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[T]he Obama administration, while not granting unlimited flexibility, has been reasonably flexible when Republican governors have come to them asking for waivers [in the Medicaid expansion program]. One of the first to get a Medicaid waiver from the Obama administration was Ohio, led by now presidential candidate Governor John Kasich. I will suggest that the Kasich administration has achieved some pretty remarkable results—and also continued to take a lot of conservative criticism for their Medicaid expansion. (Robert Laszewski, 10/14)

About 32 million people in the U.S. remained uninsured as of early 2015, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of federal survey data has found, with about half of them eligible for Medicaid or subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. With the high-profile resistance in some states to Medicaid expansion and the ACA generally, you may think those places are the main obstacle to covering more of the uninsured. But the uninsured remain a problem in both red and blue states. (Drew Altman, 10/14)

Is the Affordable Care Act still widely unpopular? Apparently not. Poll results reported this week by nonpartisan public policy firm PerryUndem Research/Communication show that a majority of likely voters in five key battleground states – Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania – believe the Affordable Care Act is here to stay (64%) and want Congress to improve the law, not repeal it (71%). This result is particularly significant for us in Pennsylvania, as the majority of our state’s congressional delegation has staunchly opposed the health care law and continued to push for repeal, despite the gains in coverage, new consumer protections and other benefits that have been brought to their constituents. (Antoinette Kraus, 10/14)

Despite a near-universal assumption that the Supreme Court will take up an abortion case in its new term, the general chatter hasn’t included much detail about the specific issue, the stakes or the prospects. This column is an effort to address those questions. The stakes couldn’t be higher, either for women who live in the growing number of states governed by anti-abortion politicians or for the court itself. During the next few weeks, the justices will decide whether to hear an appeal filed last month by several Texas abortion clinics. The clinics are among those that will be forced to close under a law that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld in a series of decisions culminating in June with Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole. (Linda Greenhouse, 10/15)

D.C. council members members seem to feel there is no limit to the demands they can make on companies that try to do business in the city. Witness the burst of legislation in the past three years requiring employers to pay higher salaries, provide new benefits and face new regulations . Now, with the ink barely dry on those laws, a majority of the council wants to put an additional burden on employers with a tax that would allow workers to take up to 16 weeks of paid family leave annually. No doubt the American workplace needs to become more family-friendly, but this proposal is not grounded in reality and would end up hurting the District and its workers by driving up costs and driving away jobs. (10/14)

The public and private sectors are now engaged in an unprecedented array of virtuous efforts to improve end-of-life care. That these efforts are generally not evidence-based is not the fault of the organizations promoting them. It is the responsibility of investigators and research sponsors to identify, develop, and rigorously test interventions so that they can offer guidance as growing political and cultural tolerance increasingly permits implementation of end-of-life care programs. (Scott D. Halpern, 10/14)

Open enrollment for health insurance starts Thursday. So millions of people 65 and older are getting lots of ads in the mail for insurance that covers what Medicare doesn’t. I got my first taste this year, as I approached 65. I was Medicare to-be. In just a few months, I received 40 mailings from insurers and brokers — plus Medicare’s own 152-page guide to Medicare. (George Judson, 10/15)