San Diego Union-Tribune: UCSD Updates Partnership Proposal After Tri-City Considers Looking Elsewhere 
Nearly nine months after choosing to work together on a turnaround plan for the financially distressed Tri-City Medical Center, negotiations between UC San Diego Health and  the Oceanside health care district have reached a tipping point. (Sisson, 7/24)

Bay Area News Group: East San Jose Leaders Criticize Plans To Expand Good Samaritan Hospital While Downgrading Care At Regional Medical Center
San Jose community leaders are decrying a plan by HCA Healthcare to expand a local hospital on the western edge of the city while downgrading care at Regional Medical Center on the East Side. ... On Wednesday evening, community members continued to rally in front of the hospital — this time taking aim at HCA’s decision to expand Good Samaritan Hospital just 14-miles away in a more affluent part of the city. The project, which is being done to comply with state seismic regulations, calls for two new hospital wings that will increase the number of beds from 404 to 419. (Hase, 7/24)

Modesto Bee: Modesto Hospital Launches Robotic Surgery For Heart Patients
Doctors Medical Center of Modesto is offering a minimally invasive option for coronary bypass surgery. With the assistance of a surgical robot, Dr. John deGraft-Johnson operated on a patient in late June by making small incisions between the ribs and using the robotic arms to bypass multiple blocked arteries, most likely extending the man’s life for years. (Carlson, 7/25)

Modern Healthcare: Aetna, Kaiser, Oscar Health Owe Risk-Adjustment Payments
Marketplace health insurers will pay $10.3 billion under the risk-adjustment program for 2023, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Monday. While insurers will transfer 11.5% more to other carriers than they did the previous year, payments are 10.4% less as a share of premiums. (Berryman and Broderick, 7/24)

The Wall Street Journal: CrowdStrike Explains What Went Wrong Days After Global Tech Outage 
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that upended computer systems across the world last week, said it had identified a quality-control flaw that led to outages for millions of Microsoft Windows users and how it got onto its systems. In an incident report published Wednesday, the company said a bug in a quality-control tool it uses to check system updates for mistakes allowed a critical flaw to be pushed to users’ machines. (Vipers and Rundle, 7/24)

PoliticoPro: A Data Dispute Is Making Waves In Health Tech
A below-the-radar dispute over the mining of patient data and how companies exchange that information is rattling the health tech industry. Electronic health records giant Epic claims that Integritort, which provides analysis of medical records for legal cases, incorrectly accessed its patient data through Carequality, a nonprofit framework for sharing health data. Epic says Integritort retrieved the data by falsely claiming it was for treatment purposes, which made it easier to gain access without a physician’s authorization in violation of Carequality’s rules. (Leonard, 7/25)

Bloomberg: Is The Nurse Practitioner Job Boom Putting US Health Care At Risk?
When Fred Bedell entered the emergency room on Oct. 12, 2020, he was in the throes of tremendous abdominal pain. The situation was frightening, but Bedell, a 60-year-old father of two, had little reason to doubt that he’d receive anything except excellent care at Florida Lake City Hospital, a 113-bed facility about 60 miles west of Jacksonville. For the past several years, the local chamber of commerce had named it the “Best of the Best.” (Melby, Mosendz and Buhayar, 7/24)

Bloomberg: Spotty Training Hurts Nurse Practitioners And Patients
Americans are more and more likely to get health care not from doctors, but from nurse practitioners. It’s one of the fastest-growing professions in the US — and the number of nurse practitioners in the country is expected to climb 45% by 2032. But training for the booming profession has never been standardized, and some students worry they’re not being set up for success. (Fox, Holder, Lu and Sugiura, 7/24)

Stat: Inside UnitedHealth's Doctor Empire
It’s no secret that UnitedHealth is a colossus: It’s the country’s largest health insurer and the fourth-largest company of any type by revenue, just behind Apple. And thanks to a series of stealthy deals, almost 1 in 10 U.S. doctors — some 90,000 clinicians — now either work for UnitedHealth or are under its influence, more than any major clinic chain or hospital system. (Herman, Bannow, Ross and Lawrence, 7/25)

