Los Angeles Times: Newsom Signs Bill To Accelerate Study Of Psychedelics For PTSD
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill to fast-track the study of psychedelic drugs, which a coalition of veterans say hold enormous potential to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. More veterans die from suicide in America on a daily basis than average daily combat deaths in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined, according to data collected by the Department of Veterans Affairs. (Harter, 10/16)

The New York Times: Gavin Newsom Vetoes Reparations Bills In California 
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California vetoed bills that would have provided tangible benefits to those descendants, though he approved a state agency to determine who qualifies for potential reparations. (Rosenhall, 10/15)

CalMatters: Hospital Association Sues California Over Spending Limits
California hospitals filed a lawsuit against a state health regulator Wednesday, seeking to block rules meant to keep consumer health care costs from growing too quickly. (Ibarra, 10/15)

The Sacramento Bee: As Washington Cuts Back, California's Rural Hospitals Worry About Their Future
“There are a lot of unknowns right now, so we’re obviously looking at things we can do to tighten our belts ahead of the potential changes,” said Siri Nelson, president and CEO of Marshall Medical, a nonprofit health system in El Dorado County. (Nixon and Lightman, 10/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: UCSF Health Renames St. Mary’s, Saint Francis Hospitals
UCSF Health is renaming the two community hospitals it acquired last year, St. Mary’s Medical Center and Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, to UCSF Health Stanyan Hospital and UCSF Health Hyde Hospital, respectively. The announcement, made Tuesday, comes about a year and a half after UCSF acquired the two struggling San Francisco hospitals for a collective $100 million. (Ho, 10/15)

Becker's Hospital Review: Cedars-Sinai Embraces Synthetic Data For Faster Research
Cedars-Sinai is adopting a synthetic data platform to enhance research and clinical care, enabling teams to work with AI-generated datasets that mimic real patient data while maintaining privacy and security. The Los Angeles-based health system is partnering with Amsterdam-based Syntho, which uses AI to generate fully anonymous datasets that mimic real patient information. Unlike de-identified data, which removes patient identifiers from real records, synthetic data is entirely artificial but preserves patterns and relationships in the original data. (Diaz, 10/15)

The Washington Post: Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Provider Directory Mired In Errors
Ahead of the open enrollment period for Medicare Advantage plans that began Wednesday, the Trump administration created a directory to help millions of seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance. But the portal frequently produces erroneous and conflicting information, The Washington Post found, setting off a scramble inside the federal government to fix it. Left unaddressed, the problems could confuse older adults as they sift through dozens of options, or force them to foot the bill for regular medical appointments, according to Medicare experts and patient advocates. (Diamond and Johnson, 10/15)

Times of San Diego: Chula Vista’s Mayor Asks Residents For Help Solving 'Epidemic' Of Homelessness
The city of Chula Vista is taking action against what Mayor John McCann has called the region’s most urgent challenge, homelessness, by establishing its first ever strategic plan to address it. Homeless prevention services, encampment enforcement and more shelters were some of the suggestions residents shared, rapid fire, as they were inscribed in red marker on a poster board. (Psalma Ramirez, 10/15)

San Francisco Chronicle: Lurie’s New RV Policy Promises Housing, Clean Streets. Can SF Deliver?
Fidel Ramirez Espinoza has lived peacefully in a motorhome on the edge of San Francisco’s Lake Merced for nearly five years. Priced out of apartments on his part-time gardening income, Espinoza made the RV into a home for him and his 14-year-old son. So when the single father learned the city would soon impose two-hour parking limits for RVs, Espinoza said he was worried. But on a recent weekday evening, after walking more than a mile to meet with outreach workers, Espinoza, an immigrant from Mexico, secured a permit temporarily exempting his RV from the new rules. He shares his RV not only with his son, but a friend and the friend’s one-year-old son as well. (Angst, 10/15)

The Sacramento Bee: First-Of-Its-Kind Housing For School Workers Planned For This Sacramento Lot
A developer plans to build affordable housing for employees of the Twin Rivers Unified School District, marking the first known project of its kind in the city of Sacramento. (Clift, 10/15)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County Declares State Of Emergency To Fight ICE Immigration Raids
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week approved a state of emergency that could benefit tenants and others hurt by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The action Tuesday is one of most sweeping efforts by local authorities to push back at raids that have targeted several major American cities since the summer and comes amid weeks of clashes among immigration officers, protesters and others on the streets of Chicago. (Lin and Vives, 10/15)

AP: This Family Visit To A Military Base Ended With ICE Deporting A Marine’s Dad
Parents of a U.S. Marine were detained by federal immigration officials and one of them was later deported after visiting family members at a California military base, a case that has drawn attention to how the government’s immigration crackdown is touching military families. Steve Rios, a Marine from Oceanside, California, told NBC 7 San Diego that his parents, Esteban Rios and Luisa Rodriguez, were taken into custody late last month while picking up his pregnant sister, Ashley Rios, and her husband, who is also a Marine, at Camp Pendleton. (10/15)

AP: What To Know About Deporting Family Members Of US Troops
Have other military members’ families been detained? Yes. A Marine Corps veteran’s wife, who was seeking a green card, was detained in May in Louisiana but a judge barred her removal. And veterans without citizenship are increasingly worried about deportation. (Bedayn, 10/15)

