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For a bill that passed without a single Republican vote, Obamacare sure treats red states well. The law takes more money from blue states than from red states and it spends more money in red states than in blue states. It is, as Alec MacGillis wrote in the Washington Post at the time, "a rare triumph of principle over parochialism." But before you think Democrats the only ones capable of putting principle before party, consider what has happened since the law's passage. Republicans have been busily remaking Obamacare into a subsidy from red states to blue ones. (Ezra Klein, 12/23)

A federal appeals court made the right decision this week when it struck down a key provision in a North Carolina law requiring doctors to perform ultrasounds on women seeking abortions and then both show and describe the sonogram images to them. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., wisely found the provision to be an unconstitutional violation of the free-speech rights of doctors. (12/23)

For the first time in years, there has been a slight uptick in the number of kindergartners who started the school year with all their recommended vaccinations, the state reported Tuesday. This is good news for California, where the anti-vaccine movement has thrived over the last decade despite its basis in a thoroughly discredited study and public statements by a few celebrities who are neither scientists nor medical experts. (12/23)

The Food and Drug Administration will recommend that men who have sex with men (i.e. gay men) be allowed to donate blood. Without question, this is good news. But only up to a point. Instead of the lifetime ban that has been in place since 1983, the so-called deferral period is now one year. In other words, if you are a man who has had sexual contact with another man in the past 12 months, you still can’t give blood. This change would put the United States’ policy on par with policy in Australia, Japan and Great Britain. (Jonathan Capehart, 12/23)

Neli Latson has a music player. Also, he can order snacks from the canteen and leave his cell for several hours a day. This is good news, or what passes for it, in the life of Reginald Latson, a 23-year-old with autism and an IQ of 69 who goes by the nickname of Neli. It is good news because, for more than a year, he has been held in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison. Except: Latson should not be in prison at all. ... Latson should be in a secure residential treatment facility, and Virginia’s mental health officials support this outcome even as its corrections system incarcerates him. (Ruth Marcus, 12/23)

Health care professionals must balance the harms and costs of tests and treatments against the potential benefits in order to provide high-value, cost-conscious care. Clinical researchers, in turn, identify the diagnostic tests, treatments, delivery systems, and clinical pathways that will provide an evidence-based foundation for patient care. Unfortunately, despite a growing recognition of the economic stressors in medical education systems and an awareness that instructional approaches vary in their effectiveness, the paradigm of value has been applied in only a limited fashion to medical education. (David A. Cook and Thomas J. Beckman, 12/22)