Viewpoints: House Lawsuit On Health Law ‘Misguided’; FDA’s Rules On Drug Claims At Issue

The Washington Post: A Misguided Lawsuit
Amazingly, yet another lawsuit challenging a significant provision of the Affordable Care Act remains pending in court. This time, however, what is at stake is not a disagreement about Obamacare, but a question about the role of the judiciary: Should the House be able to bring a lawsuit simply because it disagrees with how the president is interpreting the statutes that the full Congress has enacted? The answer is no. Allowing interpretive disagreements between the legislature and the executive to be resolved in federal court would constitute the single most radical expansion of the authority of federal judges in more than 200 years. (Walter Dellinger, 8/16)

The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire: The Next Obamacare Battleground: State Insurance Premiums
The New York Times reported last week on the Obama administration, in an effort “to avoid another political uproar over the Affordable Care Act,” urging state insurance commissioners to hold down premium increases for 2016. ... But trends in many states appear likely to force premiums higher. Continued low enrollment after the 2015 open-enrollment season means that some insurers still face a group of enrollees who are older and sicker than their initial projections. (Chris Jacobs, 8/14)

The New York Times' Upshot blog: Donald Trump, Moderate Republican
Donald Trump may be the “post-policy candidate,” but when you strip away the bluster and the outrageous commentary that have defined his campaign to find his occasional, substantive statements about public policy, a surprising fact emerges: Mr. Trump is a moderate Republican. ... Instead of promoting his ideological purity, he notes that policy choices are circumstance-specific. For example, he’s not a priori opposed to single-payer health care. “It works in Canada,” he said at the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 6. “It works incredibly well in Scotland.” Even in the United States, “it could have worked in a different age,” but it wouldn’t work very well right now, he said. So instead, he’d replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” which would take care of people who can’t afford health insurance. (Josh Barro, 8/14)

The Wall Street Journal: A Free-Speech Clinic For The FDA
The Food and Drug Administration thinks its powers are so total that it can even prohibit drug companies from making true claims about their products. Not so fast. A federal judge in an important and closely watched test case in New York has called this political control a violation of the First Amendment. At issue are off-label prescriptions. ... [The FDA] said drug makers could engage in off-label marketing in limited ways if the FDA edited and signed off on the materials first. The word for this is censorship, which a small company called Amarin Pharma is now challenging, at considerable risk of FDA retaliation. (8/14)

Los Angeles Times: Don't Allow Prescription Drugs To Become A Marketing Free-For-All
If the Food and Drug Administration can't regulate how pharmaceutical companies market their drugs to doctors, its ability to protect the public will be severely diminished. A federal court ruling last week makes this scenario possible, and it will take a concerted effort by the FDA to continue setting limits on eager pharmaceutical salespeople. (8/14)

The New York Times: The Ebola Vaccine We Needed
About 27,000 people in West Africa have been infected with the Ebola virus and more than 11,000 of them have died since the outbreak began last year. Many could have been saved if an effective vaccine had been available. But the world relies on drug companies to create new vaccines and medications, and they have no financial incentive to do so for diseases that mostly affect poor countries. Clearly, the world needs a better mechanism for vaccine development. ... Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a bold proposal by three doctors for an international vaccine fund with an initial capitalization of $2 billion. (8/14)

The Washington Post: Why Ethical Psychologists Play An Important Role In Interrogations
On Aug. 7, the American Psychological Association overwhelmingly approved a sweeping ban on any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations conducted by the U.S. government. This ban includes even non-coercive interrogations. ... For me the APA ban is simply sidestepping responsibility for what the organization failed to do, and still has not done, in regard to the psychologists who took part in harsh interrogations or witnessed and abetted “soft” torture or so-called enhanced interrogation techniques for the U.S. military, other countries’ militaries and police, the CIA and so forth. Those psychologists should have been, and should still be, called up on ethics charges and have their APA memberships revoked. (Anne Speckhard, 8/16)

The New York Times: The V.A.’s Woman Problem
Of the almost 22 million veterans in the United States today, more than two million are women, and of those, over 635,000 are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs system, double the number before 9/11. Women are the fastest growing group of veterans treated by the V.A., and projections show that women will make up over 16 percent of the country’s veterans by midcentury. Like Ms. Brooks, many female veterans are returning home with PTSD — the No. 1 complaint among women seeking treatment at V.A. health facilities. Hypertension and depression are the next two largest diagnostic categories for women. And one in five female veterans treated by the V.A. reported having experienced military sexual trauma. Unfortunately, these veterans aren’t always getting the care they require from a system originally designed to serve mostly men. (Helen Thorpe, 8/15)

The Washington Post: Fertility Clinics Destroy Embryos All The Time. Why Aren’t Conservatives After Them?
Last month, my husband and I signed forms donating an embryo we had conceived to medical research. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans are vowing to defund Planned Parenthood for allowing women who have abortions to make the same choice. (Margo Kaplan, 8/14)

The New York Times: Why We Need Fetal Tissue Research
Hidden-camera videos showing Planned Parenthood staffers discussing fetal tissue donations have led not just to efforts to defund the organization, but to calls for an end to the use of fetal tissue in research. In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the law and bioethics professor R. Alta Charo explains why these calls are misguided. Fetal tissue is not only being used in potentially life-saving medical research, it has already saved countless lives. (Anna North, 8/14)

The New York Times: Coke Tries To Sugarcoat The Truth On Calories
The Coca-Cola Company, which has suffered a large decline in consumption of sugary sodas as consumers worry about obesity, has formed a new organization to emphasize exercise as the best way to control obesity and to play down the importance of cutting calories. Coke and other beverage makers have long funneled money to industry-leaning scientists and formed innocent-sounding front groups to spread the message that sugary sodas have no deleterious effect on health and should not be taxed or regulated. The new organization, the nonprofit Global Energy Balance Network, is the latest effort to put a “science based” gloss on industry positions. (8/14)

The Baltimore Sun: Can Maryland Region Become A Top Biotech Hub By 2023?
The Maryland region is one of the richest sources of health care knowledge and research innovation in the world. Here you can find more than 800 life sciences companies, 70 federal labs, regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and elite academic, medical and research institutions. ... Our goal is to place our region among the top three biotech hubs in the U.S. by 2023. To achieve this objective, we intend to develop a comprehensive strategic plan and a branding strategy that clearly portrays the benefits of the Maryland region as the heart of the biotech industry. (Reg Seet, Rich Bendis, Phil Schiff, 8/16)