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Just after midnight on July 10, Judy Rosa woke and saw the light and heard the TV still on in the finished basement of her Seabrook Beach, N.H., home. She called to her son, Philip, to turn them off. But something made her go downstairs herself, where she found Philip dead of a drug overdose. Yet his obituary a week later was unusual. It did not say Philip died “suddenly” or “unexpectedly.” No, the obituary read: “Philip J. Carnovale, 32, of Boca Raton, Fl., lost his courageous battle with addiction Tuesday, July 10, 2018.” Explaining the choice to reveal Philip’s addiction, Rosa said, “It’s about awareness.’’ (Margery Eagan, 7/30)

In 1976, a young, first-time mother entered the hospital in spontaneous labor. She had not missed any prenatal visits, those visits had revealed no abnormalities, her pregnancy was full-term, and she carried one fetus positioned headfirst. In other words, hers was a prototypical low-risk pregnancy. She felt great. Then a physician ruptured her amniotic sac, hastening labor. “I went,” she told me years later, “from feeling nothing to being totally in excruciating pain.” A nurse attached her to what was then a relatively new device — an electronic fetal monitor. Physicians reviewed the monitor strip and told the mother she had to make a decision, and fast. “They said either that I would die, or my baby would die, or both of us would die, if I didn’t have a caesarean. They said her heart was in distress.” At about 10.5% of births, caesareans were far less common in the United States in 1976 than they are today, when almost one in three births is by caesarean section. (Jacqueline H. Wolf, 7/29)

 This week Robert Wilkie was confirmed as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. I had the honor of serving under him as Director of VA’s Center for Women Veterans during his brief tenure as Acting Secretary and recognize the vast array of urgent issues that will immediately require his attention once he is sworn in – not least of which is calming the personnel churn that has plagued the department in recent months. Among these matters is determining whether VA should amend its regulation on providing medical care for transgender veterans. As part of his nomination process, Wilkie said if he were to be confirmed, VA’s policy on providing care to transgender veterans “will remain unchanged.” This would be good news if VA currently provided all medically necessary care to transgender veterans; however, it does not. (Kayla Williams, 7/29)

Reports of bipartisanship’s demise may be a little bit exaggerated, because if there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats can still occasionally agree on, it’s cutting taxes or increasing spending, especially to the benefit of favored industries, and charging the cost to the national debt. Irresponsibility, in other words, has a broad constituency. Case in point: the House of Representatives’ 283-to-132 vote Tuesday to eliminate permanently the 2.3 percent excise tax on the medical device industry’s revenues. Fifty-seven of the 283 “yeas” came from the blue side of the aisle. (7/29)