CalMatters: More Than 40 California Hospitals Closed Maternity Wards In A Decade. Is Yours One Of Them?
Few regions in California have escaped the impact of maternity ward closures in the past decade. At least 46 hospitals have permanently closed or suspended labor and delivery since 2012, a CalMatters analysis of hospital records found. About 60% of the closures have taken place in just the last three years. (Hwang, Ibarra and Yee, 11/15)

CalMatters: CA Hospitals Close Labor Wards, Limiting Maternity Care 
El Centro Regional Medical Center delivered the last baby at its 67-year-old maternity ward in early January. Then it closed its obstetrics department, leaving just one other hospital to deliver the approximately 2,500 babies born every year in Imperial County. (Ibarra, Hwang and Yee, 11/15)

Los Angeles Times: UCLA Sues Mattel For Allegedly Reneging On $49-Million Children's Hospital Donation 
Mattel, the company behind Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price and Barbie, pledged in 2017 to donate $49 million to UCLA to support its children’s hospital. But now the hospital says Mattel never came through with the money. According to a new lawsuit, the El Segundo toy company made “the inexplicable decision a few short years later to renege on that pledge” and is now trying to offer the pediatric hospital just a few million dollars, plus a bunch of Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels cars and other in-kind donations. (Dean, 11/14)

Modern Healthcare: Kaiser Medicare Advantage Ratings Dipped Due To Staff Shortages
Kaiser Permanente is diversifying in response to declines in Medicare Advantage star ratings and threats from large insurers and retailers. The Oakland, California-based integrated system suffered a setback in its Medicare Advantage business when it experienced one of the industry's biggest declines in quality ratings this year, with four of its seven plans losing out on bonus payments. (Tepper, 11/14)

Modern Healthcare: UnitedHealth Sued Over AI, Medicare Advantage Denials 
UnitedHealth Group faces a potential class-action lawsuit over its use of an artificial intelligence tool to allegedly deny post-acute care coverage to Medicare Advantage members. The plaintiffs, family members of two deceased UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage policyholders, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota and aim to represent a national class of similarly affected enrollees. The lawsuit alleges that the health insurance company breached its contracts with members, which resulted in unjust enrichment under federal law. (Tepper, 11/14)

Bloomberg: Drug Prices: Cigna Follows Mark Cuban’s Lead To Simplify Pricing
Cigna Group is taking a page from billionaire Mark Cuban’s playbook to sell medicines for a set markup, the latest sign that companies that manage drug benefits are responding to pressure from upstart competitors. Next year Cigna’s Express Scripts subsidiary will offer employers and health plans the option to pay pharmacies up to 15% above their wholesale costs, plus an extra fee for dispensing the medicines. (Tozzi, 11/14)

Reuters: US FDA Warns Amazon Against Sale Of Unapproved Eye Drops 
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday it had sent a warning letter to Amazon.com related to sale of seven unapproved eye drops on the company's e-commerce platform. In the letter dated Nov. 13, FDA said Amazon was selling eye drops which have not been recognized as safe and effective for providing temporary relief from eye symptoms such as excessive watery discharge, redness, burning, or pink eye. (11/14)

Voice of OC: Irvine Asphalt Factory Closes Today After Years Of Complaints 
Irvine’s All American Asphalt plant closes for the last time today, ending years of debate over how to handle one of the county’s biggest air polluters. The factory’s closure came after a years-long campaign by residents living near it to have the plant shut down or relocated, with many saying the smoke it released into their neighborhoods made it difficult to breathe.  (Biesiada, 11/15)

Orange County Register: Initial Cleanup Efforts Underway In Tustin But Fire Persists 
Initial cleanup efforts are underway in Tustin to rid from city streets and homes dangerous debris spewed out from the burning blimp hangar, as the stubborn fire continues to burn and emit smoke into the air. “I don’t think anybody thought that the fire would still be burning six days later,” Tustin Mayor Austin Lumbard said. (Slaten, 11/14)

San Francisco Chronicle: Maps Rank Every California Neighborhood By Extreme Weather
Californians are intimately familiar with extreme weather, from hot, dry winds that can whip up wildfires to heavy downpours that result in destructive floods. But climate change has ramped up the frequency and severity of such activity, making it more important than ever for communities to prepare for intense weather. (Devulapalli and Lee, 11/15)

The New York Times: Health Risks Linked to Climate Change Are Getting Worse, Experts Warn
Climate change continues to have a worsening effect on health and mortality around the world, according to an exhaustive report published on Tuesday by an international team of 114 researchers. One of the starkest findings is that heat-related deaths of people older than 65 have increased by 85 percent since the 1990s, according to modeling that incorporates both changing temperatures and demographics. People in this age group, along with babies, are especially vulnerable to health risks like heat stroke. As global temperatures have risen, older people and infants now are exposed to twice the number of heat-wave days annually as they were from 1986 to 2005. (Erdenesanaa, 11/14)

San Francisco Chronicle: National Abortion Rights Group Endorses Barbara Lee For Senate
A leading national abortion rights organization will endorse Rep. Barbara Lee for Senate on Wednesday. (Garofoli, 11/15)

