Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Covered California Premiums To Jump 6% Next Year
Individual health insurance premiums are set to rise by an average of 6% on the state marketplace next year amid rebounding demand for medical care and uncertainty surrounding federal financial assistance, Covered California said Tuesday. (Martinez, 7/19)
Attorneys for two women with disabilities have filed a potential class-action lawsuit alleging that Florida’s Medicaid program is improperly denying coverage for incontinence supplies. (Saunders, 7/19)
Empire BlueCross BlueShield has backed out of the city’s plan to privatize health insurance for 250,000 retired municipal workers, according to a memo released Monday. (Neber, 7/19)
Oregonians will decide in November whether people wanting to purchase a gun will first have to qualify for a permit, after one of the strictest gun-control measures in the nation landed on the ballot. (Selsky, 7/19)
Chris Suttle planned his funeral five years ago. The commercial insurance consultant was diagnosed with a frontal lobe brain mass in 2017. (Dougani, 7/20)
More than 18 million Americans sometimes didn’t have enough to eat last month, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than 5 million people often went hungry. Those numbers would have been higher if millions of families hadn’t received extra food aid through a pandemic-related expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. (Hernandez, 7/19)
Alissa Keaton was in grade school in the early 1980s when her mother gathered her siblings at their St. Louis area home and fled from Keaton’s abusive stepfather. Once settled near Rolla, Keaton’s mother filed for divorce. A few weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. The divorce was put on hold and she eventually returned to live with him. The abuse continued. (Spoerre, 7/20)
In early March, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a controversial proposal to compel people with serious mental health issues into care and housing. Mental health advocates, mayors and family members who stood alongside him at the press conference at a San José behavioral health treatment program heralded the plan, known as CARE Court, as a visionary move. (Wiener and Tobias, 7/18)
It took three years for officials to notice lead was seeping into the city's drinking water. Missouri regulators had given the green light in 2014 for Trenton to start adding monochloramine to its drinking water to disinfect it without the harmful byproducts of chlorine. But by 2017, the city noticed something alarming. (Kite, 7/20)
