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If you’d asked me a few years ago to name the Republican Party’s top policy priorities, I would have said: 1) Obamacare repeal and 2) tax cuts.Today, the GOP seems to believe that both are duds with voters. Worse than duds: huge liabilities, ripe for Democratic exploitation. (Catherine Rampell, 9/24)

Last December, after Senate Republicans successfully passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell went to the floor of the US Senate and declared, “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.” Senator McConnell, you might want to call your office. According to a report last week from Bloomberg News, an internal Republican National Committee poll shows that the GOP’s top legislative accomplishment has become an albatross around the neck of the party. By a margin of 61 percent to 30 percent, those polled view the tax cut as benefiting “large corporations and rich Americans” over “middle class families.” A majority of voters fear that the measure will lead to cuts in Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit, something that Republicans have already hinted at. (Michael A. Cohen, 9/24)

Predictably, politicians and pundits are questioning whether Christine Blasey Ford’s disclosures about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be believed in view of how long she was silent. The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network reports that 1 in 4 of female students ages 18-24 experience rape or sexual assault, but that only 20 percent of them report it. According to the Justice Department, girls ages 14 to 17 experience the highest rate of sexual assault among all groups: close to 11 percent. For all children under 18, only about 13 percent of sexual assaults are reported to police. (Mary Shannon Little, 9/25)

President Trump began his week at the U.N. General Assembly with an event seeking to prompt action against the global drug trade. “The call is simple,” Trump said at an event early Monday morning. “Reduce drug demand, cut off the supply of illicit drugs, expand treatment and strengthen international cooperation. If we take these steps together, we can save the lives of countless people in all corners of the world.” (Adam Taylor, 9/24)

The Trump administration has taken another step in its program to use fear and cruelty to drive out legal, as well as illegal, immigrants. On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule that would enable it to deny green cards and visas to immigrants here legally who have used public health and nutrition assistance, including Medicaid and food stamps. (9/24)

They're doing it in school bathrooms. In locker rooms. In hallways and on school grounds. The most brazen of the students? They're doing it right inside classrooms. They're vaping — inhaling vapor from electronic cigarettes that often contain the highly addictive nicotine, lured by devices that are easy to hide from adults and by flavors such as mango, crème brûlée, mint and nectar. The most recent data show that 3 million school-age children — including more than 600,000 middle school students — have tried vaping. Many are concerned that it could be a gateway to stronger substances, such as regular cigarettes or marijuana. (Lori Higgins, 9/25)

My emergency medicine team had spent several tense hours working to ease the severe asthma attack that was making breathing difficult for our 8-year-old patient. Once she was stable, her mom asked, “Why do you think her breathing got so much worse than usual?” I gave her the standard answer — maybe her daughter caught a virus or her medicine regimen needs to be changed — but I cringed a bit as I stripped off my gloves and tossed them into the overflowing waste bin, knowing that’s not the whole story. There is also air pollution from factories and power plants near her home, smog from cars and trucks, and pollution from the hospital she is being treated in. (Jonathan E. Slutzman, 9/25)

Of the many dubious reasons insurers use for denying claims, one of the most bizarre is telling a patient they neglected to obtain prior approval for treatment in the midst of a medical emergency. Because, of course, the first thing most people think of in a life-or-death situation is phoning some insurance company’s call center and jumping through bureaucratic hoops. (David Lazarus, 9/21)

Is this the health care breakthrough Massachusetts has been waiting for? Or is it just another burden on consumers in the making? In essence, those are the questions facing state regulators as they try to decide whether to bless a proposed merger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Lahey Health, two prestigious institutions that want to combine into a new 13-hospital powerhouse. (9/21)