Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations.
KFF HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES
KFF Health News: A NY Hospital Tried To Close Its Birthing Center. This City United To Fight Back Like many residents of this aging industrial city on the Hudson River, Starletta Washington was stunned when she heard Troy’s last remaining hospital planned to close its birthing center. “It was devastating,” said Washington, who heads the local YWCA. Washington was born at the hospital and had her children there. She couldn’t believe families would now have to get to a hospital half an hour away or face the prospect of an emergency delivery. (Levey, 9/9)
KFF Health News: Nonprofits Are Helping Musicians Pay For Insurance In Austin, Texas, And Beyond Musician Zack Morgan jokes that when he lost his corporate job in 2015, it was like being pushed off a cliff. For years, he said, he’d been playing both sides of the Austin coin: tech worker by day, funk keyboardist by night. “Maybe this is my sign to try the full-time music thing,” Morgan recalled thinking. “Step one in that was: Get health insurance again.” (Aldridge, 9/9)
KFF Health News: Democrats Demand Trump Administration Halt Collection Of Patients' ER Records A group of Democratic lawmakers is calling for the Trump administration to suspend a new surveillance program it quietly launched to collect the personal and identifiable health data of Americans who visit emergency rooms. KFF Health News first reported that the Consumer Product Safety Commission — a federal agency tasked with monitoring injuries from household items — was pressuring hospitals to provide a private company with personally identifiable health information for analysis. The rollout of the program has inspired broad pushback from hospitals and privacy advocates. (Seitz, Rosenfeld and Tahir, 9/8)
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
Stat: FDA Names Permanent Leaders For CDER, CBER The Trump administration permanently filled four key leadership roles at the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, after it nominated Heidi Overton to lead the agency late last month. (Manto, 9/8)
Fierce Healthcare: CMS Puts Pressure On DME Suppliers As Part Of Anti-Fraud Push The Trump administration is cracking down further on durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers as part of its broader push to root out fraud. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Monday that it has identified 11 medical supply companies that it will block from receiving payments under Medicare Advantage or Medicare Part D. The agency said it suspects these firms were involved in more than $3.4 billion in fraudulent billing practices in 2025 and 2026. (Minemyer, 9/8)
The New York Times: American Bar Association Ends D.E.I. Standards Under Trump Pressure The American Bar Association, the lawyers group that sets standards for the legal profession, eliminated on Tuesday a diversity requirement for law schools after facing pressure from the Trump administration. The bar association said that the diversity requirement could jeopardize its role as an accreditor that oversees nearly 200 juris doctorate programs. (Patel, 9/8)
ON CAPITOL HILL
CIDRAP: Lawmakers Criticize Deal That Would Send NIH Funds To Department Of Defense Democratic lawmakers in Congress are speaking out about an agreement that would allow the Department of Defense (DoD) to tap into billions of dollars in funding designated for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Dall, 9/8)
The Hill: House Democrat Sells Zyn-Style Tins Amid Tough Race A House Democrat seeking reelection is selling Zyn-inspired campaign merchandise, leaning into an association with the explosively popular nicotine pouches that have devotees among the Trump administration. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) is selling a $50 “GLUE-ZYN-KAMP” storage tin on her office campaign website, mimicking the Zyn pouches’ ubiquitous circular container. The Democrat is among the party’s most vulnerable incumbents, running in a district President Trump carried three times. (Weixel, 9/8)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Rick Jackson Proposes ‘Intelligent Medicaid Expansion’ In Georgia Republican Rick Jackson is pledging to close Georgia’s health insurance coverage gap by embracing what he calls an “intelligent Medicaid expansion” to address one of the state’s most politically contentious fights. (Bluestein, 9/8)
VACCINES
The Washington Post: Supreme Court Declines Catholic Mother’s Bid For Son’s Vaccine Exemption In N.Y. The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a New York woman’s bid to send her son to kindergarten without receiving state-required vaccines, in a case that highlights the limits of the court’s push to expand religious rights. In a one-line order, the high court effectively sided with state and local officials, who argued that a religious exemption would undermine their attempts to prevent the spread of disease among children and the general public. (Mark, 9/8)
Here's what U.S. Catholic magazine has previously explained about vaccinations.
