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Eight years ago, the newly passed Affordable Care Act was so widely criticized that it contributed to Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives. But in this midterm election, health care is the party’s most-mentioned topic in advertising—far above anything else, including opposition to President Trump. Meanwhile, Republicans—who have made repealing the Affordable Care Act one of their top advertising messages since the 2010 election—are barely mentioning it this year, after the GOP-led Congress tried unsuccessfully to overturn the law last year. The party has instead turned its attention to touting the tax legislation Mr. Trump signed into law late last year. (McGill and Bykowicz, 10/9)

Numerous Republicans who are supporting attempts to dismantle Obamacare are simultaneously campaigning for election on their support for a core provision of the law. The GOP spent the eight years since the Affordable Care Act was passed attempting to derail it in Congress, the White House and the courts. But those efforts have struck a nerve when it comes to a central element of the law -- rules protecting insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions. (Kapur, 10/9)

A new Democratic ad is accusing Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) of “lying” about helping people with pre-existing conditions. The ad from Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who is seeking to unseat Heller in a close Senate race, features people with pre-existing conditions, one of whom says, “Dean Heller is lying about helping us.” (Sullivan, 10/8)

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) is airing a TV ad that criticizes Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s positions on taxes, health care and “sanctuary cities” — and her campaign calls two out of the three untrue. Locked in a tight race, both candidates and their allies are spending heavily on TV ads in the central Virginia district, which comprises rural areas and parts of Richmond and its suburbs. Brat and Republican-aligned interest groups spent $363,275 on commercials last week alone, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. Spanberger and her allies spent $408,728 over the same period, some of it for an ad that features the mother of a diabetic son who criticizes Brat, saying he voted against protections for people with preexisting medical conditions. (Vozzella, 10/8)

With polls showing the governor’s race is tight, incumbent Kate Brown has ramped up the attack ads against her Republican challenger, Rep. Knute Buehler, on his home turf: health care. Brown says Buehler, an orthopedic surgeon by trade, has repeatedly voted to cut health care funding and restrict access while assuring Oregonians he would do no such thing. “I feel like I’m running against two different people,” she recently told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Rep. Buehler voted against expanding the Oregon Health Plan, he voted for taking 430,000 people off the plan. He voted against a plan that would have covered all our children. Are you kidding me? That’s not only dead set against Oregon values, it’s cruel.” (Manning, 10/8)

Pro-abortion rights advocacy group NARAL is launching a $1 million ad campaign hitting vulnerable House Republicans over the GOP's support for newly-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The NARAL campaign is seeking to turn Democratic anger over Kavanaugh into votes during the midterm elections. (Birnbaum, 10/8)

The embrace of “Medicare for all” shows that the Democratic party has “gone off the rails,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Monday. In a speech at the National Press Club, Ryan warned that the plan favored by “the Left” would result in Americans having no choice about the cost or coverage of their health insurance. (Weixel, 10/8)

And Senate Democrats are looking to get another health vote on the record —

Democrats are planning to force a vote in the Senate this week on overturning a Trump administration rule expanding non-ObamaCare insurance plans. The Democratic resolution, which will likely get a vote on Wednesday, would overturn a rule finalized in August that expanded the availability of short-term health insurance plans. (Sullivan, 10/8)

Forget "Obamacare." President Donald Trump has found a new target when it comes to ideas from the Democrats for the nation's health care system. In rallies for the November midterm elections, Trump is going after "Medicare for All," the rallying cry of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats. Trump is trying out attack lines echoed by other Republicans that a government-run system would wreck the existing and enormously popular Medicare program for seniors and disabled people. (Alonso-Zaldivar, 10/9)

Attacks ads have always been a staple of campaign season. But Republicans have twisted facts in some ads to an extraordinary degree as they fight to save their House majority, weaving narratives about Democratic candidates that are misleading at best — or blatantly false at worst. ... Some Republican candidates have launched similar attacks impugning the motives or patriotism of their opponents. West Virginia Republican candidate Carol Miller ran a clip of her Democratic rival, Richard Ojeda, saying “the United States of America is not the greatest country.” One vet in the spot accuses Ojeda, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, of “stepping on the graves of every dead soldier.” What Ojeda actually said is that U.S. isn't the greatest country because homelessness is rampant, the health care system is lacking and the opioid epidemic has been allowed to fester. Ojeda issued his own ad in response, talking about the names of fallen soldiers tattooed his back. (Bade, 10/9)

