The New York Times: Trump Says He Got Rid Of Obamacare. The I.R.S. Doesn’t Agree.
At a rally in Michigan a little over a week ago, President Trump assured his supporters that he had kept his promise to abolish the Affordable Care Act — even though Congress had failed to repeal the Obama-era health law. “Essentially, we are getting rid of Obamacare,” Mr. Trump said, reminding a cheering crowd that the individual mandate that required most people to have health insurance or pay a penalty was scrapped as part of the Republican tax bill he signed into law last year. “Some people would say, essentially, we have gotten rid of it.” (Rappeport, 5/6)

CQ: Proposed Rate Increases May Renew Political Focus On Health Law
Insurers in some states have started filing their 2019 premium rate requests, an annual process set to thrust the health care law back into the political spotlight. The step comes as primaries for the November midterm elections are underway, and as some conservative groups are urging congressional leaders to refocus their attention on the Democrats’ health law. Democrats, meanwhile, are plotting how to highlight for voters next year’s insurance rates, which analysts expect to continue to rise. (McIntire, 5/7)

The Associated Press: Idaho, Feds Wading Through Details Of Insurance Proposal
Idaho officials are hoping to allow insurers to sell plans that don't comply with former President Barack Obama's health care law. The move is needed to save Idaho's insurance exchange as premiums continue to rise and some healthy residents opt to go uninsured, Idaho Department of Insurance Director Dean Cameron says. But the federal government hasn't signed off, with agency leaders noting they are bound by law to enforce the Obama-era health insurance rules. (5/6)

In other news from the states —

The Hill: ObamaCare Insurers In Virginia Propose Major Premium Hikes For 2019 
Two of Virginia’s ObamaCare insurers are requesting significant premium hikes for 2019, according to initial filings released Friday. Both Cigna and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield cited policies advocated by the Trump administration, including the repeal of ObamaCare's individual mandate, as part of its justifications for the increases. (Weixel, 5/4)

The CT Mirror: CT Lawmakers Ask Malloy To Help Shore Up Obamacare
With little hope of shoring up the Affordable Care Act in Washington, congressional Democrats, including the members of Connecticut’s delegation to the U.S. House, are asking governors and state legislatures to help. Led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, the five members of Connecticut’s House delegation wrote Gov. Dannel P. Malloy last week outlining what they say are steps the state can take to prevent another sharp increase in health insurance rates and a rise in the number of uninsured residents — by as much as 21 percent. (Radelat, 5/4)

And an oft-forgotten provision in the health law goes into effect —

Politico: Obama’s Calorie Rule Kicks In Thanks To Trump
One of Barack Obama’s top food policy rules has escaped Donald Trump’s war on regulations. Starting Monday, calorie counts will have to be posted at thousands of restaurants, grocery stores and movie theaters, representing a milestone change in how the food industry shares information with the American public. The rule, an oft-forgotten provision of Obamacare, is being pushed over the finish line by a Trump nominee, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who says the labeling requirement is simply about transparency. (Evich, 5/7)

Kaiser Health News: Today’s Special: Obamacare Menu Labeling Rules Ushered In
The law, intended to nudge Americans to eat healthier, applies to chains with at least 20 stores.And it won’t be just fast-food and sit-down restaurants that are affected. Grocers, convenience stores, movie theaters, pizza delivery companies and even vending machines must meet the new requirements.The menu labeling rules will improve public health, the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said last week in an interview. He pointed to studies showing that enlightened customers order, on average, up to 50 fewer calories a day. (Galewitz, 5/7)

The New York Times: V.A. Medical System Staggers As Chaos Engulfs Its Leadership
At first, it was one doctor quitting the tiny Ukiah Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Northern California. Then another left, and another, until of the five doctors there a year ago, only one remained. The Veterans Choice Act, passed by Congress amid scandalous stories of hidden waiting lists at Veterans Affairs hospitals, allowed more veterans to get care from private providers, but it created an avalanche of paper at Veterans Affairs facilities as outside doctors sent in information on patients. Veterans Affairs doctors had to enter so many medical records manually into the aging department health records system that it crippled their ability to see patients. (Philipps and Fandos, 5/4)