CIDRAP: Some Adult Vaccines Are Linked To Lower Dementia Risk. Can They Promote Brain Health? About seven years ago, Paul Schultz, MD, a professor and neurologist at UTHealth Houston, met with the biomedical informatics team he regularly collaborates with as they investigate risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Someone made a comment that piqued his interest. “My colleagues who were looking through the databases said, ‘Hey, we found a signal that the influenza vaccine seems to be associated with less Alzheimer’s. Is that something you know already?’” Schultz told CIDRAP News. “I was like, ‘Oh my God; that’s totally unexpected.’” (Holohan, 9/8)
REPRODUCTIVE AND INFANT HEALTH
ProPublica: Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse In Abortion-Ban States The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding. (Suozzo and Philip, 9/9)
The Washington Sun: Challenge To Abortion Drug Heads Back To Court Ahead Of Midterm Elections A federal appeals court in Louisiana is set to hear oral arguments Wednesday in a high-profile case that could limit access to a drug used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States. The court action over whether the abortion and miscarriage drug mifepristone can continue to be distributed through the mail and telemedicine appointments, coming weeks before the midterms, is legally and politically thorny for the Trump administration. (Hawkins and Winfield Cunningham, 9/8)
CNN: A Study Links Prenatal Acetaminophen With Reproductive Changes In Girls. Doctors Say It Remains Safe To Use When Needed A new study found that some girls born to mothers who took acetaminophen during pregnancy developed reproductive organ changes that could affect fertility later in life. It’s a finding the study authors say should drive future research but shouldn’t yet change how certain symptoms are treated during pregnancy. (Christensen, 9/8)
The Baltimore Sun: Baltimore Infant Sleep Deaths Reach 11 As City Warns Against Co-Sleeping Eleven Baltimore infants have died in sleep-related incidents so far this year, already matching the city’s total for all of 2025 and prompting health officials to renew warnings about unsafe sleeping practices. (Pryce, 9/8)
Maryland Matters: Cecil County Looks To Fill In Maternity Care Gaps After Closure Cecil County leaders and community members are scrambling to piece together solutions to the loss this summer of the county’s only birthing center, after the closure of the unit at ChristianaCare Union Hospital in Elkton. (Brown, 9/8)
MedPage Today: Menopausal Hormone Therapy May Bolster Heart Health Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) may have heart benefits for some women with vasomotor symptoms, though effects vary by timing of initiation and race, a target trial emulation of observational data suggested. (Robertson, 9/8)
MENTAL HEALTH
MedPage Today: Gender Gap In Youth Suicide Has Almost Disappeared A gender gap long seen in the suicide rates of 10- to 14-year-olds in the U.S. has tightened, new research indicated. In 2017, the suicide rate of boys was twice that of girls (3.28 vs 1.66 per 100,000 population), but by 2024, it was only 4% higher (2.38 vs 2.28), reported Jean Twenge, PhD, of San Diego State University. (Henderson, 9/8)
Wyoming Public Radio: New Compact Allows Out-Of-State Licensed Counselors To Practice In Wyoming As many Wyomingites continue to struggle with mental health and thoughts of self-harm, a new agreement allows counselors from out of state to practice in person or via telehealth here. (Ouellet, 9/8)
North Carolina Health News: Why Does Early Treatment Matter For Psychotic Episodes? In 2014, Angela Diaz was 24 years old and believed she was receiving secret messages from the world around her. She describes being paranoid that her coworkers were watching her and could hear her thoughts. She believed one was sending her secret messages through small things he would do, such as changing the photo on his computer screensaver. (Knopf, 9/9)
HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
CalMatters: Kaiser Nurses Say Surveillance Of Them Is Undermining Healthcare Kaiser Permanente nurses who answer advice and triage calls say their duty of care for patients is being increasingly threatened by workplace surveillance. (Johnson, 9/9)
Modern Healthcare: Trinity Health To Cut More Than 550 IT Roles Trinity Health will cut 557 positions this fall. Affected jobs include analysts, desk support, engineers and system administrators, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed in Michigan last week. Phased layoffs will occur in October and November, according to the notice. (Hudson, 9/8)
Bloomberg: UnitedHealth Sells Interest In Florida WellMed Clinics To TPG UnitedHealth Group Inc. has sold an interest in some of its Optum Health operations in Florida to private equity company TPG Inc. as the health conglomerate is working to recover from a collapse in profits last year. “We didn’t need the dollars, we have the dollars to invest, but we needed the focus and somebody that could actually work with us locally,” UnitedHealth Chief Financial Officer Wayne DeVeydt said in an interview with Bloomberg News. Working with TPG will allow the business to grow more quickly than it would be able to if UnitedHealth were running everything while also executing a broader turnaround, he said. (Swetlitz, 9/9)
CalMatters: Medi-Cal Assisted Living Waiver Leaves Rural Seniors Behind Last summer, siblings Roselie and John Aiello decided it was time for Roselie to leave her home of 73 years. Raised on a cattle ranch in the small town of Mount Shasta, Roselie spent her life working as a butcher and handling animals, assisting her father until his death. When her three brothers moved away, she stayed at home on the ranch, with its winding dirt roads and green pastures. But over the years, the hard manual labor left her bones weak and her back curved, slowing her pace. (Blough, 9/8)
