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On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a disturbing report about the death of an elderly woman in Washoe County, Nev. What killed her wasn’t heart disease, cancer or pneumonia. What killed her were bacteria that were resistant to every antibiotic doctors could throw at them. (Nicholas Bagley and Kevin Outterson, 1/18

Medicare works. It’s far more efficient, cost effective, and affordable than private sector health insurance. Not surprisingly, it’s also a lot more popular. It should be extended to all of us. Instead, House Speaker Paul Ryan is working hard to destroy Medicare and force seniors and people with disabilities into the arms of private, for-profit health insurers. Ryan wants to end Medicare as we know it and, instead, simply give seniors and people with disabilities fixed cash stipends to fend for themselves, unprotected, on the private market. (Nancy Altman, 1/18)

There are many good reasons to oppose Carson's nomination to lead HUD. He has questioned the agency's mission and previously devalued his own ability to lead a federal department given his lack of government experience. I certainly have significant doubts about his qualifications. Yet, in nominating such an unlikely candidate, President-elect Donald Trump may have inadvertently made a connection that too few policy makers and physicians recognize: Health and housing are inextricably linked. And our inability to successfully assist individuals who are homeless places a significant strain on our public resources. (Manik Chhabra, 1/19)

With early optimism surrounding the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change now fading into anxiety over potential changes to U.S. environmental policy under a Trump administration, many are looking for new leaders in the fight against global warming. Hospitals should step into the breach. Doing so could both slow climate change and improve healthcare systems globally. (Renzo R. Guinto, 1/18)

After years of academic debate over the role and value of patient-satisfaction scores and reviews of health care providers, Yelp, the online powerhouse of documenting customer satisfaction, is forcing the issue. With more than 102 million customer reviews to date, 6% of them in the health care arena, Yelp easily dwarfs longer-standing commercial physician-review sites such as Healthgrades and Vitals. (Vivian Lee, 1/20)

Medicare is poised to overhaul the way it pays for ambulatory care services. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has published a final rule codifying the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), which directed CMS to gradually replace fee-for-service reimbursement with value-based payment approaches. MACRA’s bipartisan passage may position it to play an outsized role in federal efforts to improve health care quality, rein in service volume, and control spending growth while not jeopardizing access to care. Can it deliver on these goals? (Eric C. Schneider and Cornelia J. Hall, 1/18)

Vaccines can prevent outbreaks of emerging infectious disease from becoming humanitarian crises. The WHO recently deemed 11 pathogens as the most likely to cause severe outbreaks in the near future and will regularly update its list. There are feasible vaccine candidates for some of these diseases. When such candidates exist, timely vaccine development can avert global public health emergencies, contain loss of life, and limit social and economic damage. An efficient global system of vaccine research-and-development preparedness is needed. (John-Arne Røttingen, Dimitrios Gouglas, Mark Feinberg, Stanley Plotkin, Krishnaswamy V. Raghavan, Andrew Witty, Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, Paul Stoffels, and Peter Piot, 1/18)