Los Angeles Times: Sen. Kamala Harris Plans To Back Medicare-For-All Legislation
Sen. Kamala Harris will co-sponsor a Medicare-for-all plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), she told Californians at a town hall in Oakland on Wednesday. The freshman Democratic senator from California has previously said she supports the concept of universal healthcare, but this is the first time she has explicitly said she would join Sanders when he files the bill. The House version of the measure, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), has 117 sponsors, including 27 California Democratic House members. (Wire, 8/30)

Politico: Harris To Co-Sponsor Sanders' Single-Payer Bill
To the delight of a hometown crowd at a packed town hall meeting Wednesday in Oakland — where she was raised — Harris announced for the first time that she intended to co-sponsor “Medicare for All,’’ the single-payer health care bill which has the strong support of progressives and groups including National Nurses United, saying it was “the right thing to do.” But that stated position puts her at odds with Feinstein, who has publicly expressed concerns about the costs and details of single payer, and who this week at the Commonwealth Club of California said she favored a public option for health care instead. (Marinucci, 8/31)

Sacramento Bee: Sen. Kamala Harris Backs Single Payer Heatlh Care
In a follow-up interview, Harris told The Sacramento Bee that public attention on the national health care debate, following two failed Republican attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, could be a signal that the time is right to adopt a single-payer system. “As we talk about moving toward a single-payer system, I think that there’s certainly momentum and energy around that, and when I get back to D.C., I’ll have a better sense of where people are now that they’ve been home,” Harris said. “I think that the recent history on the issue of health care is very telling ... Americans are making it very clear when they defeated the repeal of the (Affordable Care Act) that they don’t want us playing politics with their health care.” (Hart, 8/30)

San Jose Mercury News: Sen. Kamala Harris Announces Support For ‘Medicare-For-All’ Bill
Single-payer health care has become one of the key issues of the progressive movement. More than half of Democrat House members support a single-payer bill written by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan. Other Democratic senators who are talked about as potential 2020 presidential contenders, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand have also supported single-payer without publicly endorsing Sanders’ bill. (Tolan, 8/30)

KPCC: Could California Be The First State To Legalize Drug Injection Sites? 
California lawmakers may soon vote to allow for the creation of legal injection sites for IV and other drug users. The bill has passed the Assembly and is awaiting a vote in the Senate before the legislative session ends in a couple of weeks. The measure, AB 186, would pave the way to set up these drug use sites in certain areas, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. Local government would have to give the OK to private groups that wanted to create them. (Faust, 8/30)

The Desert Sun: Health Care Access For Riverside County Communities Depends On Transportation, Many Other Factors
Health care for people in low-income communities is a challenge exacerbated by a lack of reliable transportation. In rural areas like Blythe and the unincorporated communities in the eastern Coachella Valley, residents will delay care because they lack an affordable, reliable means of travel. While Blythe residents struggle to cross the many miles to care, North Shore, Oasis and Thermal residents may be less than five miles from providers but still struggle to reach needed medical services. Public transportation agencies, community clinics and community organizers are seeking to bridge the gaps, but advocates and officials say it’s a complex issue to address. (Gagliano, 8/30)

In other news from across the state —

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Scripps To Shutter Its Hospice Service 
Less than five years after it started offering hospice care, Scripps Health is poised to shutter the service, notifying patients that they will need to find new providers by mid-September. It’s a significant change of course for an organization that has been committed to providing end-of-life care since it stepped in when San Diego Hospice went bankrupt in 2013. Today, 114 county residents — most who receive care in their homes — must choose a new hospice company by Sept. 4. Scripps is working with Escondido-based Elizabeth Hospice, which has expanded its service area to San Diego in recent years and has agreed to hire its employees. However, patients and their families are free to select whichever service they want. (Sisson, 8/30)

The Desert Sun: FDA Cracks Down On Stem Cell Treatments Administered In Rancho Mirage
On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration signaled a crackdown on some stem cell treatments which could have repercussions for a local medical facility. The FDA announced this week it had sent members of the U.S. Marshals Service to a biotechnology company in San Diego to seize samples of a vaccine which are used as part of a “potentially dangerous and unproven treatment” administered to cancer patients at a Rancho Mirage clinic. The vaccine, which the federal agency said is used only on people who have a high risk of smallpox, was combined with stem cells and was then injected directly into cancerous tumors. (Kennedy, 8/30)

Iowa Public Radio: Study: Babies Born To Mothers Living In Areas Of Very High Pesticide Exposure See Problems
Applying large amounts of pesticides to farm fields can have negative effects on babies born to mothers living nearby, according to new research. The data-crunching study published in Nature Communications looked at the farm-heavy San Joaquin Valley in California, where a variety of pesticides get applied to dozens of different crops including fruits, vegetables and nuts. (Mayer, 8/30)

In other public health news —

inewsource: Doctors Debate Danger Of Popular Diabetes Drug After FDA Amputation Warning 
Many San Diego doctors are taking their patients off of Invokana, a widely used diabetes drug, after a large industry-sponsored trial found it doubled the risk of lower limb amputations compared with those taking a placebo. Patients are being switched to other medications even though the study’s authors say the drug’s benefits — a reduced risk of cardiovascular events including death, non-fatal heart attacks and non-fatal strokes — outweigh its risk of amputations. (Clark, 8/31)

Orange County Register: Taking A ‘Vacation From Mental Illness’ At Mountain Camp 
Mountain Respite Camp is intended as both an escape from the challenges of living with a psychiatric disability and an opportunity to bond with people who are strangers yet know intimately what everyone else is going through. While the largest group of campers hailed from Orange County, others came from the Los Angeles area and the Inland Empire. (Walker, 8/30)