Modern Healthcare: What’s Driving The Healthcare Labor Shortage In 2024
Healthcare’s staffing crisis shows no sign of slowing in the second half of 2024, with many clinical roles continuing to go unfilled. Healthcare employment has been on the rise in all sectors this year, pushed higher by a surge in ambulatory healthcare services and mounting pressure on facilities to meet staffing minimums. Employers are doing what they can to recruit workers by increasing wages while also turning to technology to improve workforce efficiency. (Devereaux, 7/24)

Los Angeles Daily News: California Congresswoman's Staff Sheltered In Place After Powdery Substance Found
A suspicious, white powdery substance turned up in two letters to Rep. Norma Torres’ Ontario district office on Wednesday, July 24, she said. Interns and staffers discovered the letters, prompting hazmat teams to descend on the site, where they were investigating. Torres, who described the incident as an “attack,” said out of caution, her staff was remaining on site “until more information is found.” (7/25)

PoliticoPro: What Kamala Harris’ Time As California’s Top Attorney Signals For Health Care
Vice President Kamala Harris is leaning into her background as a prosecutor to campaign against former president Donald Trump. That experience could also spell a warning for major health players. As California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2016, she expanded the powers of the office to referee hospital consolidation, helped block a mega merger between insurers Cigna and Anthem, and launched lawsuits to bring down inflated drug prices. (King and Bluth, 7/24)

The Washington Post: Kamala Harris Vows To Revive Biden’s Defeated ‘Care Economy’ Plans 
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris vowed twice this week to revive Democratic plans to expand the welfare state, previewing a campaign message against Donald Trump and potentially signaling one of her top priorities should she be elected. In remarks to campaign staff in Delaware on Monday and a campaign speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the vice president focused on key parts of President Biden’s domestic agenda that failed to pass because of resistance from Republicans and centrist Democrats. In both speeches, Harris highlighted the need for legislation to expand paid family leave, housing assistance, child care and eldercare — parts of the “care economy” that advisers say have been one of her top priorities in the administration. (Stein, 7/24)

The Atlantic: Kamala Harris Could Make 2024 The Abortion Election
Of all the reasons Kamala Harris is better equipped than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November—her relative youth, the fact that she’s a former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon—her biggest advantage may be her record on abortion. Harris served as the Biden administration’s de facto advocate for reproductive rights; it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception. (Filipovic, 7/24)

The 19th: The ‘Moms’ Candidate: Harris Champions Paid Leave, Child Care And Disability Rights
When she speaks about the economy, Kamala Harris often talks about the mothers in her life. Her own mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a single parent who worked as a breast cancer researcher. She’d pack lunches before Harris and her sister, Maya, woke up in the morning, and pay the bills at night after the girls went to bed. (Carrazana and Luterman, 7/24)

The Washington Post: J.D. Vance Said Kamala Harris Has No Kids. Stepparents Would Like A Word
When Ella Emhoff graduated from college in 2021, Vice President Harris posed smiling beside her stepdaughter. At Cole Emhoff’s wedding in October, Harris officiated her stepson’s ceremony. The Emhoff siblings have affectionately dubbed Harris “Momala,” a name she has said she wears proudly. But Harris’s parental role was altogether erased in recent and resurfaced attacks from her political opponents. In a video drawn from a 2021 interview on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” J.D. Vance, now the GOP vice-presidential nominee, said that Harris and other prominent Democrats (including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future because they are “people without children.” (Gibson, 7/24)

The New York Times: Nephew Says Trump Suggested Some Disabled People ‘Should Just Die’
Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. His care had been paid for in part with help from the family. After Mr. Trump was elected, Fred Trump wanted to use his connection to the White House for good. With the help of Ivanka Trump, his cousin, and Ben Carson, at the time the housing and urban development secretary, he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle. After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.” (McCreesh, 7/24)

The Hill: Joe Biden Calls For Supreme Court Reform In Oval Office Speech
President Biden on Wednesday said he intends to call for Supreme Court reform as he laid out his plans for his final six months in office. Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office outlining his decision not to seek reelection, his first on-camera remarks since making that announcement on Sunday. In addition to explaining why he is ending his candidacy, he listed off his priorities for his remaining time as president. (Samuels, 7/24)

