Week of March 31–April 4, 2025

General Mental Health

• Sleep specialists have long warned of the hazards of bringing smartphones into the bedroom. Now, research has confirmed just how damaging that habit can be. The new study, which surveyed more than 45,000 university students in Norway, found that late-night screen was associated with a significant reduction in sleep quality and duration. Moreover, spending just one hour on a screen after going to bed was linked to a 59% increase in the risk of insomnia. Read more here.

The Opioid Crisis

• In recent years, the rate of overdose deaths from opioids — originally dubbed “hillbilly heroin” because of their almost exclusive misuse by White people — has grown significantly among Black people. This is largely due to the introduction of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times as powerful as morphine, which is often mixed into heroin and cocaine supplies and can be consumed unknowingly. In North Carolina, Black people died from an overdose at the rate of 38.5 per 100,000 residents in 2021, according to North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services data. Read more here.

Medicaid

• Under an emerging Republican plan to require some Medicaid recipients to work, between 4.6 million and 5.2 million adults ages 19 to 55 could lose their health care coverage, according to a new analysis. The study, conducted by Urban Institute researchers with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, calculated that up to 39% of the 13.3 million adults in that age group who became eligible for Medicaid when their states expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act would lose coverage if Congress required states to impose work rules. Read more here.

Federal and State Policy

• A top adviser to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended deep job cuts at federal agencies and attacked the medical establishment, which he said is controlled by industry lobbyists in a conspiracy to keep Americans sick. Calley Means, a fixture in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and co-founder of TrueMed, said at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit that the federal health department has been an “utter failure,” pointing to rising rates of chronic disease, lower life expectancy, and a culture that is too quick to medicate patients for life without addressing the underlying causes of disease. Read more here.
• More than 350,000 noncitizen healthcare workers in the U.S. may be at risk of deportation as part of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, researchers estimated. Based on the Current Population Survey (CPS) from March 2024, there were over 20 million individuals making up the workforce across formal and informal healthcare settings nationwide, of whom an estimated 16.7 million were U.S.-born citizens, 2.3 million naturalized citizens, nearly 700,000 documented noncitizens, and over 366,500 undocumented immigrants. Read more here.