Three states codify abortion rights in their constitutions

It was a nailbiter of a night for abortion rights, and we still don’t know the outcomes of some of the major ballot initiatives addressing the issue. Voters in Vermont overwhelmingly established a constitutional right to an abortion, and a similar measure also won in California. Voters in battleground Michigan also enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, but anti-abortion measures in Kentucky and Montana were too early to call.

Results so far suggest Kentucky voters might reject a measure that would have explicitly denied that abortion is a constitutional right. For now, read STAT’s Sarah Owermohle on the state of play so far.

Congress remains in limbo

Democrats outperformed expectations last night, and neither control of the House of Representatives nor the Senate has been called as of this morning, my colleague Rachel Cohrs reports. The results are remarkable for Democrats, as the party with control of the White House usually fares poorly in midterm elections, but it may not be enough to retain control of the chamber. Even with narrow control, Republicans would still gain control of key committees, as well as subpoena power to challenge the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

Control of the Senate is also up in the air as of this morning. A united House and Senate will be able to pass legislation far more easily, while a split Congress would stunt Democrats’ legislative ambitions and force Republicans to focus on oversight and bipartisan bargaining.

California bans flavored vapes and menthol cigarettes

Voters in the Golden State overwhelmingly voted to ban flavored tobacco products and menthol cigarettes. It’s by far the largest state to enact such a ban, following smaller states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and it was heralded as a major win by tobacco control advocates, reports STAT’s commercial determinants of health reporter, Nicholas Florko.

“Tonight, once again, Californians voted in support of protecting kids and standing up to Big Tobacco,” said Michael Seilback, the national assistant vice president of state public policy at the American Lung Association. “This is a game changer.” Read more.

Closer look: Brain implant to translate paralyzed patient's thoughts into speech makes progress

(adobe)

The field of brain-computer interfaces just notched another win, with a new report in Nature Communications on further progress for a man paralyzed 15 years ago and left able to speak only in grunts and moans. Last year scientists showed that a device implanted in his brain listened in to the electrical impulses firing across his motor cortex as he tried to speak, then transmitted those signals to a computer, whose language-prediction algorithms decoded them into words and sentences. So he types words on a screen by attempting to speak them.

Now the system recognizes individual letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. — and can decode more than 1,100 words from the electrical activity inside his brain as he silently tries saying the letters. One day late last summer, he said to the researchers, “You all stay safe from the virus.” STAT’s Megan Molteni has more.

South Dakota poised to expand Medicaid

South Dakota looks like it will now expand Medicaid, with 56% of voters backing Amendment D to provide health coverage to some 40,000 additional people. The approval also extends expansion's winning streak at the ballot box, following successful campaigns in recent years in half a dozen other states, including Idaho, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

There are still 11 states that haven't expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, but South Dakota is seen as the last one where voters might force their leaders' hands by approving it through a ballot measure, at least in the near future. Only a few of the holdout states have such ballot initiatives, and there aren't organized campaigns moving to put the issue up for a vote.

How one state’s gun law can affect its neighbors

When states pass laws intended to limit gun violence, how far do they go? Because it’s easy to transport guns across state lines, permissive laws reach beyond state borders, research has shown. A new study in JAMA Network Open looks at how restrictive laws worked over 20 pre-pandemic years. Using more than 662,000 deaths from firearms as their grim outcome of interest, the researchers found that two types of laws appeared to protect people not just in that state but in neighboring ones:

Requiring buyers to obtain a permit before buying a gun was linked to fewer firearm-related deaths and homicides.
Prohibiting firearm possession for people who have committed a violent misdemeanor was associated with lower firearm-related suicide rates.

“These findings suggest that synergic legislative action to implement firearm laws in proximate states may help prevent firearm-related deaths,” the authors write.

On this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," First Opinion editor Patrick Skerrett talks with pediatrician Nathan Chomilo about Covid as an inverse equity story. Listen here.

What we're reading

The global economics behind America's fentanyl problem, Quartz
Antidepressants don’t work the way many people think, New York Times
Sleepy at work? You might have ‘social jet lag,’ Wall Street Journal
Andreessen Horowitz partners with rural health system to give its companies a go-to pilot site, STAT
What happens when one twin exercises and the other doesn’t, Outside
Talkspace names a new CEO as its stock price continues to struggle, STAT