Morning health reads - Fri, May 26 2017

This story was co-published with Stat. Earlier this month, a day after the House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, Ashleigh Morley visited her congressman's Facebook page to voice her…

A feeling of pessimism is settling over Senate Republicans as they head into a week-long Memorial Day recess with deeply uncertain prospects for their push to repeal Obamacare. Senators reported that they've made little progress on the party's most…

IERRA VISTA, Ariz. — The sighting took place on a hot day in May, in the lobby of the Sierra Vista Public Library, not far from the rack where local kids can borrow donated bikes. A blond woman in white tennis shoes nudged her twin sister…

Dr. Amy J. Reed, a physician and cancer patient who turned a personal calamity into a crusade to spare other women from the medical procedure that harmed her, died on Wednesday night at home in Yardley, Pa. She was 44. Her husband, Dr. Hooman…

FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb wants to stop the next Martin Shkreli before he, or she, gets started on the next drug price gouging scandal. And shining a bright light on the drugs most vulnerable to pricing abuse may be one way to get started. In…

When Bakul Patel started as a policy advisor in the US Food and Drug Administration in 2008, he could pretty much pinpoint when a product was going to land in front of the reviewers in his division. Back when medical devices were heavy on the…

In 2008, at only 17 years old, Lindsay Lagreid decided the only way she'd get her weight down was through surgery. At the time, Lagreid was 6 feet tall and 215 pounds — “overweight,” by medical standards, but not…

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity featured a story about a basic security flaw in the Web site of medical diagnostics firm True Health Group that let anyone who was logged in to the site view all other patient records. In that story I mentioned…

From flashy tech start-ups in Silicon Valley to modernized insurers in New York, everyone wants to “disrupt” health care. In practice, this is immensely more challenging than it sounds. Electronic health records (EHRs), more than a…

For decades, therapists, patient advocates and countless families have worked to elevate mental health care in the political conversation. Their cause recently received a big boost when a new law created a federal mental health “czar”…