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Medicare spending growth can’t slow, as it has in recent years, without the question of why becoming a political football, over which ideological battles are waged. The decline between 2011 and 2014 measured at $800 per beneficiary may be in small measure due to the Medicare drug benefit; in small measure due to the better health demographics of recent Medicare enrollees; not at all due to the Affordable Care Act. But going forward, if we are so lucky as to see the slowdown maintained, a reason is likely tangentially connected to the Sen. Bob Menendez scandal. (Homan W. Jenkins Jr., 4/7)

The 68-page bribery indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., isn't the kind of reading typically required in civics classes. It should be. The indictment, which details a pattern of favors Menendez did for a wealthy eye doctor who plied him with huge campaign contributions and private jet trips, paints a depressing picture of the sleazy side of Congress, where what's legal can be just as bad as what's illegal. (4/7)

Whenever a prominent politician is indicted for corruption, questions arise. Is the prosecution part of a dangerous trend toward criminalizing policy differences? Does it endanger free speech rights of contributors? Will it constrain the legislative branch from checking the executive? These questions are being raised in the context of the indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez, as they previously were in the ill-advised prosecutions of John Edwards, Ted Stevens, Tom DeLay and Rick Perry. (Alan Dershowitz, 4/7)

You may notice your doctor is a little more distracted than usual. Even edgy. Maybe that's because a 21 percent cut in physicians' Medicare fees kicked in last Wednesday. The U.S. House voted overwhelmingly to stop that pay cut. But the Senate left town on a two-week recess without following suit. So doctors are left in limbo. (4/3)

The rate of increase in health spending and premiums in recent years is about as low as I have ever seen it. But for most people the pain from health-care costs is more intense, because the divide between out-of-pocket health costs and individuals’ wage growth has widened. Deductibles in particular could be the emerging issue in health policy. (Drew Altman, 4/8)

Five years into his term as New York’s chief executive, it’s time to give credit where credit is due: Gov. Cuomo has tamed the Medicaid beast. Succeeding where many predecessors crashed and burned, Cuomo has brought spending on the $50-plus-billion health plan for the poor and disabled down to consistently manageable levels — without touching benefits or trashing the quality of care. He pulled that off even as the program added 1.5 million enrollees under Obamacare. He also did it with none of the epic battles against hospitals and health-care unions that paralyzed the Legislature under past governors. (Bill Hammond, 4/8)

The conventional wisdom among public health authorities is that the Ebola virus, which killed at least 10,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was a new phenomenon, not seen in West Africa before 2013. (The one exception was an anomalous case in Ivory Coast in 1994, when a Swiss primatologist was infected after performing an autopsy on a chimpanzee.) The conventional wisdom is wrong. (Bernice Dahn, Vera Mussah and Cameron Nutt, 4/7)