Editorial pages focus on these public health issues and others.
Stat: National Support For ‘Red-Flag’ Gun Laws Could Prevent Many Suicides
Red-flag gun laws, which allow for the temporary removal of guns from individuals at high risk of harming themselves or others, have broad public backing but haven’t yet gained national traction. That could change now that bipartisan support is mounting in Congress for the Extreme Risk Protection Order and Violence Prevention Act. Introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and colleagues earlier this year, the legislation would not create a federal red-flag law but would instead give states incentives to adopt their own by providing grants for implementation. If approved, the bill will surely prevent deaths — including those from suicide — though its future is far from certain. (Brian Barnett, 9/20)
The Hill: Contraception Leads To Better Public And Individual Health
Overwhelming evidence from across the globe has shown that access to comprehensive reproductive health information and services, including the full range of contraceptive methods, leads to both public and individual health and wellbeing. But for the past several years, the Trump administration has sought to restrict access to high-quality care at every turn, most recently through a domestic “gag rule” that threatens to cut 4 million people off from Title X’s contraception and other preventive health care entirely, creating an urgent public health crisis. (Kate Grindlay Kelly, 9/19)
Stat: Artificial Intelligence Isn’t The Right Tool For Finding A Therapist
Companies have learned the hard way that their artificial intelligence tools have unforeseen outputs, like Amazon’s (AMZN) favoring men’s resumes over women’s or Uber’s disabling the user accounts of transgender drivers. When not astutely overseen by human intelligence, deploying AI can often bend into an unseemly rainbow of discriminatory qualities like ageism, sexism, and racism. That’s because biases unnoticed in the input data can become amplified in the outputs.Another underappreciated hazard is the potential for AI to cater to our established preferences. You can see that in apps that manage everything from sources of journalism to new music and prospective romance. Once an algorithm gets a sense of what you like, it delivers the tried and true, making the world around you more homogeneous than it might otherwise be without embedded artificial intelligence. Having your preferences catered to can sometimes be great. But it can also be debilitating in insidious ways, like in the search to find the “right” therapist. (Scott Breitinger, 9/20)
The Wall Street Journal: How Chicago Tackled The Opioid Crisis
The campaign against America’s opioid epidemic earned a victory last month when an Oklahoma judge held Johnson & Johnson responsible for its role in oversupplying addictive drugs. Yet the opioid problem is far larger than one drug company, or even the entire industry. Preventing abuse of addictive drugs requires improvements in countless nooks and crannies of public policy. (Rahm Emanuel, 9/19)
The Hill: Millions Of Us Are Living In Poverty — We Need Investments To Raise The Standard Of Living
New U.S. Census data shows a slight decrease in official poverty in 2018, but it also hides a darker reality.The latest Census figures show this official poverty rate inching downward from 12.3 percent in 2017 to 11.8 percent last year. That means about 38.1 million Americans are below the official poverty line. (Karen Dolan, 9/19)
The New York Times: Trump Declares War On California
I’m on a number of right-wing mailing lists, and I try to at least skim what they’re going on about in any given week; this often gives me advance warning about the next wave of manufactured outrage. Lately I’ve been seeing dire warnings that if Democrats win next year they’ll try to turn America into (cue scary background music) California, which the writers portray as a socialist hellhole. (Paul Krugman, 9/19)
Los Angeles Times: Can Trump Legally Revoke California’s Clean Air Waiver? Short Answer: Probably Not.
President Trump’s latest attempt to stick his thumb in California’s eye — the revocation of the state’s treasured authority to set its own auto emissions rules — rests on very shaky legal ground, experts say. At the very least, the move to revoke the state’s Clean Air Act waiver will lead to an intense legal battle that could delay the revocation past the 2020 election, the outcome of which could make his maneuver moot. (Michael Hiltzik, 9/19)
The Washington Post: The Importance Of Social Media When It Comes To LGBTQ Kids Feeling Seen
I came into my transness late in life, coming out as non-binary and switching my pronouns from she/her to they/them when I was 39. I am waiting for gender-affirming top surgery to move me closer to my most authentic self. But as a transgender person, I find it hard to look in the mirror. (Amber Leventry, 9/19)
This is part of the KHN Morning Briefing, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations. Sign up for an email subscription.