Los Angeles Times: Decline In L.A. Homeless Population Offers A Reason For Hope
For nearly two decades, an official count confirmed what all of us could see: more and more people living on sidewalks, streets and other marginal spaces all over Los Angeles County. So it felt like only good news this week when the county’s homeless agency announced a 4% decline in the homeless population and a 10% decline in those living in the street. (Rainey, 7/17)

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Sets Parking Limit On RVs To Clear Vehicle Dwellers Off Streets
People living in RVs in San Francisco will soon be barred from parking longer than two hours on all city streets unless they get a permit, a move that critics say has caused significant distress among the hundreds of RV dwellers who live in the city. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week gave initial approval to a law from Mayor Daniel Lurie that would impose strict two-hour parking limits for oversized vehicles to manage the hundreds of people living in vehicles on city streets. (Toledo, 7/16)

Modern Healthcare: UnitedHealth, Blue Shield Of CA Push Medicare Advantage HMOs
Medicare Advantage insurers are shying away from their most popular type of health plan as cost pressures continue to strain the sector. Beginning this month, companies such as UnitedHealth Group subsidiary UnitedHealthcare and Blue Shield of California stopped compensating brokers and other third-party marketers for enrolling new beneficiaries into many PPOs. Similarly, Elevance Health pulled most of its Medicare Advantage plans from online brokerages in May and began requiring paper applications in 22 states. (Tepper, 7/16)

Newsweek: 80% Of US Counties Contain 'Health Care Deserts'
A growing number of Americans find themselves living in "health care deserts," areas lacking in the specific infrastructure and services needed to ensure timely access to medicine and care, new data suggests. According to new research from health care and prescription price-comparison website GoodRx, 81 percent of U.S. counties—home to more than 120 million Americans—fall under this definition in some way. This includes those which lack proper access to either pharmacies, primary care, hospital beds, trauma centers or community health centers. (Cameron, 7/16)

Becker's Hospital Review: How The EHR Is Evolving
Electronic health records, once viewed largely as digital filing cabinets, are now being reimagined as strategic tools to improve care delivery, reduce clinician burden and enable AI. Hospitals and health systems across the country are piloting new ways to optimize EHR use. From ambient voice technology to AI-assisted documentation, organizations are working to streamline workflows and enhance clinical decision-making. Stanford Health Care, based in California, for example, is testing an internally developed, AI-backed software designed to revolutionize clinician interaction with the EHR. (Diaz, 7/16)

Becker's Hospital Review: How Can Health Systems Prepare For The Future Of Cybersecurity?
If there’s one constant in healthcare cybersecurity, it’s change.From the ever-evolving tactics to the Whack-a-Mole of hacker groups, health system cybersecurity leaders must remain vigilant to protect their organizations today while preparing for tomorrow’s threats. (Bruce, 7/16)

Bay Area News Group: New Stanford Study Could Help Doctors Address Diabetes, Prediabetes
On a recent summer afternoon, Randy and Vera Tom prepared a stir-fried lunch in their Redwood City home with their “sous chef,” a 17-year-old Bichon Frise named Munchies, afoot. Randy, 70, recently overhauled his lifestyle after the couple participated in a Stanford Medicine study tracking their metabolic responses to carbohydrates in real time with a continuous glucose monitoring device. (Jung, 7/17)

Stat: Scientists Show That MRNA Therapy Can Be Delivered As A Capsule 
An oral capsule can efficiently deliver liquid mRNA therapy directly to the gut, a possible new delivery mechanism for mRNA vaccines, a new study finds. (Russo, 7/16)

CIDRAP: Adults Largely Don't Need Tetanus, Diphtheria Vaccine Boosters, Researchers Say 
With certain exceptions, US adults could safely forego tetanus and diphtheria booster vaccination—if uptake of childhood vaccines stays high, an Oregon Health & Science University–led research team wrote yesterday in Clinical Microbiology Reviews. (Van Beusekom, 7/16)

NBC News: Another Report Suggests Medicaid Cuts Could Lead To Thousands Of Deaths
The Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill could result in more than 1,000 additional deaths every year, according to a report published Wednesday in JAMA Health Forum. The cuts could also lead to nearly 100,000 more hospitalizations each year, the report found, and around 1.6 million people may delay seeking care. (Lovelace Jr., 7/16)

Stat: Medicare To Speed Up Clawback Of $7.8 Billion From Hospitals 
The Trump administration plans to claw back $7.8 billion in Medicare payments to hospitals a decade sooner than originally proposed, potentially sparking another legal challenge from the hospital industry. (Herman, 7/17)

Stat: Medicare Moves To Allow More Outpatient Medical Procedures 
The Trump administration is opening the floodgates for more surgeries to be done in outpatient facilities like ambulatory surgery centers, proposing a Medicare policy that could accelerate the shift away from hospital-based care. (Bannow, 7/17)

Modern Healthcare: CMS Adds Remote Patient Monitoring Billing Codes
Remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics companies would see potential reimbursement wins in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ proposed physician fee schedule. On Monday, CMS added six new billing codes for shorter-term remote patient monitoring and remote therapeutic monitoring within its physician fee schedule proposal. It also proposed a new code for digital therapeutics and raised the possibility of adding more when the final schedule is released. (Turner, 7/16)

