The Supreme Court has declined to interfere with Delhi High Court orders in the long-running Daiichi Sankyo-Fortis dispute, allowing a forensic audit to proceed as part of efforts to trace assets linked to enforcement of a 2016 arbitral award against former Fortis promoters. The apex court did not examine the merits.
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According to the ministry, the scheme has facilitated the establishment of domestic manufacturing capabilities for a range of high-end medical devices that were earlier predominantly imported.
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MAPLEWOOD, Mo. — After Missouri voters added abortion protections to the state constitution in 2024, Kelly McCoomb decided to keep her yard sign supporting the measure in the basement of her suburban St. Louis home.
Abortion access is important to McCoomb. She wants her daughter to grow up in a state where the option is available if needed, and the sign was a keepsake from the day Missourians voted to reverse the state’s near-total ban. McCoomb also couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d need to display the sign in her yard again soon.
“I have little faith in our Missouri government,” McCoomb said, sitting on her front porch.
Sure enough, just two years later, the state’s Republican-dominated legislature is asking Missouri voters to overturn the abortion protections they recently supported. The conflicting measures even have the same title: Amendment 3. But while a “yes” vote in 2024 supported adding protections to the state constitution, a “no” vote in 2026 would keep them. McCoomb covered the “YES” on her yard sign with a “NO” made from black duct tape before placing the sign back in her yard.
Voters will weigh in on abortion in Missouri, and three other states, in the November general election. Missouri is also one of two states voting on it for the second time since 2024. Nevada will vote again, too.
The spate of referenda comes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections with its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, leaving each state to make its own abortion policy. The result has been a patchwork of state rules with varying degrees of bans or limitations, and even a series of “shield laws” in states where abortion remains legal that aim to protect providers from prosecution in states where it’s not.
“I just think there’s a constitutional crisis that’s coming,” said Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy for the anti-abortion organization Students for Life Action.
“Can you have 50 state standards on whether or not a human being is a human being? Can you have 50 state standards on whether human beings have legal protection?” Hamrick said.
Advocacy Groups Work To Clarify Ballot Measures
That patchwork of abortion protections is the reason Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom introduced the 2024 ballot measure to enshrine the state’s law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks after conception into the state constitution, said Denise Lopez, president of the coalition.
The measure received strong support two years ago, with 64% of voters in favor. Nevada law requires two majority votes to enshrine constitutional amendments, so voters will need to support the expanded protection again in November for it to be enacted.
The Nevada ballot measure wouldn’t change the state’s existing law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks after conception. But the proposal would make it more difficult to overturn abortion access, requiring voter approval of any new ban in two elections.
Lopez said Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom has been campaigning to ensure voters are still mobilized.
“Folks care about it,” she said. “They’re seeing what’s happening at the national level, and they want to make sure that whatever’s happening in our neighboring states, like Idaho and Utah, doesn’t happen here in Nevada.”
Idaho, where a ballot measure establishing abortion rights recently qualified to go before voters in November, has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. Voters will decide whether state statute should allow abortion through fetal viability, the point when a fetus can survive after birth, which is generally considered to be around 24 weeks.
In Utah, abortion is allowed up to 18 weeks while legal challenges to the state’s ban continue.
In Virginia, where abortion is already allowed through two trimesters of pregnancy, until 28 weeks, voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to codify those rights.
Missouri is the only state voting this year on removing abortion protections already on the books. The measure would repeal the 2024 amendment that guaranteed abortion access through fetal viability in the state and replace it with a ban on abortions with exceptions for medical emergencies, fetal anomalies, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions for rape and incest would have to occur before 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Missouri was the first state to ban abortion after the Dobbs decision in 2022. At that time, abortions had already mostly ceased in the state after three decades of state regulations targeting the practice, including a 72-hour waiting period, minimum dimensions for procedure rooms and hallways in clinics that provide abortions, and a mandate that the clinicians have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, among others. Only 150 abortions were performed in Missouri in 2021, down from 5,772 in 2011, state records show.