In other news —

The Baltimore Sun: Baltimore VA Hospital Hosts Baby Shower For Veterans Who Are Expectant Or New Mothers 
One sign of the changing demographics of veterans could be seen this past weekend on the second floor of the Baltimore VA Medical Center on Greene Street: a baby shower. Dozens of new and expectant mothers played games and listened to speakers Saturday afternoon amid pink and blue balloons, gift bags and birthday cake. The gathering celebrated the birth of 56 babies born to local female veterans over the last year, and also served to raise awareness of an emerging field of services offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, designed to cater to women who have served in the military. (Rentz, 5/5)

Stat: FDA Is Ready To Cope With Wave Of Retirements, Gottlieb Says
The Food and Drug Administration is undaunted by the fact that many of its top staff are nearing retirement age and the agency has a plan to continue to buttress its ranks, both among the leadership and rank-and-file, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Friday. “It is the case that about 50 percent of all the people in senior roles in [the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research] right now are nearing retirement age, where they can retire with benefits,” Gottlieb said. “We’ve been aware of that. We’ve been planning for it.” (Swetlitz, 5/4)

Stat: Gottlieb Pushes Back Against Criticism Of 'Breakthrough' Designation 
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb defended his agency’s “breakthrough therapy” program, which speeds review of drugs that show signs of benefit early on, amid criticism from academics that the therapies aren’t actually breakthroughs at all. A study published in late April in the Journal of Clinical Oncology showed that, on average, cancer drugs designated as “breakthrough” don’t help patients more than drugs that aren’t designated as “breakthrough.” And a study published earlier in April in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out other examples of “breakthrough therapies” that really weren’t scientific breakthroughs. (Swetlitz, 5/4)

The Wall Street Journal: Opioid Vs. Crack: Congress Reconsiders Its Approach To Drug Epidemic
In the 1980s, Congress passed a series of laws that aimed to counter the widespread use of crack cocaine with tougher sentencing guidelines. Three decades later, lawmakers are once again considering legislation aimed at curbing a drug crisis: opioid abuse. This time, the emphasis is on funding research into a public-health crisis and enabling states to deal with its consequences. Lawmakers and experts haven’t reached a consensus on why the federal government’s response to opioids is so different from the crack epidemic that preceded it. Nor has the dynamic entirely changed on Capitol Hill. Although there is nearly universal support for a robust response to opioid abuse, a bipartisan push to revise the sentencing guidelines set during the crack era faces a more uncertain legislative future. (Peterson and Armour, 5/5)

The Associated Press: Drug Epidemic Ensnares 25-Year-Old Pill For Nerve Pain
The story line sounds familiar: a popular pain drug becomes a new way to get high as prescribing by doctors soars. But the latest drug raising red flags is not part of the opioid family at the center of the nation's drug epidemic. It's a 25-year-old generic pill long seen as a low risk way to treat seizures, nerve pain and other ailments. The drug, called gabapentin, is one of the most prescribed medications in the U.S., ranking ninth over the last year, according to prescription tracker GoodRx. Researchers attribute the recent surge to tighter restrictions on opioid painkillers, which have left doctors searching for alternatives for their patients. (5/4)

The Washington Post: DEA Issues First Immediate Suspension Of Opioid Sales To A Wholesaler Since 2012
The Drug Enforcement Administration said Friday that it had immediately suspended opioid sales by a wholesale distributor, accusing a Louisiana company of failing to report unusually large shipments of narcotics to independent drugstores “with questionable need for the drugs.” It was the first time the agency had immediately cut off narcotic sales by a distributor in six years, Justice Department officials said. (Bernstein and Horwitz, 5/4)

The Hill: DEA Issues First Sales Suspension Under Trump For Opioid Wholesaler 
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has ordered a Louisiana-based wholesale pharmaceutical distributor to cease sales of opioids, alleging that the company failed to report unusually large narcotics shipments to drugstores. The Justice Department said Friday that a DEA investigation revealed that, in some cases, independent pharmacies were allowed to purchase six times the quantity of narcotics they would normally order from the distributor. (Greenwood, 5/5)

Stat: Drug Distributors Get Hauled To The Hill To Answer Questions About Opioids
The rhetoric has come from lawmakers and doctors, entertainers and academics, and even from President Trump: The pharmaceutical industry, all have said, is in large part to blame for the ongoing opioid crisis. But even amid an epidemic that took nearly 50,000 American lives in 2016, lawmakers have remained reluctant to bring pharmaceutical executives to Capitol Hill and question them face to face. (Facher, 5/7)

