The Biden administration announced Wednesday night it was reviewing a Texas judge's ruling that declared a part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requiring that health care employers provide HIV preventive drugs unconstitutional.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted the administration was reviewing the decision because the ACA "has been the law of the land for over 10 years."
"That guarantee is critical to the health and wellbeing of millions of Americ...
drugs
Health Care — Biden tells Senate to move on health bill
Tiger Woods missed the cut at the British Open, but received a thunderous ovation from the crowd at his final hole — possibly his final time playing competitively at the iconic St. Andrews course.
Today we'll look at President Biden's call for senators to pass a health care-only reconciliation bill after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) once again dashed Democrats' hopes of including tax and climate provisions.
Welcome to Overnight Health Care, w...
A radical approach to confronting addiction puts human connection first
In 2015, Jennifer Nicolaisen was working in consulting and getting by some days on just two hours of sleep. She was a 27-year-old statistician in northern Virginia, basking in what she called “rising star energy”—the glow that came from approval from her boss, her c...
As his state is ravaged by a drug epidemic, Mitch McConnell fundraises off ‘Cocaine Mitch’ T-shirts
Kentucky has been one of the states his hardest by drug addiction in recent years, with some of the highest rates of drug overdose deaths. Meanwhile, the state’s senior U.S. senator, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is selling T-shirts branding him “Cocaine Mitch” as a fundraiser for his 2020 re-election campaign.
The nickname stems from the 2018 West Virginia Republican Senate primary. In that race, coal baron Don Blankenship, the former Massey Energy C...
What 13 states discovered after spending hundreds of thousands drug testing the poor
Thirteen states spent more than $200,000 screening federal-aid applicants for drugs last year. Only 338 people tested positive, according to data gathered by ThinkProgress.
In total, the states required more than 260,000 people to submit to drug screening or testing as a condition of receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which provides cash assistance to low-income people. In some states, not one person tested positive.
While universal drug testing for TAN...
“Do you abuse more than one drug at a time?”: Wisconsin to drug screen people on Medicaid
In addition to imposing 80 hours of work per month, Wisconsin will require that Medicaid recipients complete a drug screening questionnaire to keep their health coverage.
While the Trump administration rejected Wisconsin’s bid to drug test Medicaid recipients, the Department of Health Services (DHS) told ThinkProgress on Friday that the state will ask them the same questions they already ask people on cash assistance as a condition of eligibility. The “D...
States waste hundreds of thousands on drug testing for welfare, but have little to show for it
In 2017, states spent more than $490,000 to drug-test 2,541 people who had applied for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, which yielded just 301 positive tests.
While the costs for these programs has dropped somewhat over the past three years, the number of positive tests has also declined.
This year, ThinkProgress also asked states to provide the questionnaires used to determine whether there is “reasonable suspicion” that their applicants/recipients ar...
The hollow, contradictory hype of Trump’s big emergency speech on opioids
Like the rash of executive orders he signed in the early months of his administration, President Donald Trump’s Thursday address declaring a national public health emergency to help fight deaths linked to opioids was long on performance and short on substance.
The failure to invest new funding in the project and the vague promise that more policy specifics will be revealed in the coming weeks are symptomatic of Trump’s high-flash, low-focus approach to policymaking.
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Trump declares public health emergency over opioids, adds no new funding
President Donald Trump has finally declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, two months after he first said he would. The belated declaration is short of what is immediately needed to combat this epidemic. It offers no new funding that experts on the frontlines of the crisis say is needed — one expert says hundreds of billions in investment is necessary — and does not seem to yet prioritize increased access to the critical overdose reversal drug nalox...