Even though Missouri voters backed the abortion amendment in 2024, it took nearly two years for medication abortions to resume in the state.
A Second Vote Causes Confusion
Margot Riphagen-Dunn, CEO of St. Louis-based Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, said the whiplash of a second statewide vote on abortion mirrors the confusion that patients have experienced about whether abortion is available in the state.
“Chaos is kind of the point here,” Riphagen-Dunn said, “and it is absolutely a tactic that gets in the way of being able to provide.”
The confusion has presented problems for abortion opponents in the state as well.
“I think it’s unfortunate,” said Reagan Barklage, who is a vice president of Students for Life of America and the treasurer of the Missouri Students for Life Ballot Committee. “People need to be very clear on what they’re voting for.”
Barklage said she has had to correct anti-abortion voters while out canvassing to remind them that they are voting “yes” on Amendment 3 this year even though they voted “no” on Amendment 3 last time.
“It is crazy that it ended up being even the same number. I do not think that was intentional, but we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got,” Barklage said, adding, “I hope the pro-choicers kept their yard signs from last time.”
In Maplewood, Missouri, McCoomb said she was happy that her repurposed sign supporting abortion access had been noticed.
“I hope lots of people see and remember to revote,” McCoomb said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
India reiterated its commitment to making quality healthcare accessible and affordable for all, while sharing its experience in strengthening public health systems and addressing priority health challenges, a health ministry statement said.
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In an update shared on social media, FSSAI said it found various food safety and regulatory non-compliances, including misbranding or misleading claims sale and display of prohibited or poisonous food articles through these platforms.
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OAK HILL, W.Va. — Each day at New River Health in Oak Hill, Lisa Emery finds disheartening signs of what she describes as a slow-motion repeat of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
The disaster she’s reminded of started in 1930, when construction began on a 3-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia. Over the course of 18 months, some 3,000 miners, most of them Black, spent long hours drilling through sandstone, engulfed in a cloud of its toxic byproduct, silica dust. More than 750 men died from that exposure.
The risk still exists, and advocates for workers say the government should do more to rein it in.
In April of last year, the Trump administration paused the enforcement of a rule designed to help protect coal miners from an aggressive form of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, commonly known as black lung disease, the primary cause of which is exposure to silica dust.
(Other occupations at high risk of exposure to silica dust include construction, countertop fabrication, and oil and gas work. The new rule would reduce the permissible limit of exposure in coal mining to the existing level in other industries.)
This April, the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced an indefinite delay in enforcement of the rule.
Gary Hairston sits on New River Health’s board. For decades, Hairston, a retired coal miner and president of the national Black Lung Association, has been an advocate for miners struggling with the debilitating effects of black lung, including extreme fatigue, an incessant cough, and a sensation of drowning. He regularly lobbies legislators for improved working conditions and black lung benefits. His entreaties, he said, seem to fall on deaf ears. He rarely gets an audience with the legislators themselves.
“I’d just like them to look me in the face,” Hairston said.
Gary Hairston, president of the Black Lung Association, says his lobbying of legislators for improved working conditions and black lung benefits for coal miners seems to fall on deaf ears. (Taylor Sisk for KFF Health News)
Evidence from just-released research underscores the urgency of his appeals for a safer work environment.
In August, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released a report on the results of testing conducted over the past five years on miners in central Appalachia — eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and West Virginia — with 25 or more years underground. Almost 1 in 3 tested positive for black lung disease, the highest rate in nearly 50 years.
The rate in 2018, the last time the agency reported results, was 1 in 5. The lowest reported rate, in 1999, was less than 1 in 10.
“We knew this would happen,” said Sam Petsonk, a West Virginia attorney who has represented thousands of miners in the region. “It’s surprising to me that they only found one in three.”
Silica Dangers
Exposure to silica has increased as more-accessible coal seams are depleted, requiring mining operations to probe deeper, often through sandstone. The stone breaks into sharp particles that are 100 times smaller than a grain of sand and, according to National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health research, are some 20 times more toxic than coal dust. Trapped in lung tissue, those particles can cause a debilitating, sometimes fatal condition.
