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Nearly half of all Americans know someone addicted to prescription painkillers. State lawmakers have responded forcefully, passing dozens of laws to tackle the problem. Unfortunately, there has been little evidence that the laws work. In fact, in the most comprehensive study to date, we found that they have given little relief to especially vulnerable patients. (Jill Horwitz and Ellen Meara, 8/7)

It’s hard to exaggerate the alchemy of distortions that are turning ObamaCare into such a pending disaster that big insurers like Aetna, Anthem, Humana and UnitedHealth Group, once supporters, can’t cut back their participation fast enough. ObamaCare was always going to be a questionable deal for taxpayers if the only people who signed up were poorer people whose premiums were largely paid by taxpayers. That was fine as far as insurers were concerned. They can make a profit even if taxpayers are the only ones paying. (Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., 8/5)

Of all the big health-insurance companies, Aetna may have been the last anyone expected to pour cold water on Obamacare. The company has over the past several years enthusiastically participated in the marketplaces the law created. Now, Aetna just announced, it is canceling plans to expand its Affordable Care Act (ACA) business and reviewing its existing products. Aetna is not alone. UnitedHealth Group and Humana have recently made announcements in a similar vein. Among other things, many big insurers complain that their Obamacare divisions are losing money, requiring them to pay out more in medical bills than they collect in premiums. The law’s critics have seized on the news, using it as fresh evidence that Obamacare is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. (8/7)

Is Donald Trump experiencing a mental illness? That’s the question making the rounds these days. The answer is: I don’t know. And neither do the commentators, tweeters and psychiatrists — both licensed and armchair — who’ve diagnosed him from afar as “crazy,” a “psychopath,” not “sane,” having “narcissistic personality disorder” and a “screw loose.”What I do know is that we ought to stop casually throwing around terms like “crazy” in this campaign and our daily lives. The president of the American Psychiatric Association has said that even for professionals, these sorts of diagnoses, made from afar, are “unethical” and “irresponsible.” And they only serve to demean and undercut people. (Patrick Kennedy, 8/8)

Don't hold your breath waiting for members of Congress to return to Washington to deal with the immediate public health threat posed by the Zika virus. That would require putting the public interest over politics, an approach gone missing in action during this poisonous election year. (Merrill Goozner, 8/5)

I teach a medical school course on homeostasis: how organ systems work together to maintain physiological balance. For example, when blood pressure drops acutely, the heart speeds up and the kidneys retain sodium and water, propelling blood pressure back to normal. If body temperature falls, we shiver to generate heat, blood vessels constrict to conserve heat, and we warm up. Homeostasis is about preserving constancy in the face of changing conditions. As a model for explaining human physiology, it does remarkably well.However, there are aspects of the human condition that homeostasis cannot explain. For instance, blood pressure often fluctuates minute to minute. (Sandeep Jauhar, 8/6)

Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996 — but employees who use the drug, with their doctors’ approval, can still lose their jobs, a federal judge has ruled. This week’s decision by U.S. District Judge Dale Drozd of Fresno was actually a partial victory for the former employee, Justin Shepherd. ...But on the larger issue in the case — an employer’s authority to discipline employees whose drug use was recommended by their doctors and allowed by state law — the judge said workers have no legal protection. (Bob Egelko, 8/5)

Heroin and opioid addiction presents American society with the conundrum to beat all conundrums. We feed it while we fight it. And sometimes we fight it by feeding it. Missouri is the only state that tends to fight it by ignoring it.Addiction has reached epidemic proportions nationwide because doctors, for years, have over-prescribed powerful opioid painkillers such as Vicodin and OxyContin. Feeding the addiction, in other words. Patients who get hooked increasingly find their access to prescriptions blocked because all states but Missouri maintain registries specifically designed to help doctors and pharmacists fight opioid abuse. (8/7)

This August marks the first school year that children starting school must have required vaccines unless they have a medical exemption from a physician. The number of children without the required vaccines at school enrollment had skyrocketed by 337 percent since 2000, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable serious diseases such as measles. ...Thanks to greater public awareness, the rate of unvaccinated children in our state is already changing for the better. (Richard Pan, 8/5)