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Anthem had some good headlines on Wednesday. The insurer reported second-quarter earnings and revenue that topped estimates, with the latter jumping 7.2 percent from a year earlier. It expects to insure more people than it initially forecast this year, after surprisingly robust growth in its Medicaid business. But beneath the good, there was also bad and ugly. (Max Nisen 7/27)

Now that the party platforms for the 2016 campaign are written and posted online, we can see that Republicans and Democrats are as far apart on health care as they have been for quite some time. Platforms are never implemented as written, and not all candidates endorse every plank in them. However, they signal which issues are important to the parties and, broadly speaking, what candidates aim to do about them. (Larry Levitt, 7/27)

Many healthcare industry leaders believe the Affordable Care Act is too deeply entrenched to be repealed, as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his party promise to do. But in the Democratic National Convention's only public discussion on healthcare policy, architects of the Affordable Care Act Wednesday warned he and congressional Republican leaders could indeed abolish key elements and roll back the insurance expansions and consumer protections. (Harris Meyer, 7/27)

Gone are the days when most patients were discharged with clear diagnoses and in a stable condition. Not only was this good for patients but it served young doctors in training as well. For they saw a patient who had pneumonia or who had an appendectomy go through the full gamut of symptoms and treatment and on to recovery. This gave them confidence in their diagnostic and treatment skills. Now they are deprived of that. (Edward Volpintesta, 7/27)

Once hospitals were where you found a doctor when you suddenly needed one; now doctors are all over the place, from big-box stores to storefront clinics. Hospitals were where you were headed if you were very sick; now you can heed your insurer’s pleas and choose a cheaper emergency center instead. Hospitals were where you stayed when you were too sick to survive at home; now you go home anyway, cobbling together your own nursing services from friends, relatives and drop-in professionals. (Abigail Zuger, 7/25)

Improving the performance of America’s health system will require improving care for the patients who use it most: people with multiple chronic conditions that are often complicated by patients’ limited ability to care for themselves independently and by their complex social needs. Focusing on this population makes sense for humanitarian, demographic, and financial reasons. From a humanitarian standpoint, high-need, high-cost (HNHC) patients deserve heightened attention both because they have major health care problems and because they are more likely than other patients to be affected by preventable health care quality and safety problems, given their frequent contact with the system. Demographically, the aging of our population ensures that HNHC patients, many of whom are older adults, will account for an increasing proportion of users of our health care system. And financially, the care of HNHC patients is costly. One frequently cited statistic is that they compose the 5% of our population that accounts for 50% of the country’s annual health care spending. (David Blumenthal, Bruce Chernof, Terry Fulmer, John Lumpkin, and Jeffrey Selberg, 7/27)

It’s a long way from where I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, to the dining room in Vice President Joe Biden’s home at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Yet that’s where I found myself one day last December, along with a handful of other cancer specialists. We had been invited to offer our perspectives on the current cancer landscape, which contributed to shaping the “cancer moonshot.” I’m convinced that my perspective on medicine as an immigrant is what ultimately got me to the table. (Azra Raza, 7/28)

Vice President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot has galvanized the country in a nonpartisan way as few recent events have. And it should. Virtually every family is, has been, or will be affected by cancer. We all have a stake in seeing the project succeed. (Stanton L. Gerson, 7/27)

Last week, when the Department of Justice charged three people in Miami with fraud and other crimes in a $1 billion scheme to bilk Medicare, it was the single largest criminal case in the nine-year history of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, a coalition of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. A month earlier, a crackdown by the strike force led to civil and criminal charges against 301 people in dozens of schemes totaling $900 million in allegedly false billings. Clearly, health care fraud is vast. Less obvious is that prevention, detection and punishment of fraud have improved in recent years, though that would be threatened if the Affordable Care Act of 2010 were weakened, as Republicans have long demanded. (7/28)

Health regulators in the United States are talked about as the best in the world, but a new study on the spread of stem cell clinics shows what can happen when regulations fall behind. Out of nowhere, over the past two to three years, the clinics have sprung up — 570 in the United States, according to a recent paper — offering untested stem cell treatments for just about every medical use imaginable. (Gina Kolata, 7/28)

At age 83, my mom became steadily incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease and a gradual loss of vision. Finding care for her was a challenge, especially from 1,200 miles away. I quickly learned that my research had vastly underestimated the complications of long-distance caregiving. Problems emerge often, whether you are readily available or not, and they tend to demand immediate attention. Nor had I fully comprehended the extent of the vigilance required to protect against insufficient, low-quality services, whether by home health agencies, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, or hospitals. (Laura Katz Olson, 7/27)