CQ: House Panel Announces Opioid Legislation Markups
The House Energy and Commerce Committee will spend two days marking up nearly 60 bills related to the nation's opioid addiction problem, the panel announced Friday. The committee will consider the first slate of bills on Wednesday, May 9. Further details are expected Monday about which bills will be debated. The second markup will be held May 17. The legislation likely to be considered spans a long list of opioid issues including efforts to allow physicians to know about a patient’s prior history of abuse, more commonly known as Jessie’s Law (HR 1554). Another bill (HR 5272) would support evidence-based treatments and a separate draft bill aims to improve state prescription drug monitoring programs. (Raman, 5/4)

NPR: Narcan And Naloxone Can Be Hard To Get
A few months ago, Kourtnaye Sturgeon helped save someone's life. She was driving in downtown Indianapolis when she saw people gathered around a car on the side of the road. Sturgeon pulled over and a man told her there was nothing she could do: Two men had overdosed on opioids and appeared to be dead. "I kind of recall saying, 'No man, I've got Narcan,'" she says, referring to the brand-name version of the opioid overdose antidote, naloxone. "Which sounds so silly, but I'm pretty sure that's what came out." (Harper, 5/7)

The Wall Street Journal: Theranos Cost Business And Government Leaders More Than $600 Million
A who’s who of government, business and international finance lost a total of more than $600 million they had invested in scandal-plagued Theranos Inc., according to previously sealed documents made public in a lawsuit. High on the list is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family invested $100 million in the Silicon Valley blood-testing company, the documents show. Mrs. DeVos had previously disclosed that her family was a Theranos investor in a government filing, but the size of the investment wasn’t known. (Carreyrou, 5/3)

The New York Times: Caught In The Theranos Wreckage: Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch And Walmart’s Waltons
The company became a Silicon Valley fairy tale, with investors awarding the privately held company a valuation of around $9 billion. But the story began to unravel in October 2015 after The Wall Street Journal, owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., began questioning whether the tests worked. Theranos became the subject of federal investigations into its testing and claims of proprietary technology, which were called “nanotainers.” Much of the time the company had to resort to using conventional blood testing methods, unable to get federal approval for any test but one for Herpes. Theranos and its founder also became embroiled in a series of lawsuits, involving investors as well as one of its key partners, Walgreens, a large drugstore chain, where it offered its tests. The company reached a settlement with Walgreens last August. (Abelson and Thomas, 5/4)

In other health industry news —

Modern Healthcare: Building The Bench: Hospitals And Health Systems Prepare For Boomer Retirement Wave 
TriHealth asked its vice president of finance to shadow executives at an affiliated health system. Sending a senior executive off-site to expand his perspective was part of the Cincinnati-based health system's leadership institute, which aims to develop the skills of some 1,000 administrative and physician executives and prepare them for new roles. While many executives move around within their organization's network, the approach aimed to expose the employee—who had spent much of his career at TriHealth—to another corporate culture and operations. (Kacik, 5/5)

Boston Globe: Partners HealthCare, Harvard Pilgrim Discussing Possible Merger
Hospital giant Partners HealthCare, looking to fortify its position in the rapidly changing health care market, is in potential merger negotiations with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, one of the state’s largest medical insurers. ... Any deal is likely to face scrutiny in a state where policy makers and consumer groups are focused on controlling medical costs. (Dayal McCluskey, 5/4)

The Washington Post: Iowa's 'Heartbeat' Bill Bans Abortion After Six Weeks
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday signed a bill that would prohibit abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. It is one of the most restrictive laws of its kind in the United States and one that Republicans hope will pave the way for a showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court. The “heartbeat” bill, which would ban abortions as early as six weeks — around the time women generally feel early signs of pregnancy and before many realize they are pregnant — was passed Tuesday by the Iowa House, 51-46. The state Senate passed the bill 29-17 early Wednesday, sending it to Reynolds (R), who has said abortion is “equivalent to murder.” (Phillips, 5/4)

Politico Pro: Iowa Governor Signs Most Restrictive Abortion Ban In Country
The new law is almost certain to prompt court challenges. Abortion opponents emboldened by the prospect of President Donald Trump further shaping the ideological direction of the Supreme Court are wagering the Iowa ban or similar measures could provide a test case for overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Reynolds, who is running for reelection and has referred to abortion in the past as murder, signed the law just days after it was approved by Iowa’s GOP-dominated state legislature. Iowa already banned most abortions after 20 weeks. Eighteen states ban abortion at that point, but efforts to set earlier restrictions haven’t survived legal challenges. (Pradhan, 5/4)

