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When more than half of people who need mental health care can’t or don’t get it -- as is true in the U.S. -- other problems arise. For sufferers, these include physical illness, lost earnings, substance abuse and suicide. For society, there is greater crime and homelessness. (6/21)

Decisions about our health care — what type of insurance to have, which doctor to see or what kind of medicine to take — are some of the most personal choices we make throughout our lives. The way I answered those questions when I graduated from college is not necessarily the way I answer them as a husband and father today, nor is that the way I will answer them in the future. As we grow older, our situations and our needs change. We switch jobs, we have kids, we move across state lines and, at some point if we are lucky, we retire. (Kevin Brady, 6/22)

The graphic above embodies the latest good-news story connected with the Affordable Care Act. It shows how projections of U.S. healthcare spending growth have come sharply down since Obamacare’s enactment in 2010. The latest projections are $2.6 trillion lower than the original post-ACA baseline forecast through 2020 — a reduction in projected spending of almost 13%. This is known as “bending the cost curve”: Americans will be spending more in 2020 than they are now, but the rate of increase looks to be significantly slower than anyone expected. In raw numbers, the new expectation is that 2020 spending will come to about $4 trillion, compared to the $4.6 trillion projected at the time of the act’s enactment. (Michael Hiltzik, 6/21)

If you haven’t been following the Obamacare news recently -- and given how much else has been going on, there’s a good chance you haven’t -- then you may have missed the news that insurers' rate-increase requests for 2017 are quite large. A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation says the cost of the “benchmark” plan (the second-lowest-cost silver plan in a market, which is the price used to calculate subsidies) will go up 10 percent this year, double the rate at which prices increased last year. The lowest-cost silver plans are also seeing substantial hikes. This matters because these are the most frequently purchased plans. (Megan McArdle, 6/21)

Health care costs are expected to grow 6.5% through next year. While costs have finally reached a point of equilibrium after years of double-digit growth, they are still expanding far faster than overall inflation, leaving employers and insurers trying to figure out how to stomach the new increases. The answer may not please many consumers. (Laura Lorenzetti, 6/21)

Back in February, when President Obama first asked Congress for $1.8 billion to fight the Zika virus, the country was still in the grip of winter, with spring one month away. Now, here we are in the first week of summer . . . and Congress is still refusing to come up with funds to fight this increasingly harmful menace. Lawmakers in Washington appear to be in no hurry to help, but here at Ground Zero, Zika looms as a very real threat to the health and welfare of our residents, and the need for help is urgent. (6/21)

During a hospital stay, you need comfort, support, compassion, and kindness. No matter how skilled the clinical care you receive or how successful the treatments, if these human elements are missing, you’re likely to give the hospital low marks. A 2013 study done at two large Baltimore hospitals showed that the average time a doctor spends with each of his or her patients in the hospital is only eight minutes. (Jim Hemmer, 6/21)

Is your doctor willing to sell you out for the price of a sandwich? That’s the implication a lot of people seem to have taken from a new study published by JAMA Internal Medicine. It looked at the prescribing behavior of physicians for whom pharmaceutical reps bought meals, and found that those who got even a meal worth less than $20 -- think Olive Garden or Potbelly, not Le Bernardin -- were significantly more likely to prescribe brand-name medications that had a cheaper alternative. (Megan McArdle, 6/21)

Sure, out of sheer cussedness at this point, the state still refuses to accept billions of dollars in federal health-care assistance readily available through Obamacare. Even as other Republican-led states find a means to accept the assistance, Georgia has not, and the impact has been substantial. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Georgia has the second-highest rate of uninsured in the country, at 18 percent of the nonelderly population. (Jay Bookman, 6/21)

America’s opioid-addiction epidemic could be entering a new and catastrophically dangerous phase. The opioids circulating widely today — drugs like Oxy Contin and hydrocodone — pale in comparison to the dangers posed by another drug spreading in street markets: fentanyl. (6/21)

Addiction is a chronic, treatable disease, like diabetes and high blood pressure. Unlike most other chronic diseases, though, addiction comes with the burden of stigma. This stigma presents enormous problems. (Sarah E. Wakeman and Eric M. Weil, 6/21)

California should join New York and Florida in shielding patients from surprise out-of-network medical bills experienced by more than 20 percent of patients who have ER visits, surgeries or hospitalizations. The practice can cost patients thousands of dollars and has sent some into bankruptcy. If you've experienced the shock, you'll agree this has to stop. Out-of-network bills occur when hospitals or treating physicians use medical professionals not in the patient's network for special services, sometimes without patients' knowledge. (6/21)

The irony is that all of Centene’s money already comes from taxpayers. It manages health care programs, most of them Medicaid programs, some of them created by the Affordable Care Act. It scrutinizes health care spending and figures out ways to save states money. (6/21)