Stat: HHS Leadership Shakeup: Kennedy Fires Top Aides 
Two top aides to Health and Human Services Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were dismissed from their roles this week after just months on the job. Both Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff, and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff for policy, were let go, HHS confirmed. (Cirruzzo, 7/16)

MedPage Today: The NIH Undergoes More Shake-Ups
July has been a month of shake-ups for the NIH, with advisory council scientists dismissed, the Advisory Committee to the Director disbanded, and research perceived to be risky put on pause, according to reports. NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists who were about to take positions on advisory councils, Nature reported. These groups make final decisions on funding grant applications for the agency. (Fiore, 7/16)

The Washington Post: Trump Officials Halt ‘Dangerous’ NIH Research, Overriding Career Scientists
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office surrounded by his top health officials, vowing a crackdown on “dangerous gain-of-function research” on viruses and pathogens that he alleged was occurring in the United States with inadequate oversight. “It’s a big deal,” Trump had said, alluding to the highly contested theory that the covid pandemic was caused by a lab leak related to such research in China. Soon after, researchers at the National Institutes of Health spent weeks assessing experiments for risk and preparing a report for the White House on what studies to halt. (Natanson, Johnson and Achenbach, 7/16)

The Hill: Donald Trump Signs Law Cracking Down On Fentanyl Trafficking
President Trump on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal fentanyl and toughening prison sentences for those who traffic the drug. Trump signed the Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl Act at a White House ceremony, where he was joined by lawmakers and individuals whose family members have died from fentanyl overdoses. The president called the bill signing a “historic step toward justice for every family touched by the fentanyl scourge as we sign the HALT Fentanyl Act into law.” (Samuels, 7/16)

Military Times: Will RFK Jr.’s Push For Psychedelics Help Or Hurt The Emerging Field?
For decades, proponents of psychedelic drugs have come to Washington with a provocative message: Illegal, mind-altering substances like LSD and ecstasy should be approved for Americans grappling with depression, trauma and other hard-to-treat conditions. A presidential administration finally seems to agree. (Perrone, 7/16)

Voice of OC: Anaheim Gives Immigrant Aid Fund A $250K Boost
Anaheim officials are boosting their newly minted immigrant aid fund by $250,000 to help residents reeling from ICE raids – either causing some people to stay home or a household breadwinner getting detained. The fund, created last month along with a city webpage detailing various legal resources for residents, was largely funded by donations until Tuesday night. (Elattar, 7/16)

KVPR: Two Kern Prison Facilities Could Benefit From Big Beautiful Bill Under Historic Funding For ICE
Two former prison facilities in Kern County could soon augment the federal government’s immigrant detention capacity as the Trump Administration looks to ramp up its mass deportation campaign. The facilities would open with the blessing of Congress, which earlier this month approved historic new funding through the Big Beautiful Bill. (Klein, 7/14)

Los Angeles Times: State Lawmaker Wants A Crisis Hotline For LGBTQ+ Youth On Student IDs
Bridget McCarthy believes that if her son Riley Chart had quick and easy access to a suicide prevention hotline designed for queer young people, he might be alive today. Chart, a trans teen who had once endured bullying because he was different, took his own life at the family’s home during the COVID-19 lockdown in September 2020 — two weeks after his 16th birthday. (Beason, 7/17)

Los Angeles Times: Weather Service Cuts Are Harming Agriculture, Worsening Wildfire Danger, California Senators Say
“Protecting human lives from severe weather events is not a partisan issue, and it is important that the NWS has the workforce required to meet its core mandate to protect human life,” the senators wrote. (Smith, 7/17)

The New York Times: Upended By Meth, Some Communities Are Paying Users To Quit
Overcoming meth addiction has become one of the biggest challenges of the national drug crisis. Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for meth, which works differently on the brain. ... Lacking a medical treatment, a growing number of clinics are trying a startlingly different strategy: To induce patients to stop using meth, they pay them. (Hoffman, 7/16)

NBC News: Birth Control Access: Scorecard Evaluates Family Planning Policies Across The U.S.
A new report finds that only a third of states protect access to affordable contraception through their policies, such as Medicaid expansion or requiring health insurers to pay for prescriptions for months at a time. The report, released Wednesday, analyzed current birth control policies across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. ... The report — a state-by-state contraceptive policy scorecard — shows how important local legislation is to family planning and health care. (Sullivan, 7/16)

Bloomberg: Severe Obesity In US Children Has More Than Tripled Since 2008
The proportion of severely overweight children in the US has skyrocketed in recent years, with the highest rates seen in adolescents and Black children, a new study found. Roughly 23% of all children were obese in 2023, up from 19% in 2008, according to the survey published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open. Additionally, more than 1% of children between the ages of 2 and 18 had “extremely severe obesity” — a 250% increase from the start of the study, the researchers from the University of California, San Diego, found. (Amponsah, 7/16)

California Healthline: Maybe It’s Not Just Aging. Maybe It’s Anemia
Gary Sergott felt weary all the time. “I’d get tired, short of breath, a sort of malaise,” he said. He was cold even on warm days and looked pale with dark circles under his eyes. His malady was not mysterious. As a retired nurse anesthetist, Sergott knew he had anemia, a deficiency of red blood cells. In his case, it was the consequence of a hereditary condition that caused almost daily nosebleeds and depleted his hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that delivers oxygen throughout the body. But in consulting doctors about his fatigue, he found that many didn’t know how to help. (Span, 7/17)