Focus

Shaved Costs, High Risk, Maximum Profits: Regulators Worry About Florida’s Butt Lift Boom

MIAMI — In hindsight, Nikki Ruston said, she should have recognized the red flags. The office in Miami where she scheduled what’s known as a Brazilian butt lift had closed and transferred her records to a different facility, she said. The price she was quoted — and paid upfront — increased the day of the procedure, and she said she did not meet her surgeon until she was about to be placed under...

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Forget Junk Food Restrictions. It’s Time to Scrap Food Stamps Altogether

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—more commonly known as food stamps—has seen sharply rising costs in recent years. The costs have been slowly ballooning ever since the program’s inception in 1961, but due to a variety of policies and economic factors that arose during the pandemic, SNAP spending is rapidly escalating. For context, SNAP expenditures in fiscal year 2000 totaled...

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Lawmakers Pledge to Fight for Comprehensive Action on Stillbirths

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. A growing number of lawmakers across the country are calling for action following a ProPublica investigation that revealed the failures of federal agencies and health care providers to reduce the country’s stillbirth rate. More than 20,000...

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NFL Has Been Slow to Embrace Mental Health Support for Players

When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed on the field in the middle of the “Monday Night Football” game in Cincinnati on Jan. 2, Carrie Hastings, half a continent away, understood what she needed to do — and right away. “I had a few guys that I sort of immediately knew I should check in on,” said Hastings, the Los Angeles Rams’ sports psychologist and mental...

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The U.S. Attorney’s Office Middle District of Florida Nets $168M in Battling Fraud in FY 2022

The U.S. Attorney’s Office Middle District of Florida collected $168,330,189 related to criminal and civil matters in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2022. Of that, $103,089,821 represents total collections in criminal and civil actions. The office further breaks it down stating that $43,048,067 was recovered in locally handled cases — $17,769,638 in criminal and $25,278,429.11 in civil cases....

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What’s the fittest fitness for the oldest old?

Like many in her age range, Sylvia McGregor, a 97-year-old in Sydney, Australia, deals with her share of maladies — in her case, arthritis, osteoporosis, hearing loss, macular degeneration, lung disease, hypothyroidism, chronic kidney disease, heart disease and two total knee replacements. But  unlike most nonagenarians, she does intensive strength training twice a week. She credits the...

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