Hospital units dedicated to treating the nation’s sickest kids are disappearing nationwide. In the past year alone, hospitals have closed pediatric intensive care units for critically ill kids in Montana, Oregon, and Missouri. Overnight hospital wings for kids have also shuttered in Illinois and California. Depending on the hospital, pediatric units — which are separate from neonatal…
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This article was originally published by Truthout on Oct. 21, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an emergency petition from the Trump administration, which sought a stay on a lower court’s injunction on a policy that would have denied gender-affirming care to federally incarcerated transgender people.
That policy was implemented by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 that denied the existence of transgender people. The order also directed federal agencies to take steps that would be consistent with that view, and included specific instructions for the BOP.
“The Attorney General shall ensure that the Bureau of Prisons revises its policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order, and shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex,” the order reads.
After the BOP conformed to the order, a group of incarcerated trans people who had been receiving gender-affirming care sued the administration. The group is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which argued that their Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment were being infringed upon.
A federal judge agreed, and, in August, ordered the policy to be blocked. The Trump administration challenged that finding, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld it, prompting Solicitor General John Sauer to submit an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
The court has regularly ruled against transgender people, allowing state bans on trans athletes’
California voters will soon decide whether to tax billionaires — but even if a majority says yes, the measure could still lose to either of two billionaire-funded measures designed to cancel it out. The billionaire-backed group Building a Better California designed two countermeasures to undermine the wealth tax and create multiple ways to defeat it. Recent polling shows slim majorities…
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New federal rules likely will force three dozen states to reduce their annual Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals by a total of more than $50 billion — potentially shrinking the number of providers willing to see Medicaid patients, according to a new analysis. The analysis in the peer-reviewed Health Affairs estimates that the 17 states with the highest provider reimbursement rates…
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Vice President J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, jointly announced on Tuesday a plan by the Trump administration to cancel coverage for hundreds of thousands of individuals and families currently enrolled in insurance exchanges within the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The administration will cancel around 315,000 ACA health plans…
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A group of Democrats has introduced bicameral legislation to ban private equity from owning medical practices as increasingly widespread corporate ownership continues driving up health care costs each year. The bill was introduced Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) with the support of 12 other members of the Senate and House. The legislation was based on a law in Oregon…
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