Health Equity & Access Weekly Roundup: August 28, 2026

Chicago Panel Weighs Barriers to Transplant Weight-Loss Access

At an August 6, 2026, Population Health Roundtable in Chicago from The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®), 9 panelists from Northwestern Medicine, Loyola Medicine, and University of Chicago Medicine discussed the fragmented state of obesity and diabetes care in the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) era, describing overlapping referral pathways from transplant clinics, primary care, and patients themselves, with no clear consensus on who "owns" a patient's weight-management plan once treatment begins. Much of the discussion centered on transplant-access barriers, highlighted by the University of Chicago's ACTNOW clinic, a program built to help patients disqualified from organ transplants due to weight, which struggled for institutional buy-in despite helping 30 previously disqualified patients receive transplants.

Panelists also pointed to insurance-driven prescribing constraints, with rising BMI thresholds for GLP-1 coverage cutting off patients already on the drugs, and described pharmacists absorbing significant uncompensated work (prior authorizations, dose titration, patient education) without institutional recognition. The session closed with moderator Robert Kushner, MD, professor emeritus at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, urging nonstigmatizing staff training and suggesting obesity medicine specialists be embedded directly within subspecialty clinics rather than requiring separate referrals.

FDA Approves Brepocitinib as First Oral Drug for Dermatomyositis

The FDA approved brepocitinib (Lisraya; Roivant Sciences) as the first oral, targeted therapy for adult dermatomyositis, based on the phase 3 VALOR trial (NCT05437263), which randomized 241 adults 1:1:1 to once-daily brepocitinib 30 mg, 15 mg, or placebo over 52 weeks. The 30-mg dose met the trial's primary end point and all 9 key secondary end points, with patients more than 4 times as likely to report improved overall disease activity as those on placebo; a secondary analysis found 45.7% achieved clear or almost-clear skin by week 52 versus 21.8% on placebo.

The drug also cut reliance on corticosteroids—61.7% of patients on oral steroids at baseline tapered to 2.5 mg/day or less by week 52 versus 34.4% on placebo—though serious infections occurred more often with brepocitinib, and it carries a boxed warning shared across the JAK inhibitor class. The drug will ship through a limited specialty pharmacy network, with a patient assistance program that could bring costs as low as $0 per month; its list price was not disclosed.

Abortion Pill Awareness Rises as Safety Understanding Lags, KFF Poll Finds

A new KFF Health Tracking Poll finds that public awareness of the mifepristone abortion pill has climbed sharply, from 31% in January 2023 to roughly 60% since, but understanding of its safety and role hasn't kept pace. Only 26% correctly identify medication abortion as the most common method in the US, 54% express little to no confidence in the FDA's ability to make a science-based safety judgment, and just 44% consider the pills safe (with notably lower confidence among Black women than White women), despite clinical evidence showing hospitalization-level complications in under 1% of cases and a lower mortality rate than surgical abortion or many common drugs.

Public opinion nonetheless leans toward preserving access, with 65% opposed to further restricting abortion medication and 64% opposed to criminalizing mailing the pills, though Republicans are split, and trust in either party to handle the issue remains low across the board. The piece situates these findings against ongoing legal turbulence, including the Fifth Circuit's May 2026 ruling in Louisiana v FDA requiring in-person dispensing (currently stayed by the Supreme Court) and the dismissed Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA case, framing access to mifepristone as unsettled even as demand and public salience continue to rise.

Geographic Barriers Limit Access to Cataract Surgery

A cross-sectional study in the Journal of Cataract & Refractive Surgery found that greater travel distance to a cataract surgeon significantly lowered the odds of undergoing cataract surgery among California Medicare beneficiaries, with the effect falling disproportionately on Black and Hispanic/Latino patients. Using 2017 California Medicare claims data on 445,164 beneficiaries with cataracts, of whom 21.0% received surgery, the researchers found that each additional 100 miles of travel cut the overall odds of surgery by 14% (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.86), but the effect was far steeper for Black beneficiaries (62% lower odds; aOR, 0.38) than for White beneficiaries (8% lower odds; aOR, 0.92).

The authors attributed the disparities to structural factors, including the concentration of ophthalmologists in higher-income urban areas, rather than to biological differences, and called for interventions such as subsidized travel, teleophthalmology triage, and patient navigator programs to expand equitable access.

CRC Mortality Declined Nationally, but Sharp County Disparities Remain

National colorectal cancer (CRC) mortality declined substantially across racial and ethnic groups from 2000 to 2019, but county-level disparities remained pronounced in 2019, according to a study by the Global Burden of Disease US Health Disparities Collaborators published in JAMA Oncology. Among adults 45 or older, mortality fell from 82.5 to 54.4 deaths per 100,000 among men and from 58.9 to 39.7 among women nationally, but county-level rates in 2019 varied more than 15-fold among some populations; the widest range was among American Indian or Alaska Native men, from 13.6 to 213.5 deaths per 100,000 across counties. Of 275 counties with rates exceeding 100 deaths per 100,000 in at least one population, 92 were among American Indian or Alaska Native men and 182 among Black men, versus just 4 among White men. Mortality among adults younger than 45 was stable or increased over the same period, consistent with the American Cancer Society's 2026 report. The authors called the county-level variation grounds for targeted intervention strategies in the highest-risk communities.