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Oregon voters are being asked to decide whether the state should be the first in the nation to amend its constitution to explicitly declare that affordable health care is a fundamental human right. State Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, a main sponsor of the legislation behind the ballot measure, said making health care a human right is a value statement and is not aimed at pushing Oregon to a single-payer health care system, a longtime goal of many progressives. (Selsky, 10/27)

When James Hewitt got a call from his friend to help do repairs on his house in Florida following Hurricane Ian, Hewitt jumped at the opportunity. Almost immediately after getting off the phone, he started packing his bags. “He was very excited,” Leah Delano, Hewitt’s fiancee, told The Washington Post. From their home in Jenison, Mich., Hewitt left for Naples on Oct. 4, she said, about a week after Ian made landfall. He helped his friend with house and boat repairs — and also worked with others to clear debris in the city that had experienced intense flooding during the Category 4 storm, Delano told The Post. But that Saturday, Hewitt, 56, fell off his friend’s boat into a canal, somehow scraping his leg in the process. (Mark, 10/28)

In July, the nation got a new three-digit suicide prevention number – 988. A new analysis found the hotline’s call volume jumped 45% in August compared to August 2021, with the number of callers roughly doubling in two states in the Mountain West. (Roedel, 10/27)

KHN: Knoxville’s Black Community Endured Deeply Rooted Racism. Now There Is Medical Debt

When Dr. H.M. Green opened his new medical office building on East Vine Avenue in 1922, Black residents of this city on the Tennessee River could be seen only in the basement of Knoxville General Hospital. They were barred from the city’s other three medical centers. Green, one of America’s leading Black physicians, spent his life working to end health inequities like this. He installed an X-ray machine, an operating room, and a private infirmary in his building to serve Black patients. On the first floor was a pharmacy. (Levey, 10/28)

KHN: Ambulance Company To Halt Some Rides In Southern California, Citing Low Medicaid Rates 

For 23 years, the private ambulance industry in California had gone without an increase in the base rate the state pays it to transport Medicaid enrollees. At the start of the year, it asked the state legislature to more than triple the rate, from around $110 to $350 per ride. The request went unheeded. In September, American Medical Response, the largest U.S. provider of ambulance services, announced it had “made the difficult decision” to end nonemergency transports in Los Angeles County and blamed the state for having one of the lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the country. (Kwon, 10/28)

More than half of the states have now expanded their Medicaid postpartum coverage from the federally mandated 60 days to one year, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to Axios. (Gonzalez, 10/27)