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President Trump’s State of the Union address was 80 minutes long. He spent just 49 seconds on the opioid epidemic, something he has declared to be a public health emergency. The brevity of his remarks on opioids is indicative of the lack of action taken by the federal government in the three months since the emergency declaration. For us on the front lines of the epidemic in Baltimore, as elsewhere around the country, the declaration has had no impact at all. The federal government continues to delay committing new funding to treating addiction as the disease that it is, while hundreds of people die every day from overdoses. (Leana S. Wen, 2/1)

Here’s the good news about the announcement this week that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are forming a new company to cover health care for their employees: If you’re one of the million-plus people who work at these companies, or a family member of one, you’re likely to get cheaper, better health care pretty soon. Here’s the bad news: If you’re one of the approximately 300 million other Americans, you might not see savings for a long time, if ever. And in the short term at least, you could be hit by bigger medical bills. (Elisabeth Rosenthal, 2/1)

Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are publicly traded, profit-oriented corporations. So it is interesting that when they announced their new joint health-care venture this week they made a point of saying it would be "an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints."Interesting but maybe not all that surprising: Around the world, health, life and property insurance, as well as various other financial services, have long been provided by nonprofit organizations, mostly in the form of customer-owned mutuals. (Justin Fox, 2/1)

"The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy," said Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett. ... Are the nearly 16 million people laboring in healthcare parasites? Of course not. The healthcare system is a vital cog in our society and a healthy workforce is crucial to its economy. That's why cancer is the better comparison for the system's unsustainable costs. The system is growing too quickly, like a tumor. To restore health, you have to eliminate the cancer, not the vital organ on which the tumor grows. (Merrill Goozner, 1/31)

President Trump told some whoppers in this week's State of the Union speech: His tax cuts were the biggest ever (they weren't), he has added 2.4 million new jobs (only if you count former President Obama's last few months in office), wages are finally rising (they've been slowly but steadily climbing for years). But the one that really got my attention was Trump's declaration that he's committed to addressing "the injustice of high drug prices." (David Lazarus, 2/1)

Two years ago, the Long-Term Care Financing Collaborative proposed a public catastrophic long-term care insurance program. In effect, people would use private insurance, savings, or home equity to pay for the first few years of their care needs, then the government would pick up costs for people with true catastrophic needs. Today, two highly-respected long-term care experts offered an important refinement to that basic structure: A plan that ties the time period before insurance benefits are available to a person’s income. As a result, lower-income people could access new benefits sooner than higher-income people. (Howard Gleckman, 1/31)

As the sports-loving part of the population looks forward to the National Football League's annual Super Bowl on Sunday, legislatures in New York and Illinois are zeroing in on a different aspect of the nation's most popular sport: brain injuries among young players. Lawmakers in both states have introduced measures that would ban tackle football for children under age 12. Making kids wait longer to don pads and helmets is not a bad idea, nor would it be a bad choice to extend such limits to other sports, such as hockey, lacrosse and boxing, where children as young as 8 strap on gloves and protective gear and punch each other in the head. (2/2)

Besides damage resulting from football-related concussions, my husband has never had a diagnosed brain injury. He’s never been in a car accident or fallen off a roof. He never did steroids and, after struggling with alcohol abuse for about six years, off and on, after retirement, hasn’t had a drink in eight years. And he’s only 43. (Emily Kelly, 2/2)

It’s surprising how easy it is to brush off dire existential threats. We remain, for example, unprepared for the next pandemic flu, though experts warn it’s only a matter of time before a new strain capable of killing millions will emerge. ...One problem is that we citizens of the 21st century have also been warned about our “woeful” lack of preparedness for Ebola and similar disease outbreaks, a major earthquake, sea level rise, nuclear war, and a massive asteroid striking the earth. And if that isn’t enough, experts at MIT and Cambridge University are discussing how unprepared we are for threats of technology run amok, such as intelligent machines taking over the world. (Faye Flam, 2/1)

Close your eyes, and conjure up an image of an autistic kid. What springs to mind? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably a socially awkward boy who’s obsessed with gaming.But the time has come to challenge that assumption. A new study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, released Jan. 4, reinforces something I’ve known innately for years, having myself been an undiagnosed autistic girl: It is easy to overlook us. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, autism affects one in 68 children but is four and a half times more prevalent in boys than girls. But that still means there are an awful lot of autistic girls. (Sally J. Pla, 2/1)

Put simply, under the right-to-try bill, a death caused by the use of an experimental drug could not be considered by the FDA in deciding whether to approve or reject the therapy. While this may help address pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry concerns that expanded access programs could jeopardize ongoing studies, it is simply unethical at its core. I’m also worried about the financial, legal, and medical protection afforded to patients and their families under the proposed right-to-try bill. Do patients undergoing right-to-try therapies lose their coverage for hospice? Would insurers be absolved of any responsibility for covering further medical expenses once a patient starts a drug under right-to-try? What if the experimental drug causes hospitalization or leads to additional treatments — who would pay for that? (Michael D. Becker, 2/1)

Bureaucrats botch the rollout of big changes to health care coverage that affect hundreds of thousands of state employees and could have resulted in layoffs at a local insurer. Yet the governor manages to escape much of the blame, as if the agency making the decision went rogue, as if he didn’t appoint half of the board overseeing the agency, as if he doesn’t know how health care works. (Shirley Leung, 1/31)

On Monday, a Kansas legislative committee on corrections got answers to questions they should have been asking all along. Rep. J. Russell Jennings, Chairman of the Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice Oversight, called the hearing after The Star detailed the nearly $2 billion Missouri and Kansas will pay to Corizon Health over a decade to provide health care to inmates. Despite the cost to taxpayers, legislative oversight has been lax, particularly in Missouri. That needs to change. (2/1)

Women are strong and empowered, capable of achieving our goals without abortion. Our Legislature prides itself on caring about women, but SB 320 does nothing to address the real needs of pregnant students, such as housing, child care, lactation stations, diaper changing tables, flexible exam schedules, counseling and pre-natal care. (Wynette Sills, 2/1)

According to the American Medical Association’s 2018 economic impact study, California’s 90,000 physicians generate $232 billion in direct and indirect economic activity, an average of $2.6 million each. U.S. physicians produced $2.3 trillion in economic activity, more than the total economic output for the entire country of Brazil. (Theodore Mazer, 2/1)