The Associated Press fact checked the first Indiana U.S. Senate debate Monday evening among Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly and his challengers Republican Mike Braun and Libertarian Lucy Brenton. Donnelly, a moderate Democrat who has been in Congress since 2006, is considered one of the country's most vulnerable incumbents in his race against Braun, a Republican who's modeled his campaign as a political outsider and businessman after President Donald Trump. ... Braun has suggested otherwise. He has previously called for Congress to scrap the entire Affordable Care Act, which would wipe away protections that prohibit insurers from denying coverage or charging more in premiums to people with pre-existing conditions. An estimated 1.1 million people under the age of 65, in Indiana have a pre-existing condition, according to a 2015 report from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. (Seitz, 10/9)

U.S. Rep. David Young and his Democratic opponent, Cindy Axne, have been sparring over whether he has tried to protect Iowans with pre-existing health conditions. Axne focuses on the Republican Iowa congressman's votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The 2010 law, also known as Obamacare, barred insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums to Americans with health problems, such as diabetes, cancer, mental illness or high blood pressure. (Leys, 10/8)

Collins is a prominent Republican supporter of abortion rights. In defending her vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she argued that she believed he would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion legal across the United States. After CNN’s Dana Bash noted that Planned Parenthood had once given her an award but that its political arm denounced her siding with “those who disbelieve, disrespect and even mock survivors,” Collins became upset. (Kessler, 10/9)

Meanwhile, an ad campaign focusing on the Supreme Court's threat to overturning the health law has launched against Collins —

A pro-ObamaCare group is targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in new TV and digital ads for voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The ad imitates a breaking news alert, with a narrator saying that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn ObamaCare and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. (Hellmann, 10/8)

As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: "They want to steal my daughter!" It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again. (Burke and Mendoza, 10/9)

The youngest child to come before the bench in federal immigration courtroom No. 14 was so small she had to be lifted into the chair. Even the judge in her black robes breathed a soft “aww” as her latest case perched on the brown leather. Her feet stuck out from the seat in small gray sneakers, her legs too short to dangle. Her fists were stuffed under her knees. As soon as the caseworker who had sat her there turned to go, she let out a whimper that rose to a thin howl, her crumpled face a bursting dam. (Yee and Jordan, 10/8)

And a detainee at the troubled Adelanto detention facility reports on the conditions inside —

From his cell at the Adelanto immigration detention facility on July 11, 2017, Romulo Avelica Gonzalez scrawled out a journal entry on lined notebook paper. “Another person hanged himself,” he wrote in Spanish. “Lost asylum.” It was one of five suicide attempts over the course of eight months at the facility that houses nearly 2,000 detainees. Four months earlier, a Nicaraguan man had been found hanging in his cell from his bed sheets. (Castillo, 10/8)

Tosh Ackerman took part of what he thought was a Xanax pill to help him sleep one night three years ago. His girlfriend found the 29-year-old dead the next day. The Xanax he obtained from an acquaintance was counterfeit, says his mother, Carrie Luther, who lives in Mount Hermon, Calif. Toxicology reports found it contained a fatal dose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often produced illicitly for the black market. “It looked like Xanax to the untrained eye,” says Ms. Luther, who now regularly speaks about the dangers of counterfeit drugs. (Reddy, 10/8)

A federal lawsuit contends the operators of a North Carolina drug rehab program farmed out recovering addicts to work in adult care homes and restaurants and pocketed the wages for the labor they performed. The lawsuit filed by Andrew Presson of Olney, Maryland, and Kimberly Myris of Pinehurst, North Carolina, contends they enrolled in a residential substance abuse recovery program run by Recovery Connections Community. (Dalesio, 10/8)

And in other news on the crisis —

Fishermen are five times more likely to die of opioid overdoses than other Massachusetts workers, according to a state Department of Public Health analysis released in August. But addressing the addiction problem among fishermen poses unique challenges. (Freyer, 10/8)

Kaiser Health News: Black Market For Suboxone Gives Some A Glimpse Of Recovery
Months in prison didn’t rid Daryl of his addiction to opioids. “Before I left the parking lot of the prison, I was shooting up, getting high,” he said. Daryl had used heroin and prescription painkillers for more than a decade. Almost four years ago, he became one of more than 200 people who tested positive for HIV in a historic outbreak in Scott County, Ind. After that diagnosis, he said, he went on a bender. (Harper, 10/9)

