Viewpoints: Taking On The Opioid Crisis; When Palliative Care Is The Best Option

Wisconsin State Journal: Go After Doctors To Solve Opioid Crisis
Last year, 4.1 million prescriptions were written in Wisconsin for opioids -- more than two prescriptions for every three people in the state -- and this is actually down a million in the last three years.If you want to know where the drugs are coming from that are killing people, you don’t have to look any further than this obscene number of prescriptions. And the manufacturers and wholesale distributors didn’t write one of them. The hard truth is that we have an opioid crisis in Dane County -- and in Wisconsin and across the nation -- because doctors and pharmacists are making big money writing opioid prescriptions for whoever wants one, without asking questions. (Michael Reichert, 4/16)

Tallahassee Democrat: Time To Hold Big Pharma Responsible For Opioid Crisis
More than a decade ago, the state of Florida held the tobacco companies responsible for the enormous costs that nicotine addiction caused its citizens. The time has come to hold the drug companies responsible for the opioid epidemic. A group of Florida’s mental health providers has filed suit to do just that. For years, the drug companies marketed opioid drugs as non-addictive and safe, and they were widely prescribed to Florida citizens. Trouble was, of course, that it became quickly learned that opioids are extremely addictive, and the costs of addiction have reached into every community in Florida. (Ryan Robbs, 4/16)

Austin American-Statesman: How Fentanyl Got Its Grip On Texas
As a former Border Patrol Agent, Member of Congress and Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I understand first-hand the difficulties of securing our borders. Perhaps today, there may be no more important border-security priority than stopping fentanyl, the synthetic opioid, from entering the United States from Mexico and China. (Silvestre Reyes, 4/15)

The Wall Street Journal: Barbara Bush Faces Death With Courage
Barbara Bush’s decision to stop aggressive treatment for lung and heart disease at 92 is a valiant one. Her condition has worsened over the past year, leading to a recent series of hospitalizations. Now she is facing death with fortitude, courage and realism. She should inspire everyone in the medical arena, doctors and patients alike. (Marc Siegel, 4/16)

Los Angeles Times: Garcetti's Plans For Homeless Shelters Raise As Many Questions As They Answer
In his state of the city speech Monday, Mayor Eric Garcetti eloquently conjured the image of a child who sees a homeless woman sleeping on a bench and asks whether she has someone to take care of her. "The answer is yes," Garcetti said. "The city of Los Angeles is going to take care of her and bring her home." Certainly, the new plans that the mayor laid out in his speech for financing shelters across the city of Los Angeles are a start toward finding at least temporary housing — about 1,500 beds, he estimates. But his plans raised as many concerns as they addressed. (4/17)

The New York Times: The Ethical Case For Having A Baby With Down Syndrome
My wife’s ultrasound turned up something abnormal in the baby’s heart — an otherwise innocuous feature that correlates with genetic conditions such as Down syndrome. A series of tests confirmed that our son indeed had Down syndrome. We were given the option of abortion, but my wife, Jan, already regarded him as our baby, and a few months later Aaron was born. The first days after the diagnosis were hard. We thought about our son’s future, and our future. We went through a period of grieving. But we soon came to accept that Aaron would have Down syndrome, and to accept him as a member of our family. (Chris Kaposy, 4/16)

The Hill: To Reduce Health-Care Disparities We Must Address Biases In Medical School Admissions
As the gatekeepers to their institutions, medical school admissions committees wield a powerful influence over the health care of the nation. Because of this, they have an ethical obligation to be as objective as possible. The Association of American Medical Colleges issued a report in 2015 that showed racial disparity in medical school acceptance rates nationwide. Black applicants had only a 34 percent medical school acceptance rate compared to 44 percent for Caucasians and 42 percent for Asians and Latinos. Are admissions committees unconsciously biased against minorities? At The Ohio State University College of Medicine, we set out to determine the answer to that question. (Quinn Capers, 4/14)

The Wall Street Journal: How Bad Is The Government’s Science?
Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid? The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. (Peter Wood and David Randall, 4/16)

Kansas City Star: KU Needs You To Help Latinos Fight Alzheimer’s Disease
Over the course of the last movie awards season, “Coco,” the latest animated film from Disney’s Pixar, won not only the Oscar for best animated feature film, but also the best original song Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and an Annie Award. The film’s co-directors noted that having the movie portray Mexican cultural traditions was a major focus for them during the film’s development. But the film artfully incorporated another complex theme rarely found in major motion pictures: living with and caring for someone with dementia. Through their masterful direction, the film creators took a difficult but important topic — dementia’s impact on Latino families — and transformed it into a piece of art that resonates with broad audiences. (Jamie Peraless, 4/16)

Ventura County Star: The Right To Health Care
I have been practicing family medicine in Oxnard for 30 years and it is a natural time for reflecting on my career. My largest regrets are the patients who died preventable deaths for lack of health insurance; people who presented late or for whom a charity treatment plan could not be patched together. Amid the current confusing and incomplete array of options in California for health insurance is the hope provided by Senate Bill 562. The basic premise of 562 is that, like education for children and Medicare for seniors and fire and police protection, everyone should have health insurance simply because they are a Californian. (Josephine Soliz, 4/16)

Des Moines Register: Andie Dominick Named 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner For Editorial Writing
Andie Dominick, an editorial writer at the Des Moines Register, on Monday won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for a selection of Iowa-focused editorials criticizing policies that restrict access to health care. ...The Pulitzer Prize citation states that Dominick won "for examining in a clear, indignant voice, free of cliché or sentimentality, the damaging consequences for poor Iowa residents of privatizing the state’s administration of Medicaid." The Register invited Iowans to share the experiences they have had with Medicaid under privatized management, which allowed Dominick to put a human face on denials of care, loss of access to services, and providers going out of business because they were not being reimbursed by for-profit insurers. (4/16)

Des Moines Register: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Editorial: Privatized Medicaid Is Worst Prank Ever
EDITOR'S NOTE: Andie Dominick of the Des Moines Register won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. This is one of those editorials, described by the awards committee this way: For examining in a clear, indignant voice, free of cliché or sentimentality, the damaging consequences for poor Iowa residents of privatizing the state’s administration of Medicaid. ...Saturday was the first anniversary of Gov. Terry Branstad’s Medicaid privatization experiment. On April 1, 2016, Iowa abandoned state management of the $4 billion health insurance program for more than 500,000 poor Iowans and hired three for-profit insurers to take over. One year later, the entire ordeal is like an April Fool’s joke with no end. The joke is on low-income Iowans who have lost access to health services. These include home-bound, disabled people who rely on daily visits from caregivers. (4/16).