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At a recent meeting with pharmaceutical-industry bigwigs, President Trump declared that “we’re going to be cutting regulations at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.” He also said that “we’re going to have tremendous protection for the people." It’s hard to see how he can do both. (David Lazarus, 2/10)

If someone has a mental illness severe enough that he cannot work or manage his own money, should he be allowed to own a gun? In the waning weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama answered that question. Motivated by Adam Lanza's bloody rampage at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six educators in 2012, Obama imposed a rule that barred gun ownership for people who qualify for Social Security disability insurance because their mental illness keeps them from working, and who cannot manage their benefits. That pool is small — just 75,000 Americans. (2/10)

The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind giving patients the “right-to-try” experimental drugs outside clinical trials. While such laws purport to offer hope for the dying, they will actually slow medical progress. (Merrill Goozner, 2/11)

Not only did federal officials determine last month that KanCare was “substantively out of compliance with federal statutes and regulations,” they determined the previous month that services for people with disabilities were also out of compliance. Yet state lawmakers had to learn about both decisions by reading about them in the newspaper. (2/12)

Gov. Terry Branstad said in 2012 he would begin voluntarily paying 20 percent of his state-funded health insurance premiums. He encouraged other state workers, including lawmakers, to follow suit. The next year, the governor said some legislators, who had previously enjoyed premium-free health insurance, had started contributing 20 percent. But not a single lawmaker is paying that share, according to December 2016 data obtained by The Des Moines Register. And it appears they are violating state law. (2/11)

Ohio lawmakers are asking good questions about the money that Gov. John Kasich's proposed budget would devote to the state's opioid epidemic and the collateral damage from it. Last week, Republican and Democrat legislators said they are concerned that the budget does not do enough. The concern is warranted. Ohio leads the nation in drug-overdose deaths, with 3,050 recorded in 2015, the most recent year with complete statistics. (2/13)

Psychedelics, the fabled enlightenment drugs of the ’60s, are making a comeback — this time as medical treatment. A recent study claimed that psilocybin, a mushroom-derived hallucinogenic, relieves anxiety and depression in people with life-threatening cancer. Anecdotal reports have said similar things about so-called microdoses of LSD. ... I fear that in our desire to combat suffering, we will ignore the potential risks of these drugs, or be seduced by preliminary research that seems promising. (Richard A. Friedman, 2/13)

You might think that once drugs, devices and medical procedures are shown to be effective, they quickly become available. You might also think that those shown not to work as well as alternatives are immediately discarded. Reasonable assumptions both, but you’d be wrong. (Austin Frakt and Jonathan Skinner, 2/13)