Axios: Medicare Drug Coverage Faces An Ominous Spending Outlook There are troubling new signs that the overhaul of Medicare drug coverage in the Inflation Reduction Act is dramatically driving up program spending. (Bettelheim, 9/9)
The New York Times: CCRCs Are Expanding Retirement Home Care To Seniors’ Own Homes Not a single step interrupts the path, lined with thyme, to the front door of Joan Brasier’s ranch house in Asheville, N.C. With its remodeled primary bath and easy-to-clean surfaces, Ms. Brasier intends to stay in her home with her husband, Paul Wilczynski, for the foreseeable future. It’s the unforeseeable, though, that has worried them. She and Mr. Wilczynski, both retired, want to travel. But they were concerned about spending money for fun today that they may need for care tomorrow, even though their careful calculations showed they could most likely afford it. (Cleaver, 9/6)
PHARMA AND TECH
MedPage Today: Breast Cancer Drug Wins Approval Despite Rejection By Agency Advisors The FDA on Friday granted accelerated approval to camizestrant (Etcamah) for treating hormone receptor-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer at the first sign of ESR1 resistance mutations during first-line treatment. (Bassett, 9/8)
Stat: Immunotherapy Sees Striking Response In Some Head And Neck Cancers Inhibrx said Tuesday that its experimental immunotherapy targeting a protein called OX40 showed responses in patients with head and neck cancer. But the most striking results were in a small subset of patients with HPV-positive tumors, which could significantly limit the drug’s use. (Mast, 9/8)
ABC News: New Drug Shows Promise In Reducing COPD Symptoms In Former And Current Smokers, Clinical Trials Show A new drug appeared to show promise in reducing rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) symptoms in former and current smokers, according to results from late-stage clinical trials. The medication, called tozorakimab and developed by AstraZeneca, is the first biologic drug to show efficacy in treating COPD symptoms in a broad population of patients with varying ranges of blood eosinophil counts, according to Dr. Frank Sciurba, professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, in an AstraZeneca press release. (Miao, 9/8)
Stat: Roivant May Have Second Blockbuster Medicine Roivant said Tuesday an experimental drug for a type of pulmonary hypertension achieved the goals of a mid-stage study — positive results that could open up a new way to treat the serious lung disease and bolster the biotech company’s financial health with a second blockbuster medicine. (Feuerstein, 9/8)
The New York Times: Early Data Indicates An A.I.-Generated Drug Could Slow Aging Last year, a clinical trial conducted by Insilico Medicine, a company that aims to accelerate drug discovery using artificial intelligence, indicated that one of its drug candidates could help treat patients suffering from a chronic lung disease. Now, the company says that data from the same clinical trial shows a more intriguing possibility: that the drug could also slow the aging process. (Metz, 9/7)
Stat: FDA Warns Pharma Company On Poor Conditions, Corroded Gear At Its Facility Residue and stains plastered on production walls, floors, and manufacturing equipment. Corrosion on a product line. An employee wearing open-toed sandals. These were among the unsanitary conditions found last April by a Food and Drug Administration inspector during a visit to Shoolin Pharma in Gujarat, India, where the company makes active pharmaceutical ingredients for more than a dozen medicines, including erectile dysfunction and anti-convulsant pills, that are sold to compounding pharmacies in the U.S., according to the agency. (Silverman, 8/8)
The New York Times: A Newer Kind Of Gene Editing Promises To Edit ‘Nurture’ Over ‘Nature’ It is one of biology’s most ingenious rhythms: Every baby is born young. No matter how much wear and tear their parents’ DNA accumulated over their lifetimes, reproduction erases the molecular scars, handing a clean slate to the next generation. Now, a new frontier in biotechnology aims to harness this natural mechanism to do something once thought impossible: scrub away the biological detritus of our own past. By mimicking Mother Nature’s magic eraser, geneticists are working to open a new avenue for treating or preventing disease later in life — not by editing genes themselves, but by altering when, where and how genes are expressed. (Baumgaertner Nunn, 9/8)
WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS
The Hill: GLP-1 Drug Use Sees Significant Surge In Kids 8-11, Experts Say Over the last seven years, GLP-1 medication use in children age 8 to 11 has increased by nearly 31,000 percent, according to a new NYU Langone Health study. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any GLP-1 medication for children under 12, but in drastic circumstances, doctors have prescribed it off-label. (Sokol, 9/8)
MedPage Today: Asthma, COPD Attacks Down With GLP-1 Drugs In The Picture Growing evidence linked GLP-1 drugs to a reduced risk of exacerbations of two types of chronic airways disease: asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). (Lou, 9/8)
The Washington Post: The Financial Force Helping Drive America’s Craze For GLP-1 Weight-Loss Drugs Firms are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince doctors to prescribe GLP-1 drugs. (Rowland, Sidhom and Cha, 9/9)
STATE WATCH