Kenny Thompson, a retired West Virginia miner who now lives in Richmond, Kentucky, was employed in the mines for 22 years. He would sometimes cut into four feet of sandstone to reach a coal seam.
“You ate a lot of dust,” Thompson recalled. It induced nausea. It took a toll.
In October 2025, he had his left lung removed. Post-surgery, he was in a coma for three months; he flatlined three times, he said. “They were about to really give up on me.”
He had to relearn to walk and to talk. Trekking to the mailbox still leaves him winded, lightheaded, and blurry-eyed.
The new silica rule would cut the allowable level of silica dust in half, thereby meeting the standard of other industries. Miner advocates laud the fact that it would require operators to deploy engineering controls, such as improved ventilation systems and water sprays.
But the National Mining Association and other industry trade groups argue that reaching and maintaining compliance would also require supplementing those controls with workforce measures, such as requiring personal protection equipment and rotating miners from particularly dusty areas. Many miners, and their advocates, say such measures are impractical — because respirators can impede breathing, can limit vision, and often malfunction, and because smaller mines don’t have enough workers to support rotating schedules.
In April 2025, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the rule to give operators more time to comply.
In May of this year, the Labor Department sent the White House Office of Management and Budget a request to gather information on the proposed rule. And in July, the department’s regulatory agenda included a new notice of proposed rulemaking, indicating its intent to amend the rule.
The department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration “recognizes it has a clear duty under the law to impose stricter silica standards,” said Petsonk, the attorney representing coal miners. “They’re failing to provide that measure of protection to American coal miners, so they’re going through bureaucratic motions to make it seem like they’re doing something, when, in fact, they’re just perpetuating an illegal and lethal status quo.”
The Labor Department declined to comment on ongoing rulemaking or litigation.
“We knew this would happen,” West Virginia attorney Sam Petsonk says of a recently released report showing that the black lung rate for coal miners in central Appalachia is at a nearly 50-year high. (Taylor Sisk for KFF Health News)
‘It’s On the Books’
The rule is, in fact, in effect, said Chris Williamson, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration in the Biden administration — it’s just not being enforced. He and his team filed a legal brief in the closing days of the administration defending the rule.
“It’s on the books,” Williamson said, adding that the Mine Safety and Health Act prohibits weakening existing protections for miners. “I’m just genuinely curious,” he said. “I want to know how they can address the issues that the industry’s raised without weakening protections for miners.”
Meanwhile, younger miners, with a decade or less in the mines, are being diagnosed with advanced stages of black lung. New River Health’s Emery said the youngest person her clinic had diagnosed with complicated black lung was 30. He’d worked underground for 10 years.
This is no longer just your “papaw’s disease,” she said. “It’s your husband’s disease. It’s your son’s disease.” (More than 90% of coal miners are men.)
With families to support, Emery said, “what do these guys do when they’re disabled in their 30s?”
Lisa Emery is director of the New River Health Breathing Center in West Virginia and chair of the National Coalition of Black Lung and Respiratory Disease Clinics. She says the youngest person her clinic has diagnosed with complicated black lung was 30. (Taylor Sisk for KFF Health News)
She told of a man who sat in her office with his wife, describing his symptoms. As he spoke, he began to cry. His wife was taken aback. “‘I didn’t know it was that bad,’” Emery recalled her saying. “And he said: ‘That’s why I haven’t fixed the deck. I haven’t fixed the deck because I can’t breathe, and I’m just so tired.’”
Thompson can relate. “For 22 years, you’re used to getting up, putting your boots on every day, and going to work,” he said. “I’d been in great health shape and 160 pounds. And here I am now, I don’t work at all and I’m 115 pounds.”
Still, he recognizes what the job afforded.
“You know, it put my girls through college,” he said. “And to me, as a dad, that was the best reward that I can give them, to move forward in life, to be successful at what they chose to be and not work like a dog like I had to.”
