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This brief examines the main points raised in an HHS report reviewing evidence on gender affirming care concerning psychotherapy. It focuses on recommendations around “exploratory therapy,” which could include gender conversion practices, as well as the current legal and policy environment across the country regarding this practice.
This Policy Watch reviews the key provisions of President Trump's Executive Order that aim to restrict youth access to gender affirming care and examines state and legal responses.
This brief provides background on gender affirming care and state bans, explains the legal challenge to the Tennessee law, and explores the potential Supreme Court ruling and impact on access across the country.
On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a longstanding legal precedent that required federal courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretation when statutes are ambiguous. The decision will shift many policy decisions from federal agencies to federal judges, with implications for health policy that will reverberate for years to come. This issue brief examines the decision and assesses what’s ahead.
This policy watch outlines SCOTUS' June 27, 2024, decision dismissing the case, Moyle v. United States, where the Court had been asked to determine if a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act preempted Idaho's abortion ban. The decision returns the case to the lower courts and reinstates a court order blocking enforcement of the Idaho ban where it prohibits abortion care for pregnant people having medical emergencies.
This issue brief details some of the implications of the Supreme Court's June 13, 2024, ruling in the case Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA.
A long-awaited new rule recently finalized by the Biden Administration gives LGBTQ+ people more protections against discrimination when seeking health care and coverage from a range of programs and organizations, including Medicaid, Medicare, Health Insurance Marketplaces, many health insurance plans, and most hospitals and providers.
This brief overviews the Biden Administration’s 2024 final rule implementing Section 1557 of the ACA, which is home to the law’s major nondiscrimination provisions. It provides a brief background on 1557 rulemaking and identifies key differences between this rule and the 2020 rule from the Trump Administration. It highlights two areas of growing interest impacted by the rule – nondiscrimination protections related to pregnancy and nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. Table 2 summarizes the major provisions of the new final rule with side-by-side comparison to the Obama (2016) and Trump (2020) administration rules.
This brief discusses the longstanding legal doctrine, Chevron deference, being challenged in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and includes examples of what could be at stake for health care consumers should federal courts no longer use this doctrine to address litigation related to federal health regulations. The focus here is on patient and consumer protection regulation, but overturning the Chevron deference would have implications in all areas of health care.
In advance of oral arguments about access to medication abortion before the Supreme Court on March 26, KFF examines how a Court ruling for the plaintiffs would limit access to mifepristone blocking its use in telehealth and distribution through pharmacies, including in states where abortion is legal and protected.
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