Wearing gloves and working under a hood that vents fumes from the evidence room, La Mesa police Sgt. Katy Lynch pushed a button on the scanner in her hand and shined a laser on the plastic baggie in front of her. In less than a minute, the device, which is about the size of a Nintendo Game Boy, identified the white powder, flashing the word “methamphetamine” on its small screen. (Kucher, 10/7)

Nursing home residents are increasingly spending time in rehabilitation treatment during the last days of their lives, subjected to potentially unnecessary therapy that reaps significant financial benefits for cash-strapped facilities, a study shows. The proportion of nursing home residents who received “ultrahigh intensity” rehabilitation increased by 65 percent between October 2012 and April 2016, according to research published this month by the University of Rochester. Medicare defines “very high” therapy as almost 9 hours per week, and “ultrahigh” therapy as more than 12 hours per week. Some residents were found to be treated with the highest concentration of rehabilitation during their last week of life. (Griffin, 10/9)

The CMS is looking to increase its oversight of post-acute care settings through new civil money penalties on nursing home staff and a new verification process to confirm personal attendants actually showed up to care for seniors when they are at home. A proposed rule in the works to implement a federal law would allow the CMS to impose enforcement actions on nursing home staff in cases of elder abuse or other illegal activities, the agency announced in a notice Friday. (Dickson, 10/8)

According to industry insiders, in an average year Kansas might have to take legal control, or receivership, of one or two nursing homes. But 2018 has been anything but average so far, and it could be a sign of things to come. Changes in the way nursing homes are reimbursed have made it harder for them to make enough money to stay in business, especially for homes owned by out-of-state investors who siphon off revenue — a growing share of the market. (Marso, 10/9)

A review of data maintained by the Agency for Health Care Administration shows that, in 33 counties encompassing the western half of the state south to Hernando County and east to Putnam County, more than half of the 412 assisted-living facilities and nursing homes have yet to implement their emergency power plans. (Koh, 10/8)

The path to reducing rates of hypertension in black communities may start in the church pews, according to a new study by New York City researchers. Specially trained community health workers operating within faith communities in New York City were able to significantly reduce and manage hypertension in black communities, compared with health education alone, according to researchers at the NYU School of Medicine. (West, 10/9)

High blood pressure is widespread among African American men at least in part because they’re more likely than other people to eat a traditional Southern diet with lots of fried and fatty foods, a new study suggests. Researchers followed 6,897 people in the South who didn’t have high blood pressure in 2003-2007, including 1,807 African American men and women. After about nine years, 46 percent of black participants and 33 percent of white participants developed high blood pressure. (Rapaport, 10/8)

Is climate change stressing you out? A new study linking weather and mental health in the United States suggests things could get much worse. The study outlines three separate ways that hotter and more extreme weather stand to undermine the mental well-being of the people forced to experience it. The effects will be most pronounced for women and for low-income Americans, the findings indicate. “Ultimately, if observed relationships from the recent past persist, added climate change may amplify the society-wide mental health burden,” the study authors wrote Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Kaplan, 10/8)

Nearly 40 years after surgeons first operated on fetuses to cure devastating abnormalities, researchers have taken the first step toward curing genetic disease before birth via genome editing: scientists reported on Monday that they used the genome editing technique CRISPR to alter the DNA of laboratory mice in the womb, eliminating an often-fatal liver disease before the animals had even been born. The research, by a team at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), is a very early proof of concept. But while CRISPRing human fetuses is years away, at best, the success in mice bolsters what Dr. William Peranteau, who co-led the study, calls his dream of curing genetic diseases before birth. (Begley, 10/8)

Scientists say they've located the first well-documented genetic glitch that increases a man's risk of impotence, a step that might someday lead to new treatments. Most impotence isn't caused by genetics but rather things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, smoking, drug and alcohol use, stress or anxiety. (Ritter, 10/8)

Each year, more parents send their young child to elementary school equipped with a smartphone. For instance, the percentage of third-graders who reported having their own cellphone more than doubled from 19 percent in 2013 to 45 percent in 2017. Similar increases took place for fourth-graders and fifth-graders. About 50 percent of fourth-graders and 70 percent of fifth-graders went to school with a phone in 2017. (Englander, 10/8)

