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When he unveiled a new state budget last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom crowed about California becoming the nation’s first state to embrace universal health care coverage. His budget would accomplish that goal by extending state Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented immigrants of all ages, beginning in 2024. “I campaigned on universal health care,” Newsom said a day later. “We’re delivering that.” Not quite. (Dan Walters, 1/18)

We’re entering our third year of Covid, and America’s nurses — who we celebrated as heroes during the early days of lockdown — are now leaving the bedside. The pandemic arrived with many people having great hope for reform on many fronts, including the nursing industry, but much of that optimism seems to have faded. (Lucy King and Jonah M. Kessel, 1/19)

Current attempts to destroy the right to abortion, if successful, will return us to a pre-1973 Roe vs. Wade world of restrictions. Working at Family Planning Alternatives and Women’s Community Clinic in San Jose allowed me to see the difference between the pre- and post-Roe eras. I heard the horrors of illegal, back-alley abortions. So the moment the Supreme Court decision was announced, women showed up spontaneously on Market Street in San Francisco to celebrate their joy and freedom. Shortly thereafter, our clinic began offering low-cost, safe, legal and accessible abortions onsite. Women no longer needed to go to a hospital to have their abortions. During that period, I held the hands of hundreds of women during their safe, legal abortions. (Susyn Almond, 1/19)

A recent op-ed in the Tribune highlighting breast cancer mortality rates among Black women in Chicago should sadden and motivate all of us. It reminded me of a meeting I had with Dr. Robert Winn, former director of the University of Illinois Cancer Center, who left me floored after showing the gap between Black and white residents in a ward-by-ward map of breast cancer mortality rates. (Dick Durbin, 1/18)

The recent Biden-Harris Maternal Health Day of Action focused the nation’s attention on shameful and inexcusable facts about the health and survival of our mothers. Not only is America’s overall maternal mortality rate the highest among wealthy nations, death occurs more than twice as often for Black, American Indian and Alaska Native women. The day saw dozens of organizations, including ours, make significant commitments to act, but how do we increase the chances that these actions will help reverse decades-long trends of worsening health inequities? (Dr. Mary-Ann Etiebet and Sema Sgaier, 1/18)

Often around the turn of the year I perform an act of pundit accountability, looking back on the previous year’s columns to assess the things that I got wrong. For this January’s edition, though, I’m going to take a different kind of backward glance, and try to answer one of the frequent questions I received when I wrote, last fall, about my experience with chronic illness: Namely, has being sick altered any of my views on health care policy? (Ross Douthat, 1/19)

The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought infection prevention teams into the spotlight, showcasing their expertise and decades of work on preparedness. As the pandemic continues to unfold with the omicron and delta variants driving hospitalizations up again, these teams are helping manage unprecedented surges of critically ill patients in the face of additional ongoing challenges created by inadequate supplies of personal protective equipment, staff shortages, fear and fatigue. The COVID-19 response has challenged established procedures in ways previously unimaginable. (Dr. Mary Hayden and Ann Marie Pettis, 1/18)