Iowa is scrapping its Medicaid program because there has been a spike in premiums of around 20 percent and because just two insurance carriers have joined in, FierceHealthPayer's Dori Zweig reports. Enrollees are going to be moved into the traditional Medicaid expansion program or into Medicaid managed care.
Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down that state's ban on doctors prescribing abortion-inducing pills to patients via video teleconferencing, the Associated Press reports. Iowa was the first state to allow doctors to dispense abortion-inducing medications through telemedicine.
The court ruled that it placed an undue burden on a woman's right to get an abortion. The Iowa Board of Medicine enacted a rule requiring a doctor be physically present with a patient before prescribing such drugs. However, the board had allowed telemedicine for other procedures.
Last month, the Iowa Supreme Court threw out the 25-year prison sentence of a man who pled guilty to criminal transmission of HIV for failing to inform a sexual partner of his HIV-positive status, ProPublica reports. The Supreme Court, 6-1, determined that the defendant's defense lawyer provided ineffective counsel when he allowed his client to plead guilty to a charge for which there was no factual basis. Many states criminalize HIV-positive people's sexual activity without informing their partners, even if there is no evidence if the exposure was likely to result in the transmission of HIV, ProPublica reports.
The Iowa Supreme Court is considering removing the bar examination as a requirement for bar admission for graduates of the two law schools in Iowa, the Des Moines Register reports. One of the arguments in favor of the elimination of the bar exam is that graduates wouldn't have to wait months in order to start working as a lawyer. One law-school official told the Register that, by his calculation, graduates would reduce their debt level by 30 percent by avoiding the delay of their entry into their profession as well as avoiding the need to borrow the costs of studying for the bar exam.
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