Gynecologists hope the federal Food and Drug Administration's decision to approve human papillomavirus vaccine for older adults could protect more people. Missouri has one of the highest rates of cancer caused by the virus in the nation. (Fentem, 10/9)

When she was in graduate school for public health, Niasha Fray found a job she loved: counseling women with breast cancer about sticking to their treatment. She offered what's called "motivational interviewing," a type of therapy intended to help women overcome obstacles keeping them from taking their medications — which can have unpleasant side effects. (Gordon, 10/9)

Kaiser Health News: Spurred By Convenience, Millennials Often Spurn The ‘Family Doctor’ Model
Calvin Brown doesn’t have a primary care doctor — and the peripatetic 23-year-old doesn’t want one. Since his graduation last year from the University of San Diego, Brown has held a series of jobs that have taken him to several California cities. “As a young person in a nomadic state,” Brown said, he prefers finding a walk-in clinic on the rare occasions when he’s sick. (Boodman, 10/9)

When Orville Young ran up to his mother, Elaine Young, to give her the mail, she noticed he was using his non-dominant hand. Although a seemingly insignificant detail, it made the Minnesota mom stop and think — her then-3-year-old son had developed a cough and a runny nose over the Fourth of July holiday, but she and Orville’s then-6-year-old sister were sick, too, so she assumed that Orville had simply caught their cold. It was not until nearly two weeks later — when everyone else was on the mend and Orville had come down with a fever — that she started to worry. (Bever, 10/8)

Over the past several months, a team of STAT editors and reporters pored through hundreds of nominations from across North America. We didn’t set an age limit; we were on the hunt for the most impressive doctors and researchers on the cusp of launching their careers but not yet fully independent. Most were postdocs, fellows, and biopharma employees working with more senior scientists. All are blazing new trails as they attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in science and medicine. (10/8)

Spurred by news stories about hospitals “dumping” poor people onto the streets, a new law will soon require health care providers to develop specific policies for safely discharging homeless patients. Beginning in July, hospitals must document in writing that shelters have beds for homeless patients before sending them to the facilities. (Hubert, 10/9)

The agency — which is part of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services — is experiencing high caseworker turnover and caseloads as these staffers work through the emotional toll of supporting and providing services for older and disabled Texans. Caseworkers are also unhappy about workers at Child Protective Services — which is also part of the department — getting significant raises after high-profile scrutiny from media and state leaders. As legislators head back to Austin for the 2019 legislative session in January, it’s unclear how much attention the agency focused on protecting vulnerable adults will receive. (Evans, 10/9)

Johns Hopkins University announced it will name a new research building on campus in honor of Henrietta Lacks, whose “immortal cells” led to the development of the polio vaccine, studies of leukemia and AIDS, chemotherapy and in vitro fertilization research as well as the effects of zero gravity in space. “This building will be a place that stands as an enduring and powerful testament to a woman who not only was the beloved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother to generations of the Lacks family, but the genesis of generations of miraculous discoveries that have changed the landscape of modern medicine and that have benefited, in truth, the much larger family of humanity,” Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels said Saturday during the university’s ninth annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial lecture series. (Brown, 10/8)

The state has been approved for a five-year, $2.7 million federal grant to help young families, especially those at highest risk for child abuse. The funds will be targeted to programs in Manchester, Laconia, Belmont, Franklin and Tilton. The grant will fund the Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families (CCSPF) project, which will be led by the Division for Children, Youth and Families and the Division of Public Health Services. (Leader, 10/8)

An influential state commission issued a highly critical assessment on Friday of a second key player in the murder conviction of Joe Bryan, saying a Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab chemist had “overstated findings, exceeded her expertise and engaged in speculation” when she testified in 1989. In a report issued at its quarterly meeting, the Texas Forensic Science Commission also found that the now-retired chemist, Patricia Retzlaff, failed to do thorough analysis of key DNA evidence in 2012, after a judge allowed such testing. (Colloff, 10/8)

At Harborview, 175 limb amputations are performed yearly. About 60 percent are due to diabetes, peripheral vascular disease and flesh-eating bacterial infections, according to Susan Gregg, the director of media relations for UW Medicine, which oversees Harborview. Of the remainder, the majority are due to trauma incidents, most often motorcycle and car crashes. Other causes include burns, work-related injuries, and boating and recreational-vehicle crashes. Only one in 10 involves an upper extremity. (Clarridge, 10/8)

