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For Gabriela, the recent expansion of the state’s Medicaid program to children 12 and younger — regardless of their immigration status — means her 10-year-old son can now connect with a pediatrician, and she won’t have to worry as often about medical bills. (Carlesso, 1/10)

City labor officials defended legislation that would charge municipal retirees who don’t opt into the Medicare Advantage plan for health insurance, as Council members questioned the move at a hearing Monday. (Touré, 1/9)

Since Jan. 20, 2020, when health officials reported the first local fatality from COVID-19 – involving a man who had just come back from Wuhan, China – the still-mysterious and evolving disease has gone on to kill more than 7,700 people in Orange County, making it the most lethal health event of the past century. But according to three years of local health data, COVID-19 has been something else as well – an unequal-opportunity killer. (Mouchard, 1/8)

Advocates for the homeless in San Francisco say the city has continued to remove unhoused people from encampments without providing shelter for them, in defiance of a federal magistrate’s order. U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu issued an injunction Dec. 23 — barring San Francisco police and other officers from sweeping homeless encampments, citing their occupants for sleeping in public and seizing their belongings — while she considers a lawsuit against the city. Federal appeals courts have ruled that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits local governments from making it a crime to sleep on a street or sidewalk when no homeless shelters are available. (Egelko, 1/9)

Jerold Phelps Community Hospital in Garberville, California is one of the smallest in the country. Its mere nine acute-care beds serve a community of about 10,000 people in southern Humboldt County. The next closest emergency room is about an hour’s drive north. Despite its small size, the hospital is facing a hefty price tag to meet the 2030 retrofit deadline required under the state’s seismic safety standards — about $50 million for a new single story hospital that would replace its 1960s building. (Ibarra, 1/9)

Slapped with the largest jury verdict for an individual in Cook County, Sterigenics agreed Monday to settle scores of other lawsuits accusing the company of poisoning the west suburbs for decades with cancer-causing ethylene oxide. A claims administrator will be appointed to distribute $408 million to as many as 870 people who sued Oak Brook-based Sterigenics, which used the highly toxic gas to sterilize medical equipment, pharmaceutical drugs and spices near Kingery Highway and Interstate 55 in Willowbrook. (Hawthorne, 1/9)

People living in rural, urban and suburban areas all experience domestic violence at similar rates — a fact that’s reflected in data and in research. Though it’s not a perfect metric, the number of calls to domestic violence hotlines provides some sense of the problem in North Carolina. The NC Council for Women and Youth Involvement reports that domestic violence hotlines in North Carolina received about 93,000 calls between July 2020 and June 2021. (Donnelly-DeRoven, 1/10)

The head of South Dakota prisons is pledging to dramatically overhaul how the system treats hepatitis C in the coming year. South Dakota’s new hepatitis C policy for incarcerated people, which is not yet final or public, will treat all people with hepatitis C for the virus, regardless of the stage of their infection, Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko told STAT in an interview Monday. The policy will also mandate that all people being booked into prison be tested for the virus, she added. (Florko, 1/9)

Nine medical marijuana dispensaries in Connecticut have been cleared to open their doors to customers over 21 on Tuesday. The openings mark the latest adult-use cannabis launch in the Northeast: New Jersey, Vermont, Rhode Island and New York all started recreational weed sales last year. (Zhang, 1/9)