The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat: Federal Cuts End Napa County-Led Program Training California Teachers To Support Children With Disabilities
A $10.5 million federal grant that trained California educators to better support children with disabilities has been abruptly canceled — three years before its funding was set to expire — because it conflicted with “the priorities of the current administration,” officials say. (Mehta, 10/15)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County Gets A New Tool To Find And Save Vulnerable People With Cognitive Disabilities
Janet Rivera cares for both her 79-year-old mother, who has dementia, and her 25-year-old son, who has a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome. Despite their differing diagnoses, both of her loved ones share a common symptom: They are prone to wander away from home, and have cognitive impairments that make it hard to find their way back. When she came across L.A. Found, a county program that distributes free technology to help locate vulnerable people with cognitive disabilities, it felt like a lifeline. (Purtill, 10/16)

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Man Can’t Escape His Drug Addiction Even After 6 Heart Infections
While relatively rare, cardiac doctors in San Francisco see it again and again: young people hospitalized with a deadly heart infection caused by injecting drugs. And given limited health care resources and the relentlessness of addiction, doctors often have to decide between performing demanding surgeries or refusing to operate, knowing that without care, the person could die from the infection. Austin [Draper], an empathetic young man with a creative spirit who’s been lost in a cycle of opioid addiction for more than a decade, knows the condition better than most. (Angst and Lurie, 10/15)

The Bay Area Reporter: Study Finds LGBTQ Youth Mental Health Crisis Worsens
With their rights coming under attack at all levels of government, LGBTQ young Americans are facing a worsening mental health crisis, a new study has found. Queer and transgender teens and young adults continue to have higher odds of later anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts than their heterosexual peers. The findings come from the Studying Protective and Risk Factors: A Longitudinal Mental Health and Experiences Study among LGBTQ+ Young People, known as Project SPARK for short. It followed 1,689 LGBTQ+ youth ages 13-24 across the United States from September 2023 to March 2025, collecting data every six months. (Bajko, 10/16)

The New York Times: Trump Rattles Vaccine Experts Over Aluminum
Federal health officials are examining the feasibility of taking aluminum salts out of vaccines, a prospect that vaccine experts said would wipe out about half of the nation’s supply of childhood inoculations and affect shots that protect against whooping cough, polio and deadly flu. The review at the Food and Drug Administration began after President Trump listed aluminum in vaccines as harmful during a press briefing about the unproven link between Tylenol and autism. (Jewett, 10/15)

Bloomberg: Pfizer CEO Says Vaccine Approvals Tougher Amid US Policy Overhaul
Pfizer Inc. Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said that vaccines are harder to get approved right now as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks to overhaul the country’s immunization policies. “It’s not harder to get drug approvals right now, it’s harder to get vaccine approvals,” Bourla said Wednesday during a wide-ranging conversation with CNBC that waded into his company’s US investments, deal with the Trump administration and the country’s current regulatory environment. (Peterson and Muller, 10/15)

Los Angeles Times: Federal Shutdown Stalls California's Legal Battles With Trump
Days before the Trump administration was supposed to file its response to a California lawsuit challenging its targeting of gender-affirming care providers, attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge to temporarily halt the proceedings. Given the federal shutdown, they argued, they just didn’t have the lawyers to do the work. (Rector, 10/15)

The Sacramento Bee: The Government Shutdown Is In Its Third Week. What It Means For Californians
Covered California, which manages the state program, estimates that as many as 400,000 of the nearly 2 million state residents using the program may have to drop their coverage if the credits end. (Nixon, Lightman, and Melhado, 10/15)

AP: Senate Democrats Ready To Reject Government Funding Bill Again Over Health Care
Senate Democrats are poised for the 10th time Thursday to reject a stopgap spending bill that would reopen the government, insisting they won’t back away from demands that Congress take up health care benefits. The repetition of votes on the funding bill has become a daily drumbeat in Congress, underscoring how intractable the situation has become as it has been at times the only item on the agenda for the Senate floor. House Republicans have left Washington altogether. (Groves and Jalonick, 10/16)

Stat: CMS Backs Off Pause On Medicare Doctor Payments Amid Shutdown
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said late Wednesday that it was not pausing all Medicare payments to doctors, after a statement earlier in the day stated it would. Instead, the agency will only wait to process claims that are related to programs that have expired, such as some telehealth or rural services. (Payne and Bannow, 10/15)

AP: Report Suggests US Obesity Epidemic May Be Improving
For the first time in more than a decade, the number of states with rates of obesity of 35% or more dropped, an encouraging sign that America’s epidemic of excess weight might be improving. But cuts to federal staff and programs that address chronic disease could endanger that progress, according to a new report released Thursday. Nineteen states had obesity rates of 35% or higher in 2024, down from 23 states the year before, according to an analysis of the latest data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Aleccia, 10/16)

AP: World Is On Track To Add Nearly 2 Months Of Superhot Days, Study Finds
The world is on track to add nearly two months of dangerous superhot days each year by the end of the century, with poorer small nations hit far more often than the biggest carbon-polluting countries, a study released Thursday found. But efforts to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases that started 10 years ago with the Paris climate agreement have had a significant effect. Without them Earth would be heading to an additional 114 days a year of those deadly extra hot days, the same study found. (Borenstein, 10/16)

AP: Indonesia Finds Radioactive Element At Clove Plantation
Indonesia detected traces of radioactive cesium 137 at a clove plantation as it searches for the source of radioactive contamination that forced recalls of shrimp and spices exported to the U.S., a task force investigating the issue said Wednesday. U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials blocked the import of all spices processed by PT Natural Java Spice of Indonesia in September after federal inspectors detected cesium 137 in a shipment of cloves sent to California. (Tarigan, 10/15)