Health

Newsweek - As summer heats up, tiny ticks are busy spreading diseases that most Americans have never even heard of, with doctors calling one of them almost akin to Lyme disease in public health risk.

"It is true that both mosquito and tick-borne illness reports, more inclusively called 'vector-borne' illnesses, are increasing, in part possibly due to regional climate changes and expanding insect and tick habitats," Dr. Natasha Wyndham Hanners, infectious disease specialist at Children’s Health and Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, told Newsweek. "It is also true that ease of worldwide travel along with more advanced diagnostic techniques are revealing emergence of previously unknown organisms or organisms new to an area."

The Hill -  A one-year ban on abortion providers being able to bill Medicaid for non-abortion services, which was included in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed last year, expired on July 5.

Anti-abortion activists have for months been calling for such a provision to be included in another bill that could go through the same special budget reconciliation process that bypasses the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, allowing Republicans to push partisan legislation through both chambers.

Republicans’ second shot at a reconciliation bill, however, was a “skinny” package aimed at restoring funding for immigration enforcement and Border Patrol. And this week, House Republicans released a $95 billion reconciliation 3.0 framework teeing up money for defense, farm aid, and grants to encourage voting restrictions — omitting any measures to offset that new spending, or any other special provisions, including the measure to restrict Medicaid funds from going to abortion providers.