Michigan Disability Resistance

The auto-injectors are designed to be used during life-threatening allergic reactions to provide a quick shot of epinephrine. If they fail to fire, people experiencing a reaction can die or suffer serious illnesses. According to the FDA, that’s exactly what happened for hundreds of customers.

In the letter, the agency wrote:

In fact, your own data show that you received hundreds of complaints that your EpiPen products failed to operate during life-threatening emergencies, including some situations in which patients subsequently died.

The agency goes on to lambast Meridian Medical for failing to investigate problems with the devices, recall bad batches, and follow-up on problems found. For instance, a customer made a complaint in April 2016 that an EpiPen failed. When Meridian disassembled the device, it found a deformed component that led to the problem—the exact same defect it had found in February when another unit failed.

The FDA wrote:

Momentum is finally shifting against the legalization and expansion of assisted suicide. Twenty-three states have rejected bills attempting to legalize assisted suicide since the beginning of 2017, and these bills are now considered dead for the remainder of the year.

The states that defeated these bills to legalize or expand assisted suicide run the gamut politicalls, from New York and Rhode Island to Utah and Indiana. Such bills were defeated by votes in the legislature, died from inaction, stalled in committee or were completely withdrawn. A circuit court in Hawaii dismissed a lawsuit which asked the court to resolve that the criminal laws in the state should not apply to assisted suicide.

His belly swollen, his energy flagging, 45-year-old Jorge Perez Remache waits in his Queens apartment for the word that his turn has come to receive a life-saving liver transplant. Though he has suffered from cirrhosis for 10 years, the chance of that happening is virtually zero.

A thousand miles south in tiny Morven, Ga., Katryna Grisson— equally sick, just three years older and, like Perez Remache, on Medicaid — awaits the same miracle. Her odds, however, are substantially better, because the ratio of available livers to people who need them is more favorable in the southeast.

“Basically, it’s not fair that my dad has to wait until he gets sicker and sicker,” said Alex Perez, Perez Remache’s 22-year-old son. “What’s the point of getting [a liver] when you’re sicker? Before they find a liver, he’s dead already.”

Under a recently proposed plan, that could change. The people who control transplants in the United States are preparing to consider a way to address the decades-old geographic disparity in liver allocation. The plan would alter how the precious organs are distributed and could shift hundreds of livers across state and regional borders.

Since 2009, developers have been able to use the ProPublica Congress API (first developed by The New York Times) to retrieve data about the thousands of bills introduced during every two-year session in the House of Representatives. Until now though, you had to download each piece of information separately, and you needed to know how to write API calls.

For example, if you wanted to discover who sponsored a bill and also how members of Congress voted on it, you would need to download those pieces of data individually, and know how to call for them in the software code.

That's no longer the case. Wednesday, ProPublica announced that you can now download all the information about all of the bills in each legislative session using its new bulk bill data set. You can get all of the data for free in the ProPublica data store. There's also a data dictionary that can be used to decipher the bills here, and you can download them in either JSON or XML formats.

The Trump administration is drastically cutting the money being spent on encouraging people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Thursday.

In the last Open Enrollment period, CMS spent $100 million on education and outreach activities, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson; that amount was double the outreach budget for 2015 - $51.2 million – when enrollment was higher.

The agency is also changing the way it awards funds to the Navigator organizations that help people sign up for coverage. Money for the Navigators -- which comes from fees paid by insurers -- amounted to $62.5 million last year; the administration expects to spend $36.8 million this year, the spokesperson said in an email.