The American Prospect: Kamala Harris Has An Opportunity On SCOTUS Reform 
President Joe Biden was all set to announce a major initiative to reform the U.S. Supreme Court, just days before he suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The new presumptive nominee’s own plans regarding the Court now remain to be seen, but there are indications that Harris will move forward with similar proposals to create term limits and enforceable ethics rules for the justices. And there’s a real possibility that Harris will also support broader reform measures to increase the number of justices on the Court, and to limit the number of justices each president can nominate. (Kanu, 7/24)

The Washington Post: Judge Blocks Forced Reset Trigger Ban, Citing Supreme Court Ruling On Bump Stocks 
A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a Biden administration ban on forced reset triggers, devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire at faster rates, citing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a ban on bump stocks last month. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled in favor of guns-rights groups that had sued the U.S. Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2023 challenging the ban. (Wu, 7/24)

San Francisco Chronicle: 9th Circuit Shoots Down GOP-Led States’ Abortion Pill Challenge
A group of Republican-led states can’t challenge the government’s approval of increased access to mifepristone, the pill used in nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions, because the states haven’t shown they are being harmed by it, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is the first by any federal appellate court on the issue, which could be crucial in determining access to mifepristone. (Egelko, 7/24) 

ABC News: Infant Mortality In The US Rose 3% In 2022, Marking 2nd Year Of Increases: CDC
Infant mortality rates in the United States increased by 3% in 2022, according to a new federal report published early Thursday morning. Researchers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics looked at linked birth and death data sets -- information from the death certificate linked to the information from the birth certificate -- from the National Vital Statistics System. (Kekatos, 7/25)

The Washington Post: Twice-A-Year Shot Offers 100 Percent HIV Protection, Study Finds 
A twice-yearly injection could help prevent HIV infections, according to the results of a new study described by medical experts as a breakthrough. In a randomized trial involving more than 5,000 young women and girls in South Africa and Uganda, none of those who received the prevention shots contracted HIV. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. (Pannett, 7/25)

NPR: HIV Preventive Strategy Sparks Interest -- And Protests -- At AIDS Conference
A new way to prevent HIV infection is generating great buzz -- and more than a bit of controversy -- at this week’s AIDS 2024 Conference in Munich. ... These results were significant enough for the Data Monitoring Committee -- an independent group of experts appointed to assess the progress of clinical trials -- to recommend that Gilead halt its blinded trial and offer lenacapavir to all study participants. On June 20, Gilead announced these results, and now, all participants can choose to receive the injection. (Barros Guinle, 7/24)

San Francisco Chronicle: As The AIDS Crisis Grew, S.F. Giants Closer Rod Beck Stepped Up
The Giants will celebrate the 30th anniversary of Until There’s a Cure Day on July 31. [Rod] Beck won’t be there; he died in 2007 after struggles with substance use. But his legacy continues in fan memories — his 199 saves with the Giants are the second most in team history — and a courageous choice of empathy that resonates through generations. (Hartlaub, 7/25)

Times of San Diego: SD County Plans To Hand Spray For Mosquitoes In Mt. Hope Area Friday
County Vector Control crews plan to hand spray a neighborhood in the Mt. Hope area this week to keep mosquitoes from potentially spreading the dengue virus, it was announced Wednesday.The action comes after mosquito activity was found near a person who contracted the fever outside the U.S. (Ireland, 7/24)

Fresno Bee: Sanger Declares State Of Emergency Over Wastewater Plant 
Sanger is having a moment of reckoning with its wastewater treatment plant as the Fresno County city tries to correct years of disrepair and deferred maintenance — including stricter enforcement of rules with major industrial water users like Pitman Family Farms. In a unanimous 5-0 vote, the Sanger City Council voted Thursday to declare a state of emergency for its domestic and industrial wastewater treatment plants. (Montalvo, 7/24)

Fresno Bee: Barefoot Death Valley Tourist Severely Burned By Sand In 123-Degree Heat, Park Says 
A Death Valley National Park tourist suffered severe burns to his feet after trekking barefoot in triple-digit heat, rangers say. As temperatures reached about 123 degrees, the 42-year-old Belgium man took a short walk on the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes barefoot Saturday, July 20, the National Park Service said in a July 23 news release. (Segura, 7/24)