KPCC: Skip The Jog This Week, Outdoor Air Quality Suffers As Temperatures Rise 
Dial back your outdoor activities and exercise during this week’s prolonged heat wave: Officials have forecast unhealthy air quality through the rest of the week. (Beggin and Shatkin, 8/30)

The New York Times: Trump Administration Wants To Stabilize Health Markets But Won’t Say How
A Trump administration official said Wednesday that the administration wanted to stabilize health insurance markets, but refused to say if the government would promote enrollment this fall under the Affordable Care Act or pay for the activities of counselors who help people sign up for coverage. The official also declined to say whether the administration would continue paying subsidies to insurance companies to compensate them for reducing deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for low-income people. Without the subsidies, insurers say, they would sharply increase premiums. (Pear, 8/30)

The Wall Street Journal: Leaders Of A Dozen State-Run Insurance Exchanges Call For Preservation Of Subsidies
Leaders of a dozen state-run health insurance exchanges threw their support Wednesday behind congressional efforts to bolster the individual insurance markets while giving states more leeway over implementing the Affordable Care Act. The state health leaders warned that premiums would continue to climb, and state budgets would suffer, if the federal government didn’t commit to preserving payments to insurers that offset out-of-pocket costs for some consumers, and if states didn’t get more flexibility. (Armour, 8/30)

The Wall Street Journal: Voters Urge Bipartisanship As Congress Returns To Washington
On a swing through western Iowa this week, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told constituents he is committed to working in a bipartisan way when Congress returns next month to provide storm relief, stabilize the health-care system and fund the government without drama. It is a message that has resonated with many voters as Mr. Grassley tours the state during Congress’s August recess. It comes as President Donald Trump, a fellow Republican, has criticized lawmakers in his own party and said this month that he is willing to risk a government shutdown if the GOP-controlled Congress declines to appropriate money for additional border fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. (Tau, 8/30)

The Associated Press: US Clears Breakthrough Gene Therapy For Childhood Leukemia
Opening a new era in cancer care, U.S. health officials on Wednesday approved a breakthrough treatment that genetically engineers patients' own blood cells into an army of assassins to seek and destroy childhood leukemia. The Food and Drug Administration called the approval historic, the first gene therapy to hit the U.S. market. Made from scratch for every patient, it's one of a wave of "living drugs" under development to fight additional blood cancers and other tumors, too. (Neergaard, 8/30)

The New York Times: F.D.A. Approves First Gene-Altering Leukemia Treatment, Costing $475,000
The new therapy turns a patient’s cells into a “living drug,” and trains them to recognize and attack the disease. It is part of the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy that bolsters the immune system through drugs and other therapies and has, in some cases, led to long remissions and possibly even cures. The therapy, marketed as Kymriah and made by Novartis, was approved for children and young adults for an aggressive type of leukemia — B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia — that has resisted standard treatment or relapsed. The F.D.A. called the disease “devastating and deadly” and said the new treatment fills an “unmet need.” (Grady, 8/30)

The Washington Post: FDA Clears First Gene-Altering Therapy — ‘A Living Drug’ — For Childhood Leukemia
“We’re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said. “New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine” and cure intractable illnesses. He said companies are pursuing hundreds of experimental treatments involving gene therapy products. (McGinley and Johnson, 8/30)

NPR: CAR-T Therapy For Leukemia Wins FDA Approval
The treatment, which is also called CTL019, produced remission within three months in 83 percent of 63 pediatric and young adult patients. The patients had failed to respond to standard treatments or had suffered relapses. Based on those results, an FDA advisory panel recommended the approval in July. (Stein, 8/30)

Stat: Houston Hospitals May Not Be Back To Normal For A Month
Amid the evacuation of approximately 1,500 patients from Houston-area hospitals, officials are commending the emergency response by health providers — while also cautioning that it may be weeks before the facilities are back to business as usual. The SouthEast Texas Regional Advisory Council — which has overseen catastrophic medical operations since Hurricane Harvey as part of Houston’s emergency command center — estimates that nearly two dozen hospitals have evacuated patients by ambulance and airplane over the course of the past week. (Blau, 8/30)

The Washington Post: Some Hospitals Evacuated, But Houston’s Medical World Mostly Withstands Harvey
The first ambulances finally arrived at Ben Taub Hospital, in the heart of Houston’s vast Texas Medical Center, to remove five patients clinging to life on ventilators. The county hospital had initially planned to transfer all of its 350 patients. As the remnants of Hurricane Harvey continued to unleash epic rains, a foot of water was rising in the hospital’s basement from a burst pipe and wet seeping in from the city’s inundated streets. The kitchen was knocked out, as well as the pharmacy and the area where supplies such as linens and needles are stored. (Goldstein and McGinley, 8/30)

The New York Times: A Sea Of Health And Environmental Hazards In Houston’s Floodwaters
Officials in Houston are just beginning to grapple with the health and environmental risks that lurk in the waters dumped by Hurricane Harvey, a toxic stew of chemicals, sewage, debris and waste that still floods much of the city. Flooded sewers are stoking fears of cholera, typhoid and other infectious diseases. Runoff from the city’s sprawling petroleum and chemicals complex contains any number of hazardous compounds. Lead, arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic elements may be leaching from some two dozen Superfund sites in the Houston area. (Tabuchi and Kaplan, 8/31)

NPR: Need For Dialysis Soars For Harvey Evacuees In Houston
Among the most pressing medical needs facing Houston at the moment: getting people to dialysis treatment. At DaVita Med Center Dialysis on Tuesday afternoon, nurses tended to dozens of patients on dialysis machines while another 100 people waited their turn. Some were clearly uncomfortable, and a number said they hadn't been dialyzed in four days. Those delays can be life-threatening. (Hersher and Hsu, 8/30)