UC Health is on the hunt to fill about 300 nursing jobs at its facilities across the Cincinnati region, including the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, West Chester Hospital and the Daniel Drake rehabilitation facility. Recruitment events are scheduled this month to find people to care “for patients with the most complex illnesses and injuries,” said Beverly Bokovitz, chief nursing officer at UC Medical Center. (Saker, 10/8)

HealthPartners has received a $7.9 million federal grant to extend and expand a project that builds health insurance cooperatives in African nations where access to medical care is limited. The Bloomington-based insurer and health care provider has been providing assistance in Uganda since 1997 and will now expand that work into three additional countries. (Howatt, 10/8)

In an effort to serve more low-income and uninsured families, Minnesota’s dental industry is returning to a high-tech solution known as teledentistry, which allows dental hygienists to provide preventive care at low cost while supervised electronically by dentists at a different location. For the 25 percent of Minnesotans without dental insurance, even basic preventive care may be too expensive, and among the 1.1 million enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program, many cannot find a dentist who takes government insurance. (Howatt, 10/8)

California’s pet insurance regulations, which experts peg as the strictest in the country, owe their existence to a dearly departed golden retriever named Bodie. It was Bodie’s death more than a decade ago from blood cancer, and his owner’s subsequent tussle with a pet insurance company for reimbursement of medical expenses, that led to the legislation requiring California’s pet insurance rules today. But outside of the Golden State, pet insurance is governed by a loose, state-by-state set of regulations that vary widely, experts say. (Povich, 10/8)

In a harshly worded order scolding state officials for treating the Constitution “like a recommendation,” a Tallahassee judge Friday gave the Department of Health two weeks to begin registering new medical-marijuana operators or risk being found in contempt. Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson, siding with Tampa-based Florigrown LLC, rebuked Gov. Rick Scott, the Scott administration and the Republican-dominated Legislature for failing to properly carry out a 2016 constitutional amendment that broadly legalized medical marijuana. (Kam, 10/8)

Today, CBD, whether it’s derived from heady cannabis or its sober botanical twin, hemp, is being touted as a super-cannabinoid, both a wellness agent and a natural therapeutic medicine that’s predicted to be a $22 billion industry by 2020, sold online and in convenience stores and cannabis dispensaries near you. An increasing body of scientific research encompasses more than 60 ways CBD affects humans. (Murrieta, 10/8)

The ad went viral. Joe Manchin, Democratic senator up for re-election in West Virginia, a state where President Donald Trump's approval rating is 60 percent, raises a rifle and shoots a hole in a document emblazoned in red: "LAWSUIT ON COVERAGE OF PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS." That's a suit filed by 20 Republican attorneys general and governors — including Manchin's opponent, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey — seeking to void the entire Affordable Care Act. (Andrew Sprung, 10/9)

Arizona is a key battleground state for control of Congress. We have perhaps the most closely fought race for U.S. Senate. And we have three swing House contests, although Democrats are thought to have the upper hand in all three. (Robert Robb, 10/7)

The rising costs of health care continue to be a challenge for all Marylanders and their families, and particularly those living with expensive, chronic health conditions. Unfortunately, a misguided policy from the Baltimore-based U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may have inadvertently created a new “pre-existing condition” that is making matters worse for many of the state’s most vulnerable patients. (Beverley Francis-Gibson, 10/8)

Health & Human Services Secretary Alex Azar recently announced that premiums for a benchmark Affordable Care Act 2019 plan on the federal exchange will drop 2 percent nationally compared with 2018 premiums — the first reduction since the law's implementation. While this is encouraging news, it is no cause for a major celebration. When Obamacare's exchanges open for business in just a few weeks, on Nov. 1, many consumers will still find exchange plans unaffordable. Rates will soar by double digits in many states. Despite the slight decline in the national average premium, the typical 2019 plan sold through the HealthCare.gov exchange will still likely cost more than twice as much as the average individual market plan in 2013, the year before most Obamacare provisions went into effect. (Sally C. Pipes, 10/8)

