Viewpoints: Reducing Harm Reduces Overdose Deaths; Trump Undermines Women’s Access To Health Care

Chicago Tribune: A Bold Remedy For Overdose Deaths
Addiction to opioids is hazardous to your health. This may sound like an obvious and inescapable reality. If your chief priority is staying cool, the thinking goes, you don't move to Phoenix. If you really want to stay alive, you don't use heroin. But humans have created innumerable places in Phoenix where it's possible to minimize personal contact with searing heat. Humans have also created places where it's possible to inject opioids at relatively low risk. (Steve Chapman, 4/26)

Alaska Dispatch News: Medicaid Helps Alaska Fight Opioid Addiction
Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act has been working in Alaska. Since implemented in 2015, more than 30,000 Alaskans previously shut out from routine and necessary care are now eligible to receive it. Not only does expansion make treatment possible for lower income Alaskans suffering with addiction, it makes it possible earlier in their illness, when treatment is typically less expensive, more effective and has the most potential to prevent the kinds of harm that can accompany addiction, such as homelessness, incarceration, or even death. (Tom Chard, 4/26)

Roll Call: A Disturbing Trend Against Women’s Health
Despite the fact that most Americans want their leaders focused on creating jobs and boosting the economy, in his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump has spent significant time and effort attacking women’s access to critical health care services and it is clear that women should expect even more harmful policies in the future. (Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), 4/27)

USA Today: Democrats' Foolish Abortion Orthodoxy
The contest for mayor of Omaha seems an unlikely place for a fight to break out among Democrats over the issue of abortion rights. For one thing, mayors have very little influence on abortion policies. Such matters are most commonly debated in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress or mulled over by the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, the Democrats, with their penchant for finding issues to battle over, have been feuding over whether to support the Democratic candidate for mayor of Obama, Heath Mello, who, as a practicing Catholic, opposes abortion. He has also pledged not to use his office to obstruct the access of women to reproductive health care. Nonetheless, pro-choice group NARAL Pro-Choice America and the news website Daily Kos have called upon Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez to withdraw their support of Mello. This is left-wing sectarianism at its most suicidal and an inauspicious sign for the hope of the party to regain the many offices it has lost. (Ross K. Baker, 4/27)

Bloomberg: Pelosi Makes Shrewd Case For Pro-Life Democrats
Democrats have made health care a moral issue, based on a compelling argument, passionately held, that everyone deserves access to care by virtue of being human. That's one context to keep in mind as the party's powerful pro-choice contingent attempts to transform a morally contentious issue, abortion, into a health-care issue that -- unlike the party's approach to health care generally -- is stripped of moral content. (Francis Wilkinson, 4/26)

Chicago Tribune: Tax Dollars And Abortions: When Politics And Scare Tactics Roil A Difficult Debate
You can't count on the Illinois General Assembly to pass a balanced budget. But you can count on lawmakers to pass heater bills that are sure to show up in campaign materials during the next election cycle. And so on Tuesday, House lawmakers passed a bill that would significantly shift long-standing state policy on taxpayer funding of abortions. The bill, now headed to the Senate, would include abortions as covered procedures in the health plans of Medicaid recipients and state workers. (4/26)

The New York Times: Spreading Plan C To End Pregnancy
After lunch on a Saturday in late January at her home in Los Angeles, Francine Coeytaux, 63, an abortion rights activist, retrieved a Priority Mail envelope from her office and announced to her guests, a group of young women she had recruited to her cause, the results of a recent experiment. “A couple weeks ago, we Googled ‘abortion pills’ and tried ordering from a few of the sites that came up,” she said. (Patrick Adams, 4/27)

JAMA: Navigating Transitions And Charting New Paths
A career in medicine creates an identity and a defining sense of purpose in life. I love being a physician and relish the planned and unexpected challenges and opportunities that have unfolded over time—which for many years seemed endless. But I also observed early in my career what can happen if one doesn’t anticipate transitions, especially in midlife and beyond. While I have come to know this as a physician, I have learned it is also true for individuals in other walks of life, as choices, options, and opportunities become altered and sometimes appear constrained and truncated by physical and cognitive changes or because one has become burned out and needs a change of direction or new path to pursue. (Philip A Pizzo, 4/25)

JAMA: Single IRBs in Multisite Trials: Questions Posed by the New NIH Policy
On June 21, 2016, the US government announced changes that are arguably the most significant of the last quarter century concerning the protection of human research participants—a requirement for use of central or single institutional review boards (IRBs) in multisite National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded research. Specifically, the NIH announced a new policy (effective September 25, 2017) to mandate that nonexempt multisite research with humans funded by the NIH be reviewed by a single IRB. (Robert Klitzman, Ekaterina Pivovarova and Charles W. Lidz, 4/26)

The Des Moines Register: The Strange Iowa Political Trip For Medical Marijuana
Two state senators, one Republican and one Democratic: One voted in favor of the medical cannabis bill that passed in the final hours of the legislative session, one voted against it. Both are unhappy. In a legislative session that tended to defy prediction, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that medical marijuana was the issue that kept lawmakers up all night as they tried to adjourn. It created odd, bipartisan political alliances as well as conflicts among lawmakers who support medical marijuana. (Kathie Obradovich, 4/26)