceries, often went without food or were anxious about how they’d feed their families. (Scauzillo, 11/11)

The Mercury News: Southern California Confirms 1st Human Case Of Mosquito-Borne St. Louis Encephalitis Since 1984
The Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the city’s first case of St. Louis Encephalitis — a mosquito-borne virus with symptoms akin to West Nile virus — on Thursday, Nov. 9. It’s the first documented case of St. Louis Encephalitis, or SLEV, in Long Beach since 1984, the health department said Thursday. The city’s announcement came a little more than a week after it confirmed a case of dengue fever. (Hutchings, 11/10)

The New York Times: Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re In A Cognitive Fog
There are more Americans who say they have serious cognitive problems — with remembering, concentrating or making decisions — than at any time in the last 15 years, data from the Census Bureau shows. The increase started with the pandemic: The number of working-age adults reporting “serious difficulty” thinking has climbed by an estimated one million people. (Paris, 11/13)

CIDRAP: CDC Warns About Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Recalled Dry Pet Food
The CDC said illness onsets ranged from January 14 to August 19. One patient was hospitalized, and no deaths were reported. Six patients are children younger than 1 year. A sample of the dog food collected and tested by the South Carolina State Department of Agriculture yielded the outbreak strain, and genetic sequencing shows that the strain is closely related to the one that infected people. (Schnirring, 11/10)

ABC News: The Recalled Cantaloupes Are Sold With The "Malichita" Label.
Sofia Produce, LLC, which does business under the name "Trufresh", is recalling all sizes of its fresh cantaloupes sold with the "Malichita" label due to potential salmonella contamination, according to a company announcement posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website Wednesday. The cantaloupes were distributed directly in states including Arizona, California, Maryland, New Jersey, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida, the Nogales, Arizona-based company said. (11/10)

CNN: Battle Over WIC Benefits For Pregnant Women And Young Kids Looms 
Without a little aid from the federal government, Whitley Hasty would have a tougher time buying the fresh broccoli her toddler son loves to eat with ranch dressing. Hasty receives WIC, the food assistance program for low-income women, infants and young children. It has helped her purchase milk, cheese, juice, eggs, fruits, vegetables and other staples for 3-year-old Leni – a benefit that has been even more vital in recent years as the price of groceries and other necessities has soared. (Luhby, 11/12)

CNN: Cutting 1 Teaspoon Of Salt Works As Well As Blood Pressure Meds, Study Finds
Cutting 1 teaspoon of salt from your diet each day can lower your top blood pressure reading just as much as a typical hypertension medication, even if you don’t have high blood pressure, a new study found. (LaMotte, 11/11)