Viewpoints: Reform Obamacare? GOP Is More Focused On Elections; Listen, Doctors: Opioid Crisis Cries Out For Trimming Prescriptions

The Wall Street Journal: Life Support For ObamaCare
We said Republicans would pay dearly for failing to replace ObamaCare, and the bill is already coming due this week in a political extortion fight with health insurers. The GOP may pad the omnibus spending bill with enough cash to preserve the law through the 2020 election. (3/19)

USA Today: Doctors Need To Help Cure Opioid Crisis
In New Hampshire on Monday, President Trump announced his latest plan to deal with the epidemic. His call for emulating countries that execute drug dealers garnered most of the headlines. And the plan, like his declaration last fall that the crisis was a public health emergency, lacked sufficient detail and funding. But at least on the prevention side of the problem, the president was on to something when he said that "the best way to beat the drug crisis is to keep people from getting hooked on drugs to begin with." He set a goal of reducing opioid prescriptions by one-third over the next three years, and ensuring that federally reimbursed prescriptions follow best practices. Physicians, many of them well-meaning, helped fuel the crisis by handing out opioids like candy. Now they can be of enormous help in bringing it under control by preventing the creation of new addicts. (3/19)

NH Times Union: Trump's Plan: A Blueprint We Can Build On
When President Trump chose to unveil his plan for dealing with the ongoing opioid crisis, what better place to do so than the “drug-infested den” of New Hampshire? We weren’t offended by Trump’s harsh words, because, well, he had a point. We’ve been hit as hard as anywhere in the country by the deadly scourge of fentanyl, and years of good faith efforts by local, state, and federal officials are just now preventing the number of overdose deaths from rising. (3/19)

USA Today: AMA: We're Helping To End Overdose Epidemic
Physicians today are providing the leadership to help end the nation’s opioid-related overdose and death epidemic. As medical professionals, we go where the evidence leads us. (Patrice A. Harris, 3/19)

Los Angeles Times: If It Wasn't Related To Abortion, California's FACT Act Would Easily Be Upheld By The Supreme Court
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday in the case National Institute of Family and Life Advocates vs. Becerra, which challenges a California law requiring reproductive healthcare facilities to inform women of state programs that might assist them. It should be an easy issue to decide — in favor of the California law — but it is not because it arises in the context of abortion. (3/20)

The New York Times: The Abortion Case That’s Really About the First Amendment
The law’s defenders say the notices combat incomplete or misleading information provided by the clinics. ”In certain ways, the case has played out just as one might have expected: The Conference of Catholic Bishops has lined up on one side and Planned Parenthood on the other. Most people’s opinions on abortion rights and their opinions on the correct outcome in this case are probably pretty closely linked. (Robert McNamara and Paul Sherman, 3/20)

Kansas City Star: Missouri Women Deserve Facts, Not Lies, About Health Care
This week, the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in an important case, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v Becerra. I’ll be paying close attention — and so should you. This case centers on the notion that patients should receive full, accurate, and comprehensive information about their health care. (Colleen McNicholas, 3/19)

Louisville Courier-Journal: Kentucky Abortion Battle Rages On But Providers Deserve Honor
Rather than judging those whose life circumstances lead them to get abortions, we would do better to recognize that we are not in their shoes. How can any of us know the individual, particular circumstances of another person’s life – especially a person we don’t even know? A person we will never know. How simple and manifestly unjust it is, instead, for those who will not have to live with the consequences to impose one-size-fits-all rules on the women who will. ...Which brings us to the Kentucky General Assembly. I am disappointed to say that trust and compassion for women are not the perspective of many in that body. Although Republican legislative leaders said at the beginning of the year that they did not expect abortion to be a key issue in the 2018 legislative session, we have seen no fewer than seven anti-abortion bills filed. (Kim Greene, 3/16)

WBUR: Policies To Help Americans Be Happier? Start With More Public Spending For Mental Health
The U.S. ranks 18th among the world’s countries, with an average life satisfaction of around 6.88 on a scale of 10. While that may be relatively near the top, America’s happiness figures have actually declined every year since the reports began in 2012, and this year’s are the lowest yet. The question, then, is whether the government has a role to play in improving the happiness of its citizens. (George Ward, 3/19)

Bloomberg: Arming Teachers Is A Terrible Idea, President Trump
It’s hard to know if President Donald Trump’s plan to arm teachers is a real proposal or just noise to obscure his hapless response to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. The idea of “firearms training for school personnel” is on a White House list of measures that patently falls short of being an actual policy to prevent shootings at schools or anywhere else. As if to confirm its pointlessness, the plan even includes that classic Washington side-step -- a blue-ribbon commission to look into it all. One can only hope that the idea does indeed come to nothing. (3/19)

USA Today: It's Teen Mental Health Week. Celebrate.
It’s Teen Health Week. Seem like there's not a lot to celebrate? Think again. Sure, suicide rates are soaring, the opioid epidemic is spreading from rural to suburban and urban areas and school shootings occurred at a rate of about one a week before the Parkland, Fla. shooting last month. Teens' stress levels are sky high. I have a 17 year old daughter who is awaiting word from all of the seemingly countless colleges she applied to.  We live in Fairfax County, Va., one of the most affluent in the country and where pressure to excel has been met with several teen suicides in the past few years. (Jayne O'Donnell, 3/19)

The Washington Post: Virginia’s Medicaid Impasse, Courtesy Of The GOP
Virginia's state Senate Republicans have dug in their heels once again to oppose a Medicaid expansion that would extend health insurance to roughly 400,000 citizens. Their stance is impervious to public opinion, which favors expansion by large margins; at odds with many of the GOP members in the House of Delegates and in some other Republican-controlled legislatures nationwide, who have switched sides in the debate; and heedless of hard-working Virginians for whom there is no health-care alternative save the emergency room. (3/19)

RealClear Health: Rural America's Health Care Crisis
Rural communities are facing a crisis that, while quiet, is threatening millions. As hospitals in these communities close and services are cut, many Americans are losing access to quality health care.Since 2010, more than 80 rural hospitals have shuttered. The National Rural Health Association, a non-profit that advocates for rural issues, estimates that there are as many as 700 more rural hospitals at risk of closing in the next 10 years. Just last month, the county commissioners of Decatur County, Tennessee, voted to close the county hospital. And even in cases where these hospitals stay afloat, critical services end up being axed. Often, obstetric services are atop the chopping block: between 2004 to 2014, 9 percent of all rural counties lost access to hospital obstetric services. (Suzanne Harrison and Kim Templeton, 3/15)

The Baltimore Sun: America’s poor families need food stamps to survive
President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2019 budget request has me worried for the future health and well-being of our nation’s low-income communities. Under this proposal, there is to be an immediate $17 billion reduction to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, followed by a $213.5 billion reduction over the next 10 years. (Caroline Meehan, 3/19)

Stat: Lawmakers Must Act On Reducing Antibiotic Use In Food Animals
Congress should include language in the Animal Drug User Fee Act reauthorization that limits the use of medically important antibiotics to 21 days. By doing that, we’ll give resistant bacteria less of a chance to thrive and spread. Large-scale production of food animals without misusing antibiotics is not only feasible, it’s necessary to maintain the effectiveness of these lifesaving medicines for humans and animals. (Matthew Wellington, 3/19)