Bloomberg: What The Temperature Doesn’t Tell You About Extreme Heat’s Hazards
After its nationwide rollout on Earth Day, the HeatRisk forecasting tool is getting a real-world test as deadly temperatures stress much of the US. Created by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, HeatRisk combines public health data and weather forecasts to create a map of threatening heat across the country. Similar to how tornadoes and hurricanes are categorized, the tool ranks heat waves on a scale of 0 to 4 based on how dangerous they are. (Battle Abdelal, 7/24)

LAist: LA County Increased Access To An Opioid Antidote 500% In 3 Years. Is That Why Overdose Deaths Leveled Off?
People in Los Angeles County now have access to naloxone — the medication that can reduce the effects of an opioid overdose — in more places than ever before, including schools, churches, libraries and jails. And that may be a key reason why the number of drug overdose deaths in the county plateaued last year, after more than eight years of alarming year-over-year increases, county officials said. (Botel, 7/24)

The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat: Police: Press Capable Of Making 200 Pills Per Minute Found In Santa Rosa Home 
A pill press suspected to have made ecstasy pills, as many as hundreds per minute, was found in a Santa Rosa home Tuesday, the first time such a “sophisticated” device has been found locally, authorities said. About 9:40 a.m., the Santa Rosa Police Department Narcotics Team searched the residence in the 100 block of Leisure Park Circle, just north of Highway 12 in western Santa Rosa, Sgt. Kevin Naugle said in a news release. (Smalstig, 7/24)

Times of San Diego: Mayoral Candidate Turner Unveils Plan For 350-Bed Veteran Shelter In Point Loma
San Diego mayoral candidate Larry Turner was joined by community leaders at a news conference at Civic Center Plaza Wednesday to unveil a proposal to address veteran homelessness, especially those struggling with mental health issues. ... The specialized 350-bed shelter located in Point Loma would offer comprehensive onsite services including trauma care, mental health support and detox facilities using federal assistance. (Ireland, 7/24)

Los Angeles Times: How California Teen Chloe Cole Emerged As A Leader Of The ‘Detransition’ Movement — And A Right-Wing Icon
Wearing pigtails, a pleated skirt and a furry heart-shaped purse, Chloe Cole bounced up the steps of the California Capitol this spring, leaned into a microphone and insisted that transgender children don’t exist. For the dainty 19-year-old, to erase transgender children is to erase a part of her past. (Mays, 7/25)

The New York Times: Halting The Bird Flu Outbreak In Cows May Require Thinking Beyond Milk 
A new study paints a complex picture of the outbreak, suggesting that the virus could be spreading in multiple ways and that it is not always mild in cows. (Anthes, 7/24)

NPR: With Bird Flu Spreading, Here's What Worries Scientists
For nearly four months, the spread of bird flu in the nation’s dairy cattle has stoked fears that, if left unchecked, the virus could eventually unleash a pandemic. The recent cluster of human cases connected to poultry farms in Colorado only underscores that the threat remains real. Genetic sequencing of the virus collected from the sickened poultry workers closely resembles what’s circulating in dairy herds, suggesting that cattle somehow introduced the virus into the poultry flock. (Stone, 7/24)

Military.com: Navy SEALs, Sailors Who Refused COVID Vaccine Will Have Records Expunged After Legal Settlement 
The U.S. Navy has reached a settlement with sailors who filed a lawsuit over the service's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, ending a nearly four-year saga that pitted Navy SEALs and other service members against their commander in chief. Under an agreement in the case announced Wednesday, Navy sailors who refused the vaccine for religious reasons can now have their records corrected and will be protected against discrimination on promotion boards for the next three years, according to their attorneys. (Kime, 7/24)

CIDRAP: Physician PTSD Levels Rose During COVID 
Physicians are known to have higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than the general population due to handling patient deaths, medical emergencies, and high workloads, and researchers who examined patterns during the COVID pandemic found that PTSD levels spiked and varied by different groups. (Schnirring, 7/24)