Americans are drinking more now than when Prohibition was enacted. What’s more, it’s been rising for two decades, and it’s not clear when it will fall again. That’s the picture painted by federal health statistics, which show a rise in per-person consumption and increases in emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths tied to drinking. The stats aren’t all bad....

The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Wednesday that a woman in her 40s died from vaping-related complications in Marin County.

The Trump administration is shutting down one of the largest U.S. facilities for child migrants that had come under intense criticism from advocates and lawmakers.

After living without her mother for two months while in immigration custody last year, an eight-year-old girl from Guatemala can barely sleep at night unless her mother holds her tight. Another Guatemalan girl has recurring nightmares and often screams out for protection from people who might again separate her from her mother. The girl, 6, was taken away from her...

The number of homeless people in Marin County declined slightly since 2017, but the number of chronically homeless people fell sharply, according to the point-in-time homeless count and survey in January.

The Trump administration is giving taxpayer-funded family planning clinics more time to comply with its new rule that says they no longer can refer women for abortions. But the clinics reacted warily to the administration’s enforcement pause, and the widening rift could eventually affect basic health services for many low-income women. A notice sent Saturday night to representatives of the...

The Trump administration has told federally funded family planning clinics it is considering a delay in enforcing a controversial rule that bars them from referring women for abortions. That comes after clinics had vowed defiance. Two people attending meetings this week between the Department of Health and Human Services and clinic representatives told The Associated Press that officials said the...

The Trump administration is considering a plan to house migrant children at Fort Benning, a busy military base in Georgia, a Department of Defense spokesman told NBC News. The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for sheltering immigrant children who cross the border without their parents, is currently operating near capacity, resulting in a backlog of children...

The Trump administration is considering a plan to house migrant children at Fort Benning, a busy military base in Georgia, a Department of Defense spokesman told NBC News. The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for sheltering immigrant children who cross the border without their parents, is currently operating near capacity, resulting in a backlog of children...

An identity thief is spoofing their caller ID, and displaying information that suggests their bogus call is coming from NBC Bay Area and Telemundo 48, our sister station.

The Trump administration on Friday set up new obstacles for women seeking abortions, barring taxpayer-funded family planning clinics from making abortion referrals. The new policy is certain to be challenged in court. The final rule released Friday by the Health and Human Services Department also would prohibit federally funded family planning clinics from being housed in the same locations as...

More than 50 companies representing over $2.4 trillion in annual revenue took a stand Thursday for legal protections for transgender people following a report that the Trump administration is considering limiting the definition of gender to birth anatomy....
Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are among the companies spanning tech, consumer products and financial services that signed a statement supporting the protections....
The...

The once-heralded blood-testing startup Theranos is shutting down, according to a media report. Theranos was unable to sell itself and is now looking to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash of about $5 million in the upcoming months, according to an email The Wall Street Journal obtained that CEO David Taylor sent to shareholders. The announcement comes nearly three months...

The U.S. opposed a World Health Assembly resolution to encourage breastfeeding because it called for limits on the promotion of infant formula, not because of objections to breastfeeding, President Donald Trump tweeted Monday. Trump criticized The New York Times for reporting that U.S. officials sought to remove language that urged governments to protect, promote and support breastfeeding, along with language...

The federal government has until Tuesday to reunite migrant children under 5 with the parents they were stripped from at the southern border.

A Texas charitable organization says 32 immigrant parents separated from their children after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were freed into its care Sunday, but they don’t know where their kids are or when they might see them again despite government assurances that family reunification would be well organized. The release is believed to be the first, large one of its...

The Trump administration has selected Tornillo, Texas, for the construction of tents to house the overflow of immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents under a new “zero tolerance” policy, according to three sources familiar with the decision. NBC News, citing those sources, reported that the Department of Health and Human Services will erect a “tent...

The Trump administration has selected Tornillo, Texas, for the construction of tents to house the overflow of immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents under a new “zero tolerance” policy, according to three sources familiar with the decision. NBC News, citing those sources, reported that the Department of Health and Human Services will erect a “tent...

It costs $775 per person per night to hold migrant children separated from their parents in new “tent cities,” an official at the Department of Health and Human Services told NBC News. The urgency of bringing in security, air conditioning, medical workers and other government contractors is the reason for the high cost, which far surpasses that of routinely staffed...

The Department of Homeland Security was discussing separating migrant children from their mothers in the earliest days of the Trump administration, NBC News reported. Obtained by MSNBC, notes from a closed-door town hall meeting on Feb. 2, 2017, for Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers show the agency’s chief told officers they might have to “hold mothers longer” and “hold...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-12th District) called the policy “a heartbreaking, barbaric issue” and said it should be ended immediately.

The east county was at center stage Friday in the controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration.