President Donald Trump said in an April 2025 executive order: “Our Nation’s beautiful clean coal resources will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”
Six months later, the Energy Department announced a $625 million investment to “expand and reinvigorate America’s coal industry.”
Should the administration announce a weaker rule, it would be “an unconscionable crime against American coal miners,” Petsonk said. “But I fear that’s going to happen.”
“It seems like coal miners, we’re just a number,” he said. “Just a number.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
The high court's Lucknow bench in its order stated that the role of the NMC medical assessment board is limited to determining whether a candidate is capable of pursuing and completing the MBBS course with reasonable accommodation and assistive devices, and does not extend to redetermining the percentage of disability certified by the competent authority.
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In a post on X marking the occasion, Modi said Ayushman Bharat was rolled out eight years ago with the idea that every Indian should have access to quality and affordable healthcare.
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Former FSSAI chief Pawan Kumar Agarwal has urged the Supreme Court to consider a phased rollout of front-of-pack food warnings, warning that the proposed nutrient thresholds could place labels on more than 94% of packaged foods and dilute their impact. His foundation suggested interim thresholds followed by stricter limits over three to five years, with mandatory labelling proposed from July 1, 2027.
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BOISE, Idaho — Joshua and Ashley Durham run a family medicine practice, and for the first time in their lives, they have no health insurance.
When the Durhams began their practice at the end of 2023 — he as a primary care physician and she as a pharmacist who handles the billing — the couple bought coverage for themselves and their two kids on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. But they said their monthly premiums for a similar health plan for this year rose several hundred dollars to nearly $1,600.
They decided to pay out-of-pocket for their medical expenses instead, leaning on $50,000 they had set aside in a health savings account over several years.
“It’s nerve-racking,” said Joshua Durham, 47. “It just takes, you know, one little accident, and then you got a big fat bill.”
The healthcare industry traditionally has more of its workforce on medical insurance than many other fields. Nationwide, 7% of all healthcare workers were uninsured in 2024, compared with 11% of all adults under 65, according to a KFF analysis of the most recent American Community Survey data. And doctors were especially unlikely to forgo health insurance, with just 2% uninsured.
The Republican-led Congress also opted last year not to renew Affordable Care Act marketplace credits enacted during the covid pandemic. While subsidies remain in place for people with low incomes, the pandemic-era credits helped reduce many consumers’ premium payments, especially those working in small businesses such as independent medical practices. Nearly half of marketplace enrollees worked for small businesses or were self-employed in 2024; some of the most common occupations included chiropractic care and dentistry.
Jack Dillon, executive director of the Association for Independent Medicine, which represents 4,000 physician-led practices, said premium increases have become untenable for small businesses, whether employers seek coverage through the marketplace or directly from insurers.
“The cost has become so astronomical,” Dillon said. “You’re looking at it and saying, ‘What’s the value?’”
As health insurance continues to become less affordable, Dillon said, more healthcare employers may seek alternatives to their standard coverage, such as providing higher hourly wages or providing only minimal plans.
The number of people without insurance in the U.S. is expected to increase by roughly 15 million over 10 years because of the expiration of the expanded ACA subsidies and $1.1 trillion in estimated cuts resulting from President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Healthier people are the most likely to opt out of insurance. That leaves insurance covering a smaller pool of people who tend to be sicker and need more expensive care. So insurers raise prices to cover the remaining enrollees, which fuels even higher premium costs.
‘Healthcare Is a Business’
Samantha LeGault, a nurse practitioner at a health clinic in Boise, said her employer-offered plan’s premium payment rose from $700 to $1,500 a month this year to insure herself, her husband, and four of their kids. LeGault has Crohn’s disease and two of their daughters also have medical conditions, so she said her family has no choice but to continue to pay for that health coverage.
But she decided to skip dental insurance to save money, and she prioritizes dental visits for her children over herself.