The contentious “right to try” bill that President Trump signed into law to help terminally ill patients get access to treatments that might — I emphasize the “might” — cure them or prolong their lives is more wishful thinking than it is reality. Right to try implies that a catalog of available drugs exists that can help patients if only they could get access to them. It’s easy to believe in a shelf of miracle cures to stop cancer — after all, media outlets are full of anecdotal stories of cancer patients who are now disease free. Some drugs, whether still in development or already available for other indications may, indeed, help some patients. But those cases are rare. (Joe Olechno, 10/9)

Will you know when it is your time to die? It is a question that has permeated my mind since July 14, 2017. This was the day my mother died. It was a sad day, but it pales in comparison to the months preceding it. A breast cancer that had returned aggressively, a hasty port placement to receive chemotherapy that was too late  and an ICU admission that began many futile interventions that never saved her life, but prolonged my mother’s suffering. As a registered nurse, I watched a scene unfold that I swore to myself I would never let happen to anyone I loved. (Colleen Chierici, 10/8)

Reading the news — the real, not fake news — and watching it on TV can make many of us unhappy. Famine, wars, innocent children separated from their parents, global warming with its worsening effects on the rise, people hurling insults at one another on a daily basis, a lack of respect toward respectable people; sadly, the list goes on and on and on. Thus, it is no wonder that many of the most popular books today are on finding happiness, on learning how to be happy. Specifically, there are 209 books on happiness reviewed on Goodreads.com, with “The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama XIV ranked No. 1 and “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin ranked No. 2. (Lynne Agress, 10/8)

We can prevent gun violence by implementing policies that are entirely consistent with Second Amendment protections. The middle, common ground is vast. (David Hogg and Chana Sacks, 10/5)

Not long ago, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited the offices of something called the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM). The walls were lined with charts measuring things like kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading scores and postsecondary enrollment. Around the table was just about anybody in town who might touch a child’s life. There were school superintendents and principals, but there were also the heads of the Chamber of Commerce and the local United Way, the police chief, a former mayor and the newspaper editor. The people at SAM track everything they can measure about Spartanburg’s young people from cradle to career. They gather everybody who might have any influence upon this data — parents, religious leaders, doctors, nutrition experts, etc. (David Brooks, 10/8)

The morning of my job interview brought excitement and anxiety. At the same time, I felt prepared and confident. It was the beginning of 2017 and already I had gone through three rounds of phone interviews, all rigorous, yet fair. This final interview would be our first face-to-face meeting. After passing through such an extensive interview process, backed by my impeccable credentials, I felt this meeting would be a formality. (Dayniah Manderson, 10/8)

One thing I’ve noticed over the years as I’ve written about climate change is that the actual predicted effects of a warmer world often aren’t well known. People understand that the planet is getting hotter, a change that is both easy to understand and directly familiar to almost everyone. But the effects of the increased heat are much broader than simply higher temperatures. In an effort to delineate what scientists expect to see as the world warms, I spoke with Alex Halliday, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. (Philip Bump, 10/8)

Family-member advocates for those with a serious mental illness know that Proposition 2, while well-meaning, will not solve the homelessness problem for those who are most ill. Prop. 2 is a misuse of funds, an unnecessary giveaway to investors and bureaucrats, that further reduces access and quality of treatment for people with severe mental illnesses. (Catherine Lauren Rettagliata, 10/6)

U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley continues to struggle with facts and logic in the debate over health insurance in America and coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions. Hawley, the Republican looking to knock off Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, recently wrote a column outlining his plan to protect patients with pre-existing conditions from losing health insurance. His proposal is incoherent. (10/7)

California can’t hope to solve its housing crisis unless the state makes a serious investment in building more units. Proposition 1 does just that, authorizing a $4 billion bond for housing loans for veterans and affordable housing for low-income households. Voters should support it on Nov. 6. (10/6)

On Thursday, following the death of the sixth inmate, the county released a statement saying that County Executive Armond Budish will ask the County Council for money to hire an outside expert to review the county jail system. It certainly warrants a review - and more. The FBI also is looking into possible civil rights violations at the jail, sources told cleveland.com this week. (Mark Naymik, 10/5)

It must be terribly frustrating for Kanye West to see a Supreme Court confirmation fight in Washington elbow his new album out of the national spotlight. But that’s show biz. His latest wave of newsmaking appearances and tweets makes me wonder whether, at best, we’re watching a genius at work or, at worst, the slow, public disintegration of a man who revealed in a June radio interview that he has been diagnosed with a “mental condition.” (Clarence Page, 10/9)