The Washington Post: Woman Who Made False Child Welfare Report About Buttigieg Won’t Be Prosecuted An Indiana prosecutor has declined to file criminal charges against the woman who made a false child welfare complaint against former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, which led investigators to the door of one of the country’s most prominent Democrats, resulting in his brief separation from his children. The caller has a long history of alcohol abuse and mental illness, E. Nelson Chipman Jr., a prosecutor in Indiana’s Marshall County, where investigators determined the call had originated, wrote to state police in a July 29 email outlining his decision. Her history includes “hallucinations and delusional thinking which includes frequently responding to voices only she hears,” he added. (George, 9/8)
Bloomberg: Nike Faces Investor Challenge Over Gender-Transition Surgery For Minors A group of conservative investors is pressing companies to stop covering gender-transition surgery for minors in employee health plans, and Nike Inc. is their latest target. Inspire Investing, which oversees $5.4 billion, is leading an investor campaign that includes the Southern Baptists and the state of Nebraska against 242 large employers, saying that offering insurance coverage for gender-related surgery for minors may expose companies to legal trouble and reputational damage. (Green, 9/8)
The Wall Street Journal: Anti-Choking Devices Are Entering America’s Schools. Do They Work? Dr. Henry Heimlich devised a new technique more than 50 years ago to stop people from choking. Simplicity, studies, shrewd promotion by its inventor—and a demonstration on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—made the Heimlich maneuver a go-to method. Now, it is fighting for the stage. (McKay, 9/9)
PUBLIC HEALTH
The Guardian: Drinking Very Hot Drinks Could Triple Risk Of Oesophageal Cancer, Study Finds Drinking very hot tea and coffee triples the risk of developing cancer of the gullet, the world’s largest study of the link between them has found. The findings show that people should let very hot cups of tea and coffee cool down until they are comfortable to drink, in order to reduce their risk of the disease, cancer experts said. (Campbell, 9/9)
MedPage Today: Novel Synthetic Opioid Cychlorphine: What Doctors Should Know The emergence of the synthetic opioid cychlorphine (N-propionitrile chlorphine) in recent years has physicians and public health experts worried. The street drug has been linked to at least 55 deaths nationally from 2025 to 2026, according to a "drug threat notice" issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in April. Prevalence of the drug is highest in Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. (Firth, 9/8)
GLOBAL WATCH
The New York Times: Nepal’s Flood Relief Workers Feel The Pain Of Trump’s Cuts To U.S.A.I.D. Two days after a catastrophic earthquake shook Nepal in April 2015, the United States Agency for International Development deployed a 128-member disaster response team to assess how it could help and pledged $10 million in humanitarian aid. The agency later provided miles of tarp for shelters, helped build temporary schools out of bamboo and used mapping technology to help people find clean water. But two weeks after the country’s worst natural disaster since then — the flash floods triggered by a glacial fall that left more than 5,000 dead or missing — the United States has dialed back, sending $3.6 million to provide food for 10,000 households. (Das, Pradhan and Ghimire, 9/9)
AP: Doctors Without Borders Warns That Funding Cuts Are Forcing Health Clinics To Close An additional three dozen health facilities serving more than 400,000 people in Sudan are closing this year due to global aid cuts, worsening a dire humanitarian situation in a country torn by more than three years of war, aid groups said Tuesday. The cuts come to a health care system that once numbered 6,500 primary healthcare facilities and 300 public hospitals, but that already was decimated in the first year and a half of war. By September 2024, the World Health Organization said that up to 70-80% of facilities in the worst-hit areas were either closed or barely functioning. (Khaled, 9/9)
NBC News: Ebola Outbreak Outpaces Containment Despite Influx Of Money And Supplies Personal protective equipment is no longer in short supply. Humanitarian funding has poured in. New health centers are up and running, and vaccine trials are underway. Yet in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ebola continues to outpace all efforts to contain it, and the deaths keep mounting. (Bendix and Williams, 9/8)
Bloomberg: IMF Weighs Pandemic Preparedness Reforms For Congo As Ebola Outbreak Spreads The International Monetary Fund is considering making pandemic preparedness reforms part of its financing program for the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the country’s worsening Ebola epidemic exposes weaknesses in how it funds and responds to health emergencies. Congo is working with the World Health Organization and World Bank on measures that could be incorporated into the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facility at a future review, according to a report it released Tuesday. Discussions have focused on developing a strategy for financing pandemic prevention and response. (Gale, 9/9)
AP: Report: Study Finds 31 Rugby League Players With Brain Disease CTE A study has found 31 rugby league players in Australia have been diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The ABC reported Australian Sports Brain Bank findings that showed players in their 20s, 30s and 40s had the degenerative brain disease, which can only be diagnosed after death. Of the 51 rugby league players’ brains donated, 31 were found to have CTE. The donors had played at various levels of the sport, from amateur to professional. (9/9)
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