The Washington Post: The Use Of Virtual Doctors Visits Are Growing But Insurance Doesn't Always Pay
Tucked into the federal budget law Congress passed in February was a provision that significantly expands the use of telemedicine — long a hyped health-care reform and now poised to go mainstream within five to 10 years. “There’s much broader recognition of the benefits,” said Mei Wa Kwong, executive director of the Center for Connected Health Policy, a research group that promotes telemedicine in Sacramento. “The law is the latest to make telemedicine more accessible. But we still have a ways to go before most consumers are aware of the option.” (Findlay, 5/6)

In other news —

NPR: Transgender Health Care By Telemedicine
At an outpatient lab in Tifton, Ga., where Karen Williams gets her blood drawn, a clerk looked from her computer screen to Williams' printed lab order, then back again. "This is not right," the clerk said, squinting at the lab order. There, the birthdate and address matched the ones on the screen, but the name displayed was a male one. A transgender woman, Williams lived as a man for nearly 50 years before beginning to make physical changes several years ago. She's grown out her hair and has gotten most of an old goatee lasered off. One of the things that hasn't changed, however, is her legal name – so in most health care situations, she usually uses her old name and driver's license. (Landman, 5/5)

The New York Times: Romaine Riddle: Why The E. Coli Outbreak Eludes Food Investigators
Scientists searching for a toxic strain of E. coli that has raced across 25 states, sickening 121 people and killing one, have been able to identify the general source as the Yuma, Ariz., growing region. But as the outbreak enters its second month, they still cannot find the contamination itself — it could be lurking in the area’s fields, water sources, harvesting equipment, processing plants or distribution centers. Federal officials predict that the outbreak, linked to romaine lettuce, will continue for several weeks. (Hoffman, 5/7)

USA Today: Calls To Hotline About Guns, Deportation And Domestic Violence Way Up
Calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline involving firearms were up more than 75% in 2017, according to an analysis out Monday by the hotline. The surge, which followed a year that had a 50% increase in gun-related domestic violence reports, is attributed to increased publicity surrounding mass shootings. Nearly 12,000 of the hotline's calls in 2017 were related to guns, up from about 6,800 such contacts in 2016.  (O'Donnell, 5/7)

The Washington Post: Alzheimer’s Cure Is Being Pursued With The Help Of An Online Game
Want to cure Alzheimer’s? Get in line. Researchers have long been puzzled by the disease and vexed by how long it’s taking to unravel its mysteries. One group of scientists is helping speed up that process with assistance from the public. “Stall Catchers,” a game created by Cornell University’s Human Computation Institute, turns the hunt for a cure from frustrating to fun. In the game, players watch short movies — made using a multiphoton microscope — that show blood flowing through the brains of living mice. Players work on a data set of thousands of images to point out “stalls” — areas of reduced blood flow caused by white blood cells accumulating on the sides of the vessels. (Blakemore, 5/6)

The Wall Street Journal: Which Anti-Depressant Is Right For You? Your DNA Can Shed Some Light
Paxil or Prozac, Zoloft or Lexapro? When treating a patient suffering from depression, Brent Forester considers which anti-depressant to prescribe—ideally, one that will ease psychic pain without side effects. It can be a tough call. (Lagnado, 5/6)

The New York Times: A Simple Way To Improve A Billion Lives: Eyeglasses
Shivam Kumar’s failing eyesight was manageable at first. To better see the chalkboard, the 12-year-old moved to the front of the classroom, but in time, the indignities piled up. Increasingly blurry vision forced him to give up flying kites and then cricket, after he was repeatedly whacked by balls he could no longer see. The constant squinting gave him headaches, and he came to dread walking home from school. “Sometimes I don’t see a motorbike until it’s almost in my face,” he said. (Jacobs, 5/5)

NPR: Prevent Lyme Disease With These Steps
Lyme disease was once unheard of in western Pennsylvania, where Barbara Thorne, now an entomologist at the University of Maryland, spent time as a kid. Thorne knew that if black-legged ticks are infected with bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, they can transmit Lyme to people and, that if untreated, symptoms can range from fever, fatigue and a rash, to serious damage to the joints, heart and nervous system. (Aubrey, 5/7)