She had already struggled to set aside retirement savings and had switched her children from a private school they liked to public school to cut down on costs. Then the new health insurance costs tightened her budget even more. She estimated that about one-fifth of her income now goes toward her monthly premium payments.
“I know how the clinics work, that I am an expensive patient,” LeGault said. “At the end of the day, healthcare is a business in the United States.”
Samantha LeGault, a nurse practitioner for a health clinic in Boise, says her medical insurance premium costs rose from $700 to $1,500 a month this year to cover her, her husband, and four of their kids. She has Crohn’s disease, and two of her daughters also have medical conditions. She continues to pay for health coverage but opted to skip dental insurance to reduce their monthly expenses. (Hayat Norimine/KFF Health News)
The Durhams have three other employees in their practice. Two of them receive health insurance through their spouses, Ashley Durham said. The Durhams said they pay $420 monthly toward their physician assistant’s premiums.
As a primary care physician, Joshua Durham said he doesn’t need regular doctor visits, because he can diagnose and treat himself — and, if needed, the rest of his family, though he acknowledged that’s frowned upon. The American Medical Association’s code of ethics generally discourages doctors from treating themselves or relatives but makes exceptions for emergency situations or short-term, minor problems. Ashley Durham said she’s filled prescriptions for her family.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor emeritus at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, said that as more people are “turning toward relatives because they can’t access or easily see a regular doctor,” it may make sense to revisit that aspect of the code of ethics.
Out-of-Pocket Expenses
Healthcare workers with less advanced medical certifications than the Durhams often don’t have the option of treating themselves or family members — or don’t have savings to fall back on for healthcare expenses. And many healthcare professionals, such as Jill Kordick, a 64-year-old retired healthcare executive in Norwalk, Iowa, aren’t willing to go without the safety net of insurance.
In her work, Kordick saw hospitalizations become financially devastating for patients, so she said she would never opt out of health insurance — even for just the 16 months before she’d become eligible for Medicare at age 65.
Last year, she qualified for the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits, allowing her to pay $75 a month for health coverage. Her premiums rose to $800 a month this year when those subsidies expired.
Because she has a $10,000 deductible, she put off going to the doctor for weeks when she had a sinus infection this year, until it ultimately evolved into an ear infection. She said she regularly rethinks, and sometimes returns, nonessential groceries in her shopping cart. And she keeps her house’s thermostat at 80 degrees in the summer to cut down on air conditioning costs.
Kordick said healthcare is a universal struggle in this country, regardless of how familiar patients are with the industry. “It’s disheartening that it’s as broken and fragmented as it is,” she said.
The Durhams have seen the impact of unaffordable healthcare on their patients. They said they try to lend some leeway to patients when they can — a luxury they have, operating their own practice. In one case, Ashley Durham said, she wrote off $1,160 in bills for a single father whose son didn’t have health insurance rather than send their bills to a collection agency.
“It’s hard, because as a human I want to help them out,” she said. “At the same time, we need revenue for our office.”
Joshua Durham is more nervous about going uninsured than his wife. As a child, he witnessed his parents struggling to pay medical bills for their family of nine in south-central Idaho. Durham recalled that his dad, who was a carpenter, helped build a surgeon’s house to pay for an operation.
Today, Durham also sometimes exchanges work for care. He said he gets free eye exams from an uninsured optometrist and offers him free primary care.
He worries about a worst-case scenario: a car crash, a sports injury, a serious diagnosis.
“Do I have pancreatic cancer today?” Durham said wryly.
So far, the couple has paid around $9,000 total for expenses out of their health savings account this year, including physical therapy to help with the thoracic outlet syndrome that affects Durham’s neck and shoulder, mental health appointments, and contact lenses. The expenses were higher than the Durhams anticipated. But it was still less than what their monthly premiums would have cost them.
Their decision has paid off, Joshua Durham said. At least for now.
The Durhams used the Affordable Care Act marketplace for health insurance for their family of four last year. This year, they chose to pay out-of-pocket for care instead when the cost of their premium payments jumped. (Hayat Norimine/KFF Health News)
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KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
