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After talking about it endlessly, Republican presidential candidates are finally starting to get specific about how they intend to replace the Affordable Care Act. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker released his plan last week. As the reaction to it shows, Republicans have to be ready with answers to a lot of hard questions. One of the most crucial: How would they protect people with pre-existing conditions? Left to their own devices, after all, insurers have an incentive to charge higher premiums to potential customers who already have chronic health conditions - - or not to offer them coverage at all. (Ramesh Ponnuru, 8/25)

For employers, the big ogre still lurking in the mists of the Affordable Care Act is the so-called Cadillac health plan tax, a levy on employer-sponsored health insurance plans valued above a certain threshold. The tax starts in 2018, when the thresholds will be $10,200 for single coverage and $27,500 for family plans, adjusted thereafter for inflation. Any value over those thresholds will be taxed at 40%. For a single employee whose coverage comes to $12,000, for example, the employer would pay tax of $720. (Michael Hiltzik, 8/25)

Disturbing videos that show Planned Parenthood personnel casually discussing the sale of fetal organs from abortions have caused widespread outrage. As each new video is released, the calls for Congress to cut Planned Parenthood’s federal funding grow stronger. No matter where you stand in that debate, the videos provide unarguable proof that current laws governing the fetal-tissue trade don’t work. Congress must tighten them. (Scott Gottlieb, 8/25)

The videos seek to show that Planned Parenthood has violated federal law by selling fetal tissue to scientific researchers. It has long been legal for patients to donate culled fetal tissue for medical research and for abortion clinics to recoup the costs they incur to facilitate the donations. The videos are strategically edited and employ familiar antiabortion shock tactics, such as the use of gruesome images of fetal tissue and inflammatory language; they may show distressing insensitivity on the part of some Planned Parenthood staff but there is certainly nothing close to illegality. ... Absent from the videos, meanwhile, is information on why these tissue donations have been allowed to happen: to assist in life-improving and life-saving medical breakthroughs. (8/25)

This the second part of my extended response to Katha Pollitt’s questions for abortion opponents, inspired by the still-ongoing release of Planned Parenthood sting videos .... Your list of questions for pro-lifers, like your recent book, is premised on the idea that our side has won major victories over the past few decades, both by passing various sorts of restrictions and by driving the real case for abortion rights into a kind of cultural underground. Obviously I think you’ve somewhat overstated our success .... If America is more pro-life than it used to be (again, an arguable point but a plausible one), the era in which it’s become more pro-life seems to have been pretty good for female advancement overall. (Ross Douthat, 8/25)

The battle for the Republican presidential nomination has produced an unexpectedly intense burst of attacks on women’s reproductive rights, not only on the right to abortion, but also by implication on some of the most commonly used methods of contraception. The shift to an aggressively conservative posture stands in direct contrast to the party’s previous five presidential nominees, all of whom sought during their campaigns to play down social issues. (Thomas B. Edsall, 8/26)

A lot of people would not work in a place where co-workers smoke. And most people will never be faced with that decision because smoking is typically banned in the workplace on the sensible ground that secondhand smoke is dangerous to everyone. Should long and unpredictable hours, excessive job demands, capricious management and other aspects of the modern workplace be banned on the same ground? (Teresa Tritch, 8/25)

With my elderly stroke patient’s back arched and his head tilted back, too many angles of his skeleton were on display. A nose covered in thin gray skin sliced the air like a shark fin, and beneath it his mouth hung open. He didn’t look like he was resting. Another nurse walking by put it bluntly, as nurses tend to do. “Is he alive?” (Kristen McConnell, 8/26)