Boston Globe: Meet Connor, A Boy At The Intersection Of Autism And Mental Illness
This is Connor, a puzzle his family and caregivers have worked long and hard to solve, a boy who lives at the intersection of autism and mental illness. It isn’t so much a rare place — as many as half of autistic children suffer from mental health problems — but it can be a deeply baffling one. (Kowalczyk, 5/4)

The New York Times: How A Low-Carb Diet Might Aid People With Type 1 Diabetes
Like many children, Andrew Hightower, 13, likes pizza, sandwiches and dessert. But Andrew has Type 1 diabetes, and six years ago, in order to control his blood sugar levels, his parents put him on a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet. His mother makes him recipes with diabetic-friendly ingredients that won’t spike his blood sugar, like pizza with a low-carb, almond-flour crust; homemade bread with walnut flour instead of white flour; and yogurt topped with blueberries, raspberries and nuts. (O'Connor, 5/7)

The Washington Post: When Someone Is Dying, Threshold Choir Provides The Comfort Of Song
It’s a quiet afternoon at the Halquist Memorial Inpatient Center, a hospice, as four women huddle close, talking quietly in a tight circle before walking through the doors to sing to men and women on the threshold of death. These women are part of the Threshold Choir, a group that brings the comfort of song to dying people. A thin woman, who is in the last weeks of life, is the choir’s first stop. She is sitting nearly upright in a hospital bed, her daughter beside her. Leslie Kostrich, the group’s leader for this day, asks the older woman if she would like to hear a few songs. She nods; the singers set up folding stools and pull up close to her bed. (Bruno, 5/5)

The Washington Post: Ovarian Tumor: 132-Pound Mass Removed From Woman's Abdomen
The tumor had ballooned to 132 pounds and stretched the patient's abdomen into a 3-foot-wide orb. By the time  oncologist Vaagn Andikyan examined the 38-year-old woman, she could no longer walk. And because the tumor was increasing the pressure on her digestive tract, she was malnourished and growing weaker everyday. It was the largest ovarian mucinous tumor Andikyan had ever encountered, benign only in the medical sense of the word. It didn't take the gynecologic oncologist long to recognize the growth for what it really was: A death sentence. (Wootson, 5/4)

The Washington Post: ‘I Saved Them Because I’m A Superhero!’: 4-Year-Old Donates Bone Marrow To His Baby Brothers
It was barely sunrise and Michael DeMasi Jr. was romping through the corridors at a children’s hospital in Philadelphia, balancing on a red line that was etched into the floor design and telling his mother to tie a balloon to him so he could “fly.” The 4-year-old boy fancied himself a real-life superhero, wearing a blue T-shirt with photographs of his 4-month-old twin brothers, who were born with a rare immunodeficiency disease. (Bever, 5/6)

The Washington Post: A Roach Crawled Into A Florida Woman’s Ear. It Took Nine Days To Get It All Out.
Katie Holley was jolted awake by a cold thing — what she had initially thought was a small piece of ice that somehow slid down her left ear. Disoriented, she rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a cotton swab and slowly stuck it inside her ear. And then Holley felt something move. It was like a “rhythmic” movement, she recalled, as if whatever that thing was was trying to burrow deeper into her ear canal. She pulled out the cotton swab and saw small, dark brown pieces that looked like legs. (Phillips, 5/5)

The CT Mirror: Senate Passes Bill Increasing Oversight To Stem Abuse At Whiting
More than a year after the repeated, cruel abuse of a Whiting Forensic patient was captured on videotape, the state Senate unanimously approved a bill that would create an independent task force to oversee the maximum security psychiatric facility and would make staff there and other state behavioral health facilities subject to fines or even criminal charges if they fail to report abuse. (Rigg, 5/4)

San Jose Mercury News: Audit Slams State Oversight Of Nursing Facilities
Citations for substandard care at skilled nursing facilities statewide increased by almost a third between 2006 and 2015, according to the report from the California State Auditor. Over the same period, profits for the state’s three biggest private operators of nursing homes soared by tens of millions of dollars, even as the number of nursing facility beds barely changed, according to the report. (Boyd-Barrett, 5/6)

