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On March 4 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, with a decision expected in late June. If the court strikes down the payment of government subsidies to those who bought health insurance on the federal exchange, Republicans will at last have a real opportunity to amend ObamaCare. Doing so, however, will be politically perilous. ... Republicans need a strategy that is easy to understand, broadly popular and difficult to oppose. ... I believe that strategy is what I would call “the freedom option.” Every American should have the right to decide not to participate in ObamaCare: If you like ObamaCare and its subsidies, you can keep it. If you don’t, you are free to buy the health insurance that fits your needs. (Phil Gramm, 2/23)

One of the biggest myths pushed in statehouses across the country is that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will be an engine of economic growth. The Obama administration promises that more than 350,000 jobs would be created nationwide in 2015 if all states opted into Obamacare expansion. But the truth is that expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults will discourage work, create massive new welfare cliffs and ultimately shrink the economy, not grow it. (Jonathan Ingram, Nic Horton and Josh Archambault, 2/24)

Sometime next year Social Security’s $150 billion disability-insurance program will become insolvent. The program, which offers income supplements to those who cannot work full time due to physical or mental disabilities, has buckled as the number of beneficiaries has soared to more than 11 million in 2014, from 3.8 million in 1984. The bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board has urged reforms. Yet the Obama administration’s 2016 budget proposes the opposite of reform: an unconditional transfer of revenues from Social Security’s retirement program. (Andrew G. Biggs, 2/23)

The bacteria are winning. Every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least two million people are infected with bacteria that can’t be wiped out with antibiotics, and as a result, 23,000 people die. Direct health care costs from these illnesses are estimated to be as high as $20 billion annually. ... The development of antibiotics has been glacial. We need a completely new approach. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, 2/24)

At a health center [in Tanzania], a young woman is in the recovery room after a Caesarean section. A nurse takes the newborn to a table for cleanup. We (a group organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies) are allowed to enter and see the child. But she starts struggling for breath. Three more nurses enter. One briefly applies bag-and-mask ventilation. Yet the infant’s breathing grows weaker and weaker as she turns a horrible shade of gray. (MIchael Gerson, 2/23)

When reviewing the recent and entirely preventable measles epidemic that began in, of all places, Disneyland, I was reminded of many things. The first was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ranking of the Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century, a list based entirely on reproducible scientific data. The No. 1 achievement, without doubt, was the development of effective immunizations against a battery of infectious scourges such as measles, polio, whooping cough and diphtheria. Yet as physicians treating measles in poorer nations already know and, most recently, those in California are learning, this disease is no weakling in the pantheon of infectious diseases. (Howard Markel, 2/24)