KFF Health News: California’s far northern region is a collection of sparsely populated counties stretching from just north of Sacramento all the way up to Oregon and from the Pacific coast to the Nevada border. The shortages are so pervasive that support for one of the costliest solutions — a proposed $200 million health care training campus — transcends partisanship.

When was the last time you felt awe? You may call it something else, but you know the sensation — the wide-eyed, hushed-voice, goosebumps-down-the-back feeling that comes with grand, novel experiences.

Doctors call it the “obstetrician’s nightmare”: a childbirth emergency where the baby’s head emerges, but the shoulders get stuck behind the mother’s pubic bone. The founding duo at Everest Medical Solutions has designed a device to make delivery safer and less traumatic when this complication arises. 

KFF Health News: California lawmakers are poised to delay the state’s much-ballyhooed new law mandating in vitro fertilization insurance coverage for millions, set to take effect July 1. Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked lawmakers to push the implementation date to January 2026, leaving patients, insurers, and employers in limbo.

CalMatters: I’m one of 60 people who clean the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. Our jobs, which we got through PRIDE Industries, have given us purpose, dignity and steady paychecks that help us pay rent, buy groceries and care for our loved ones. Now all of that is a risk. 

CalMatters: Glenn Medical Center, a 25-bed hospital in the rural agricultural town of Willows, north of Sacramento, is about to lose its “critical access” title. Without it, administrators say the hospital couldn’t afford to stay open because it would lose its increased Medicare reimbursements and regulatory flexibilities.

Autism is neither a disease nor a sickness. But for the increasing population of those diagnosed — one in 31 children is the current count in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — it’s quite real. What might surprise you is that when it comes to learning about and managing autism, the Capital Region is very much in the forefront.