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The Trump administration is asking Congress to approve a $7 billion cut to the Children's Health Insurance Program as part of a package to reduce a range of previously agreed upon federal spending. Republicans say none of the money being cut was going toward helping children and that their plan would just strike money that has been approved but is not being spent on a specific program. Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to cut a program that provides health insurance for 9 million children in the United States, many of whom live in poverty. So, which version is right? (Jeff Stein, 5/8)

Those of us with long memories — defined in this turbocharged world as memories that date back more than 90 days — will recall that one of the biggest cliffhangers of that bygone season involved the funding of the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. CHIP, which costs the federal government a paltry $14.5 billion a year but covers 9 million children and pregnant mothers, finally got funded by Congress in January, more than three months after the lawmakers allowed it to expire. (Michael Hiltzik, 5/8)

Transparency is becoming a fashionable buzzword in many walks of life. In health care, it is rearranging the relationships between patients and those who care for them. Looking at health care from different vantage points, we believe that transparent interactions among patients, clinicians, and payers hold considerable promise for improving the quality of health care and containing costs. Here’s our vision for how health care may soon evolve. (Suzanne Delbanco and Tom DelBanco, 5/9)

Even as overdoses and deaths from prescription painkillers devastated the nation, two of the largest drug distributors in the United States delivered at least 12.3 million opioid painkillers to a single pharmacy in tiny Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va. — population 1,779 — over eight years starting in 2006. That’s more than 6,900 pills for every man, woman and child in the small town. Even that accounts for only a fraction of the prescription opioids that distributors pumped into rural towns in West Virginia — a state with the nation’s highest rate of overdose deaths in 2016. Did any of these sophisticated corporations think there was something odd about millions of pills going to independent pharmacies in rural areas? On Tuesday, top executives of five opioid distributors had their chance to answer before a House committee that has been investigating pill dumping in West Virginia. The moment produced a couple of apologies, a bunch of lame excuses and an astonishing assertion by four of the executives that their companies made no contribution to the opioid epidemic that has killed 300,000 people in the USA since 1999. (5/8)

America’s pharmaceutical distributors understand that the opioid epidemic is a public health emergency, requiring the urgent attention of everyone involved in health care. We have invested heavily in our diversion-prevention capabilities and in our communities to help fight this epidemic. In addition, we support aggressive policy measures that would significantly reduce the overprescribing of opioids. Distributors are logistics experts. We neither prescribe, manufacture, promote nor dispense medicines. Thus, attempting to blame us for a problem that developed because of widespread medical practice and federal policy is a serious distortion of reality. (John M. Gray, 5/8)

When DNA evidence led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo in the Golden State Killer case last month, there was considerable relief and celebration among investigators, survivors and the public at-large. But as the public learned the details of the investigation — that investigators had uploaded a detailed genetic profile created from crime-scene DNA to a public genealogical database to find matches to relatives — companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com were quick to announce that they hadn’t been involved. (Vera Eidelman, 5/8)

Central Australia is being ravaged by an epidemic of human T-cell leukemia virus type 1, or HTLV-1. A staggering 40 percent of adults in rural Australia are infected. This epidemic is in addition to the estimated 10-20 million people infected with HTLV-1 globally.Ten percent of people infected with HTLV-1 will develop certain kinds of cancer, lung disease and chronic degenerative diseases such as adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma, bronchiectasis and HTLV-1-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis. Further, the HTLV-1 virus weakens the immune system, increasing the chances that those infected will develop other illnesses, including HIV. (Noelle Sullivan, 5/8)

If Americans were 25 times as likely to die of cancer as citizens of other wealthy nations, the federal government would be pouring billions into research to find the causes. Yet there is much less interest in examining why the U.S. gun homicide rate is 25 times as high as in peer countries. For Americans ages 15 to 24, the rate is 49 times as high. Among two dozen wealthy nations combined, nine of every 10 youths murdered with a gun are Americans, as are nine of 10 women. No other successful nation tolerates a tide of roughly 100 shooting deaths per day. The U.S. government has spent just 1.6 percent as much on gun policy research in recent decades as it has on other leading causes of mortality, such as traffic crashes or sepsis, the RAND Corporation has found. (5/4)

Many in Britain took great exception to President Trump’s comments about the rash of knife attacks and murders that have plagued London in recent months. Speaking to the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last week, Trump called back to an old NRA talking point when, after noting Britain’s “unbelievably tough gun laws,” he added, “they don’t have guns, they have knives and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital. They say it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital.” (Robert J. Spitzer, 5/9)

When two women were shot standing outside Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital the other night — waiting for news of a relative who’d himself been shot earlier — a witness asked a Tribune reporter:“What kind of city do we live in?” The next day the hospital was locked down because of a virtual riot in the lobby. Chicago is heading toward a mayoral election year so City Hall insists that crime is down. But ER workers — the nurses and doctors who deal with threats and angry families and friends of gang members — know different. (John Kass, 5/8)

Imagine the world if men could get pregnant: Birth control would likely be available without a prescription. Abortion might not even be controversial. Men would never tolerate government forcing them to carry a fetus in their bodies for nine months, give birth and change the entire trajectory of their lives. But it is women, not men, who get pregnant. So it was generations of women who fought to secure access to contraception and the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It was women who were so desperate not to have a child, they underwent botched abortions or self-induced them and sometimes died. And it's women more often then men who raise children without help from a partner. Now Iowa’s female governor has betrayed Iowa women. Gov. Kim Reynolds, who grew up during a period of history when women were allowed to make their own personal health decisions, signed into law a bill that strips other women of those decisions, their freedom and their rights.  (5/8)

For those who are too poor to afford health insurance, Medicaid is a lifeline. This joint federal and state program doesn’t care whether you’re white or black, Christian or Muslim, Republican or Democrat, a city dweller or a rural resident. In states that expanded their Medicaid programs under Obamacare, all you have to be is poor enough to qualify. But maybe not in Michigan. Last month, the State Senate passed a bill that would require Medicaid beneficiaries to find work or else lose their coverage. (Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit, 5/8)

Maryland’s Affordable Care Act insurance exchange is, in the estimate of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield CEO Chet Burrell, in the “advanced stages of a death spiral.” That may understate the case a bit. It’s not just the Obamacare exchange that could collapse if the Trump administration doesn’t promptly approve a bipartisan plan to stabilize premiums; Maryland’s entire health insurance system could be at risk. (5/8)

Remember that ’80s shampoo commercial, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”? California is beautiful, and it’s big, and it’s going economic gangbusters — the fifth largest economy in the world now, hardly the “out of control” failing state that President Trump has called it. But part of the reason it’s beautiful is that, with the long-ago blessing of the federal government, the state took serious measures to clear away the gross, choking smog that messed up that beauty, not to mention our lungs. (Patt Morrison, 5/9)