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Comfortable Friday. If I ever have youngsters, I would like them to be handled on the newly christened Dolly Parton Youngsters’s Hospital in Tennessee. What’s your favourite Dolly track? Mine’s “My Tennessee Mountain Residence.”
He’s an motion determine. He’s a milk-drinking rave-goer. He’s … America’s well being secretary?
In comparison with his predecessors, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s social media technique is distinctive and provocative. The movies he posts from his official account are sometimes AI-generated and depict Kennedy in every kind of the way: preventing synthetic pink dye at school lunches, sporting a face tattoo a la boxer Mike Tyson, or doing shirtless pull-ups at an airport.
Whereas President Trump is understood for his in-your-face embrace of social media, Kennedy’s ways stand out. They appear to be a part of a technique to create fervor round Kennedy and his agenda that MAHA leaders hope will cement their alliance with Trump’s Make America Nice Once more motion because the midterms close to.
Is it working? Learn extra from STAT’s DC duo of Daniel Payne and Chelsea Cirruzzo, together with the identification of the Gen Z digital communications director behind at the very least a few of these movies.
Kansas’ new ID regulation may have well being penalties for trans folks
This week, the driving force’s licenses of about 1,700 transgender Kansas residents have been invalidated after a brand new regulation prohibiting identification paperwork from itemizing any intercourse aside from the one assigned at start went into impact. The measure, handed by GOP supermajorities within the legislature, forces trans folks to get a brand new license or danger six months in jail and a $1,000 nice.
States are already tightening restrictions round folks’s capacity to entry lifesaving gender-affirming care, however Kansas’ new regulation may complicate extra routine well being wants and wreak havoc on the kind of care that trans folks within the state obtain.
Say, for instance, a trans individual is in search of a colonoscopy at a hospital. Consultants say that if the gender marker on their new ID doesn’t match the gender marker within the hospital’s system or on their medical insurance, they may very well be denied insurance coverage protection or turned away for remedy altogether. These denials are on prime of the harassment and violence that trans folks can face in well being care settings and the struggles to entry preventive screenings for situations like most cancers, in comparison with their cisgender friends.
“It’s not a matter of, ‘Do I like what my driver’s license says?’ It’s a matter of, ‘Can I work together with the system in a method that the system acknowledges me and makes certain I can get the care that I want?’ And when the reply is ‘or not,’ then that has life-or-death penalties for folks,” mentioned Kellan Baker, a senior adviser for well being coverage on the Motion Development Mission, an impartial suppose tank centered on equality and alternative for all.
CMS: No new sturdy medical gear suppliers
If you happen to have been planning to start out an organization promoting sturdy medical gear to Medicare recipients — a non-zero likelihood with STAT’s readership! — you’ll sadly have to attend. The Trump administration introduced Wednesday a nationwide moratorium on new suppliers within the discipline to allow them to crack down on what they describe as rampant fraud, waste, and abuse.
These corporations promote all kinds of provides, together with gauze, wheelchairs, synthetic limbs, and urinary catheters — and have had recurring points with fraud. Prior to now, federal investigations have discovered that Medicare improperly paid $34 million between 2015 and 2017, and $22.7 million between 2018 and 2024 to suppliers.
Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies Administrator Mehmet Oz quipped throughout a press convention that, “The quantity of fraud [in South Florida] is so large that it’s simpler to open one among these suppliers than to open a checking account.”
Are you a DMEPOS provider? I need to speak to you. Learn extra from me.
Beware the Brown County beer cooler
Can a cooler of ice spark a salmonella outbreak? That’s the query infectious illness researchers posed to ChatGPT in 2024 after 13 individuals who attended the Brown County Honest in Mount Sterling, Unwell., got here down with meals poisoning.
Initially, the investigators examined the meals distributors, however 4 of the individuals who fell sick didn’t eat on the truthful in any respect. So the detectives set their sights on the one remaining suspect: the truthful’s beer tent.
Sadly, there was no approach to take a look at the ice, water, or cooler in query, because the investigation started per week after the truthful ended. Enter ChatGPT. The sleuths posed the thriller to the AI chatbot, which instructed ice contamination because the seemingly perpetrator.
Once I obtained to this a part of the report, I used to be skeptical. Can ice actually act as a contaminating vector? Additionally, as now we have extensively reported at STAT, AI chatbots are not probably the most dependable sources of well being info. However on this case, the bot’s speculation might be proper.
The report states, “Some interviewed attendees have been hesitant to supply particulars as a result of they didn’t need to implicate different members of their group. One affected person with laboratory-confirmed salmonellosis reported observing leftover meals saved in a single day within the ice cooler on August 1.”
God bless Midwesterners. I genuinely advocate studying the full report. It’s the proper true crime thriller.
U.S. authorities should make investments extra in male contraceptive, STI prevention analysis
The numerous applications and insurance policies designed to curb sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies usually focus on girls. It’s time so as to add males as a goal of interventions and to spice up sexual and reproductive well being analysis within the different half of the world’s inhabitants, writes Kenneth Mayer, medical analysis director and co-chair of The Fenway Institute.
Scientists have been conducting analysis into hormonal male contraception because the Nineteen Seventies, however have solely began to crack the code in recent times. It’s attainable {that a} viable hormonal male contraception resolution may hit the market earlier than 2030. STI prevention choices are evolving, too.
Learn extra from Mayer to seek out out the place the sphere stands on male sexual and reproductive well being advances.
What we’re studying
- When house births go flawed, hospitals can add to the issues, NBC Information
- Immigration enforcement’s twin threats to well being care, Tradeoffs
- Cigna, extending attain into prescribed drugs, acquires main pharmacy utilized by hospitals, STAT
- Senate leaders warn protection division about procuring generic medicine abroad, ProPublica
- FDA probes inside Prasad complaints with outdoors assist, Endpoints