The Star Tribune: Shortage Of Home Care Workers Forcing Young Disabled Into Institutions 
Across Minnesota, a chronic and deepening shortage of home care workers is forcing scores of younger people with disabilities to move into sterile and highly restrictive institutions, including nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, designed for vulnerable seniors. Pleasures that young Minnesotans take for granted — visiting friends or even stepping outside without permission — are beyond their grasp. The trend worries civil rights advocates, who say it could imperil decades of effort by state officials to desegregate housing for people with disabilities and to help them live more independently in the community. (Serres, 5/5)

Kaiser Health News: Alarming Suicide Rate Jolts Texas Community Into Action
In the heart of northeast Texas, Tyler’s rolling landscape is dotted with churches and historical homes, and the city is known for its roses and flowering gardens. But the community also is shadowed by a grim statistic, one that leaders are striving to better understand and address. Smith County, which encompasses Tyler and is home to more than 225,000 residents, has the highest suicide rate among the state’s 25 most populous counties. (Huff, 5/7)

Sacramento Bee: Current, Ex-Sutter Health Employees Say Company Prevented Them From Taking Breaks
In hearings that begin Monday, about 30 current and former employees at Sutter Health’s midtown Sacramento surgery center will accuse the health-care giant of preventing them from taking meal and rest breaks and will ask the California Labor Commissioner to award them back wages and penalties. The Bee obtained copies of a half-dozen of the Sutter employees’ complaints in which plaintiffs seek anywhere from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages and penalties. (Anderson, 5/4)

California Healthline: Number Of California Jail Inmates On Psychiatric Drugs Soars
The number of jail inmates in California taking psychotropic drugs has jumped about 25 percent in five years, and they now account for about a fifth of the county jail population across the state, according to a new analysis of state data. The increase could reflect the growing number of inmates with mental illness, though it also might stem from better identification of people in need of treatment, say researchers from California Health Policy Strategies (CHPS), a Sacramento-based consulting firm. (Gorman, 5/4)

KCUR: Federal Research Program Picks Kansas City To Help Diversify Genetic Data 
A day-long event Sunday at Kansas City’s Union Station helped launch “All of Us,” a new nationwide research initiative from the National Institutes of Health. The program’s goal is to collect genetic data from one million people from a wide variety of races, ethnicities and backgrounds. Kansas City, Missouri, was one of seven cities chosen for the launch of "All of Us," and Tom Curran, executive director of Children's Mercy Research Institute, said that was no mistake. (Tudhope, 5/7)

Chicago Sun Times: National Institutes Of Health Launches Research Program Based On Patient Data 
The National Institutes of Health launched its biobank research program Sunday, bringing Chicago medical professionals together for the launch of its national initiative to diversify and broaden its research. The Chicago event, hosted at Millennium Park’s Chase Promenade South, is one of eight simultaneous events happening across the country to mark the launch of us All of Us. The research program aims to recruit 1 million people in order to advance individualized prevention, treatment and care for people of all backgrounds. (Hinton, 5/6)

Arizona Republic: Ex-Banner Nurse Uses Whistleblower Law To Target Billing Fraud
The federal whistleblower law allows individuals to file civil "qui tam" lawsuits on behalf of the government and recover improper federal payments to hospitals, defense contractors and other industries. The government has the option of joining the lawsuit, but if the government declines, the whistleblower can pursue the lawsuit on their own. If the lawsuit is successful, the individual collects part of the recovery. (Alltucker, 5/4)

The CT Mirror: Senate Approves Raises To Avert Group Home Strikes
The Senate gave final approval Saturday to pay hikes designed to head off a strike Monday by 2,500 unionized care providers for the disabled. The Senate vote also means many of those who care for Connecticut’s intellectually and developmentally disabled will be getting their first raise in a decade or longer. (Phaneuf, 5/5)

Kansas City Star: Walmart Exposure Pushes Missouri Measles Cases To 13
A Walmart SuperCenter and an urgent care clinic near Liberty have been added to the list of exposure sites in a measles outbreak that has now sickened 13 people who live on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metro. (Marso, 5/4)

Columbus Dispatch: Faith Community Nurses Help Heal The Body, Mind And Soul
Faith community nurses must be registered nurses and they get a certificate in the specialty after training, said Kate Whitman, a class instructor with Mount Carmel Health System. Many are retired and volunteer at their own church, since not too many churches can afford to pay someone full time. (King, 5/6)