A federal court in Washington told the Trump administration Friday that the government can’t interfere with the ability of pregnant immigrant teens being held in federal custody to obtain abortions. A judge issued an order Friday evening barring the government from “interfering with or obstructing” pregnant minors’ access to abortion counseling or abortions, among other things, while a lawsuit proceeds....

When the Trump administration abruptly canceled a federal teen pregnancy prevention program last year, it did so over the objections of career experts in the Department of Health and Human Services, according to internal notes and emails obtained by NBC News. Three political appointees with pro-abstinence beliefs guided the process in spite of the the objections, according to the cache...

President Donald Trump is donating his fourth-quarter salary in 2017 to the Transportation Department to help address the nation’s infrastructure. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao is accepting the check from the president in the amount of $100,000. The donation announced Tuesday in the White House briefing room comes a day after Trump released a plan to rebuild crumbling roads, bridges and...

The Senate has confirmed a former drug company executive as President Donald Trump’s second health secretary. Alex Azar will take on the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services. The sprawling agency has been shaken by the administration’s tumultuous first year.

Reinforcing its strong connection with social conservatives, the Trump administration announced Thursday a new federal office to protect medical providers refusing to participate in abortion, assisted suicide or other procedures on moral or religious grounds. Leading Democrats and LGBT groups immediately denounced the move, saying “conscience protections” could become a license to discriminate, particularly against gay and transgender people.

The Trump administration reportedly banned staff of the nation’s top health protection agency from using seven words or phrases in budget-related documents. But federal health officials on Saturday pushed back on the report as members of the science community publicly denounced the idea of such a directive, NBC News reported. Policy analysts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

President Donald Trump’s administration is blocking two pregnant teens in the country illegally and being held in federal custody from obtaining abortions, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday, a repeat of the situation that led to a high-profile court fight earlier this year. Both girls arrived in the country as unaccompanied minors and are being held in federal shelters,...

The number of children in the U.S. foster care system has increased for the fourth year in a row, with substance abuse by parents a major factor, according to new federal data released on Thursday....
The annual report from the Department of Health and Human Services counted 437,500 children in foster care as of Sept. 30, 2016, up from about 427,400...

An immigrant teen in federal custody who was seeking an abortion over the Trump administration’s objections had the procedure Wednesday after a U.S. appeals court ruled in her favor, her lawyers said. The 17-year-old had fought for a month to have an abortion, eventually leading to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. Department of...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday cleared the way for a 17-year-old immigrant held in custody in Texas to obtain an abortion.

An appeals court is blocking, for now, an abortion sought by a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant being held in a Texas facility, ruling that the government should have time to try to release her so she can obtain the abortion outside of federal custody. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued its ruling...

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will “immediately” stop making payments that help low-income people pay for out-of-pocket health care expenses. The announcement came late on Oct. 12 after Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent the department a legal opinion saying the payments cannot be made without congressional authorization. The subsidies are paid directly to insurance companies...

Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and...

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price on Sunday defended President Trump’s dedication to passing a new health care law after the president sent numerous tweets this week instead focused on attacking the press, NBC News reported. “The fact of the matter is that he can do more than one thing at a time,” Price said on NBC’s “Meet The...

Welcome to parenthood. You are a proud new father, simultaneously overjoyed and terrified. Since you are now responsible for another human being, you should know that the estimate of what it will cost to raise your child is approximately a quarter of a million dollars, without accounting for inflation. If you would like to send him or her to college,...

Several dozen fifth graders from Tice Creek Elementary School in Walnut Creek rallied support for Meals on Wheels and Senior Outreach Services on Friday afternoon, marking a celebratory — and quite adorable — end to what has been a month-long effort to ratchet up support for the meal delivery and aid service.

Dorothy Wilcox, 88, was mystified two weeks ago when she heard President Donald Trump’s budget director say Meals on Wheels “doesn’t work.”

The U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday that it mistakenly proposed counting LGBTQ Americans and has since “corrected” the proposal to remove the gender and sexuality category. Gay rights groups quickly declared that it was another sign that President Donald Trump was reneging on a campaign promise to protect them. The statement came a day after the agency sent Congress its...

The trajectory of opioid deaths in the United States is trending in the wrong direction and has to be moved to the top of the federal government’s radar screen along with the threat of terrorism and promoting a strong economy, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.

Marin is ranked the healthiest county in California for the seventh consecutive year, but needs to improve some health and social inequalities, the county’s Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday.

Medicare paid $30 million for ambulance rides for which no record exists that patients got medical care at their destination, the place where they were picked up or other critical information....
The mystery ambulance rides are part of a bigger problem with Medicare payments for transporting patients, according to a federal audit being released Tuesday. The Department of Health and Human...

Seven former nurses have been charged with criminal neglect in the case of a woman who needed her hand amputated after a broken finger wasn’t treated properly, officials announced Tuesday.