Government

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is awarding $20 million in American Rescue Plan (ARP) grant funding to State-based Marketplaces (SBMs) to increase consumer access to affordable, comprehensive health insurance coverage. The grants will be used by 21 SBMs to modernize IT systems and/or conduct targeted consumer outreach activities to help make health care coverage enrollment smoother. As a result, consumers will have access to increased financial assistance and eligibility determinations will be made faster.

The Americans trying to evacuate hundreds of Afghans and American citizens — including one Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator and says he is anticipating his beheading by the Taliban — pleaded for action from the Biden administration to get the would-be evacuees aboard charter flights that are standing by to fly them from Afghanistan.

This summer’s coronavirus resurgence has been labeled a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” by government officials from President Joe Biden on down.

A federal bankruptcy judge gave conditional approval Wednesday to a sweeping settlement that will remove the Sackler family from ownership of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and devote potentially $10 billion to fighting the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades.

California's San Luis Obispo County Jail violated the constitutional rights of incarcerated people by failing to provide adequate medical and mental health care and subjecting some inmates to excessive uses of force, according to a federal investigation.