Sacramento Bee: Sacramento Homeless Program Pays For Attending Meetings And Writing Policies
The city of Sacramento is offering hefty financial bonuses to hospitals, health plans and government and nonprofit agencies for attending meetings and helping to launch its $64 million Whole Person Care program on homelessness. Mayor Darrell Steinberg and other Sacramento leaders consider the pilot program central to achieving their goal of housing 2,000 homeless people by 2020. (Hubert, 5/5)

Peninsula Press: California Tackles Air Pollution Disparities With Data, Policy Efforts
While California holds a reputation as a leader in environmental policy, it still ranks worst out of all 50 states for average public exposure to particulate matter pollution — tiny particles measured in microns, a millionth of a meter — largely due to the state’s topography and population density. California is also home to seven of the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest short-term levels of particle pollution. (Salian, 5/4)

The Washington Post: Americans Are Starting To Suffer From Trump’s Health-Care Sabotage
It is a tribute to the resilience of the United States’ public and private institutions that, despite President Trump’s incoherent management, the country has, by many measures, continued to improve, notching its lowest unemployment rate since 2000 in the latest federal employment update. But the effects of the president’s underinformed instincts, enabled by the ideologues in his administration, are beginning to show up in some of the numbers, representing real pain that Americans are suffering for Mr. Trump’s deficient leadership. (5/6)

The New York Times: The New Era Of Abstinence
The administration of Donald Trump — who had a child out of wedlock after cheating on his first wife, and is in a legal battle with a porn star who says she had sex with him not long after his third wife gave birth — is promoting abstinence with a zeal perhaps never before seen from the federal government. Mr. Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is quietly advancing an anti-science, ideological agenda. The department last year prematurely ended grants to some teen pregnancy prevention programs, claiming weak evidence of success. More recently, it set new funding rules that favor an abstinence-only approach. In reality, programs that use creative ways to educate teenagers about contraception are one reason teen pregnancy in the United States has plummeted in recent years. (5/5)

The Washington Post: Are We Ready For An Epidemic This Summer?
Summer is coming. And if you think a warm-weather surge of mosquitoes and ticks is not as frightening as the fictional winter’s White Walkers from “Game of Thrones,” you haven’t read this week’s report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the rapidly escalating danger of infectious diseases spread by insects. The CDC’s key findings: The number of Americans infected with such diseases, including Zika, West Nile and Lyme, has more than tripled in a decade, jumping from about 30,000 cases a year in 2006 to almost 100,000 in 2016. This total includes nine types of infections never before seen in the United States, including Zika and chikungunya. Looking ahead, 80 percent of state and local health departments are not ready for the insect-borne threat we are facing in just a few weeks. (Ronald A. Klain, 5/4)

Boston Globe: Genetic Data Can Track Down Criminals — And Everyone Else
Today, an estimated 12 million to 15 million Americans have have sequenced their DNA using one of a few commercial companies such as Ancestry.com or 23AndMe. ...This means that we could be entering an era in which it becomes possible to find every rapist, every killer who leaves behind a genetic trace. (S.I. Rosenbaum, 5/4)

USA Today: Donald Trump Wrote His Own Medical Report. We Could Tell.
We should have known. The news that Donald Trump dictated his own medical report — despite it being signed by his personal physician Dr. Harold Bornstein — hardly comes as a surprise. In all my years studying, teaching and practicing medicine, I have never heard any doctor say “astonishingly excellent,” or call anyone or anything “unequivocally” the healthiest. (Dhruv Khullar, 5/4)

The Wall Street Journal: Shop Around For Surgery? Colorado May Soon Encourage It
Here’s a simple idea to help lower health-care costs: publish prices. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers in Colorado is pushing a bill to do precisely that. The Comprehensive Health Care Billing Transparency Act would allow Coloradans to see the true price of any health service they use—exams, procedures, prescriptions—before they undertake treatment. If passed, the legislation would mandate that hospitals and other facilities disclose the base fees they charge for specific services “before applying any discounts, rebates, or other charge adjustment mechanisms.” Every bill sent to a patient would need to include an itemized list, which would allow patients to see if a service had been marked up. By making such information available upfront, the legislation would reintroduce competition to Colorado’s opaque health-care markets. (Tom Coburn, 5/4)

The Hill: Medicaid Sustainability: Drug Formularies, Not Work Requirements
Massachusetts, long a beacon in health care access and among the first states to expand its Medicaid program (a.k.a. MassHealth) substantially in the 1990s, is trying a new approach to rein in costs for that program and it is one worthy of support: creating a closed drug formulary. (Gerard A. Vitti, 5/6)