AP: Senate Panel Takes A Step Toward Ending Sen. Tuberville's Blockade Of Military Nominations
Senate Democrats pushed ahead Tuesday with a resolution that would allow for the quick confirmation of hundreds of military nominees, an attempt to maneuver around a blockade from Sen. Tommy Tuberville over a Pentagon abortion policy. ... The panel voted 9-7 to approve a resolution that would allow the Senate to confirm groups of the military nominees at once for the remainder of the congressional term. (Jalonick, 11/14)

Axios: How The Next Republican President Could Stop Most Abortions Without Congress
The next Republican president could effectively ban most abortions through a simple policy change at the Department of Justice, experts and advocates on both sides of the abortion debate say. While Republicans disagree about whether to pursue a national abortion ban that would face long odds in Congress, a GOP president may be able to unilaterally curb access to medication abortion across the country using an obscure 19th-century law. (Owens, 11/15)

Voice Of San Diego: Padres Owner Devoted To Team, Reducing Homelessness Dead At 63 
Beloved Padres owner Peter Seidler, an eternal optimist devoted to delivering a winning baseball franchise and combating the region’s homelessness crisis, died Tuesday at age 63. Seidler [was] a two-time cancer survivor who had for months battled an undisclosed illness. ... Sometime after he moved to San Diego, Seidler began taking regular overnight walks and talking to unsheltered people he met along the way. By 2017, Seidler was regularly meeting with other power brokers about the region’s growing homelessness crisis and digging into potential solutions. (Halverstadt, 11/4)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. Caps Rent Increases For Stabilized Units At 4% 
With the city’s COVID-era freeze on rent increases set to expire at the end of January, the Los Angeles City Council signed off on a compromise proposal Tuesday that will allow landlords to raise rents next year by 4% — spurning calls from some tenant advocates to extend the freeze. (Wick and Pineda, 11/14)

CIDRAP: Scientists Develop Mpox Severity Scoring System That Could Improve Care, Research 
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other US institutions have created an mpox severity scoring system that they say could help clinicians track disease progression and response to treatment and guide researchers in identifying risk factors for severe illness and assessing the effectiveness of therapeutics. Their evaluation of the MPOX-SSS scoring system was published yesterday in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. (Van Beusekom, 11/14)

ABC News: About 36M American Adults Have Received The Updated COVID Vaccine: CDC
An estimated 36 million adults in the United States have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine as of Monday, according to new data from the federal government. Additionally, about 3.5 million children have also gotten the updated shot, according to the survey, which is a sample size of the U.S. population, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Benadjaoud and Kekatos, 11/14)

San Francisco Chronicle: Study Shows How Taking Paxlovid Affects COVID Rebound
A new study has affirmed that 1 in 5 individuals who take the antiviral medication Paxlovid to treat COVID-19 encounters a rebound infection. (Vaziri, 11/15)

San Diego Union-Tribune: North County Charter School Network Drops Policy Protecting Transgender Students' Privacy
A North County charter school network that serves more than 5,300 students scrapped a 4-year-old policy that required privacy for transgender and gender non-conforming students and replaced it with one that would allow, and in some cases require, school staff to inform parents of changes to a student’s gender identity or expression without the student’s consent. (Taketa, 11/15)

Fresno Bee: CA Students Get Mandatory Recess Under New Education Law 
California students will soon have a mandatory 30-minute recess, thanks to a new state law. Senate Bill 291 was introduced by California state Sen. Josh Newman, chair of the Senate Committee on Education, in February. (Pinedo, 11/14)

The Washington Post: House Passes Bill To Avert Government Shutdown, Sends To Senate 
The House on Tuesday passed stopgap legislation to keep the federal government operating past this weekend, sending the bill to the Senate days before the 12:01 a.m., Saturday deadline. ... The “laddered” deadlines in the bill are designed to allow the House and Senate to pass and negotiate full-year spending bills — though the two chambers are nowhere near an agreement on those — and avoid a massive year-end spending bill called an omnibus. It could still trigger two more standoffs that lead to partial government shutdowns early next year. Funds would expire for military and veterans programs, agriculture and food agencies, and the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development on Jan. 19. They would expire for the State, Defense, Commerce, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, among others, on Feb. 2. (Bogage and Sotomayor, 11/14) (Bogage and Sotomayor, 11/14)

PBS NewsHour: Most Americans Say It’s Unacceptable For Congress To Use Federal Shutdown As Bargaining Chip 
The latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll finds that most of the American public has grown weary of political games on Capitol Hill. Three out of four U.S. adults say that it is unacceptable for members of Congress to leverage the threat of a federal closure during budget negotiations – a sentiment that held true for majorities across political parties. (Santhanam, 11/15)

The New York Times: Race Cannot Be Used To Predict Heart Disease, Scientists Say 
Doctors have long relied on a few key patient characteristics to assess risk of a heart attack or stroke, using a calculus that considers blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes status, as well as demographics: age, sex and race. Now, the American Heart Association is taking race out of the equation. The overhaul of the widely used cardiac-risk algorithm is an acknowledgment that, unlike sex or age, race identification in and of itself is not a biological risk factor. (Rabin, 11/14)

CBS News: American Lung Association Releases New State-By-State Report
A new report details the toll lung cancer is taking on public health. The American Lung Association's data breaks down the challenges faced by each state. More than 350 people die from lung cancer nationwide each day. But there's been a 22% increase in survival rates over the past five years. (11/14)