San Antonio Press-Express: There Is A Better Way To Deliver Health Care
We are told “we can’t afford a single-payer system.” The real truth is that we spend so much per person for health care, that just spending the same amount in a single-payer system we can provide better care than any of the other countries of the world and care for everyone, not just three-fourths of our population. (Herbert H. Keyser, 5/5)

The New York Times: What I Learned From Gay Conversion Therapy
On Saturday, a group of Christians will gather in Washington for the Freedom March, an event that organizers describe as “a celebration of freedom from homosexuality and transgenderism.” The march will feature speakers like Elizabeth Johnston, the woman behind the Activist Mommy, a right-wing Facebook page with over 500,000 followers. And it’s gaining attention because Luis Javier Ruiz, a survivor of the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Fla., in which Omar Matteen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in 2015, will be in attendance. (Julie Rodgers, 5/5)

The Hill: Finding A Balance Between Protecting Our Youth And Saving 40 Million Smokers’ Lives
The FDA is cracking down on the sale of e-cigarettes to kids in light of the growing popularity of the vaping device JUUL. Simultaneously, the FDA supports the use of these much less harmful products for smokers who use them to replace smoking deadly cigarettes. Both can be achieved in a balanced fashion without panic. Protecting youth can go hand in glove with saving the lives of the 40 million smokers who will die prematurely if they cannot quit or switch to substantially less harmful alternative products like e-cigarettes. (David Abrams, 5/5)

San Antonio Press-Express: Needle Exchanges Merit Role In Battle Against Opioid Epidemic
Needle exchange programs have a controversial history, but medical experts and multiple studies have long acknowledged them for reducing harm when it comes to injection drug use. There have been repeated failed attempts to get such a program going for more than a decade, but now a local task force set up to combat the opioid epidemic is hoping to resurrect the idea. It has much merit. (5/5)

Seattle Times: One Choice Can Change A Life Forever: How Opioid Misuse Destroyed My Family
If my sons, Jack and Nick, had known about the risk of misusing prescription medication, they would have made a difference choice that night. They did not know that prescription drugs could kill them. (Becky Savage, 5/4)

Des Moines Register: Legislature Can Stop Iowans' Pain By Increasing Accepted Level Of THC
In the final hours of the 2017 Iowa legislative session, a bill was passed authorizing the sale and manufacturing of medical cannabis in the state of Iowa. This monumental legislation finally gave Iowans who battle disease and pain an alternative medication to traditional pharmaceutical drugs, including opioids that are now crippling many in our state. The original legislation limited Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to 3 percent. This cap on THC will benefit few; for most, it will fail to provide the relief the legislation ultimately promised. Hundreds of advocates, ordinary citizens and terminal patients throughout Iowa have lobbied the Iowa Legislature for years, expressing compassionate stories of suffering and uncontrollable pain. But without removing the THC cap, those suffering will be unable to receive the medicine they need in an affordable and practical way. (R.W. Nelson, 5/4)

Columbus Dispatch: Caregiver Job Is Too Important For Puny Pay
In one respect, the “Crisis of Care” described by Dispatch reporter Rita Price in a series of stories last Sunday and Monday is simple: The pay for workers who provide direct care for people with disabilities is so low and the responsibilities so high that not enough people are willing to do it. If only fixing it were as simple. Such caregivers, called direct-support professionals or DSPs, generally are paid through Medicaid waivers. Medicaid is the monster devouring state budgets around the country including in Ohio, and very few lawmakers are interested in spending a dime more on it, for anything. But that can’t be the final word for the tens of thousands of Ohioans with developmental disabilities who need reliable, competent care to live safely at home. (5/6)

Detroit News: We Must Protect Seniors From Abuse
Getting older is scary, especially if you reach a point where you’re forced to rely on others for help at home or in a care facility. Sadly, senior citizens and other vulnerable adults in this position are particularly susceptible to physical and emotional abuse, neglect and financial exploitation. Elder abuse is a growing problem only getting worse as our population ages. Research indicates that thousands of elderly adults are harmed in the United States each and every day. ... I recently introduced a plan to help improve the reporting of abuse through a detailed form provided to law enforcement who are called to investigate situations involving frail and vulnerable adults. (Jim Runestad, 5/6)