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Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who for years has resisted a move into House Republican leadership, said Tuesday night he would serve as House speaker if he is the party's "unity candidate." ... Ryan's move could put major pressure on the Freedom Caucus, which had endorsed Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) before House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) dropped his bid to succeed Boehner. Members of the Republican Study Committee and Tuesday Group have already showered praise on Ryan, but members of the Freedom Caucus aren't quite ready yet to endorse him. (Sherman, Bresnahan and French, 10/20)

Ryan, a former vice presidential nominee, is considered the Republican Party's best hope for uniting its divided House majority. But he had expressed reluctance at taking the difficult job without unanimous support. ... The leadership struggle has stymied the fall agenda and is complicating the next must-pass item: legislation to raise the federal debt limit to continue paying the nation's bills and avoid a credit default. ...Ryan received a partial endorsement Tuesday from one unlikely source, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the minority leader. ... Reid added that he's no fan of Ryan's ideology or his proposals for cutting Medicare and other safety net programs. He shrugged when asked whether his backing could doom Ryan's candidacy. (Mascaro, 10/20)

Ryan, the 45-year-old chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a 2012 vice-presidential nominee, has for years resisted pressure to assume a higher-profile role in party leadership. And he signaled Tuesday that his decision to serve was far from final. (DeBonis and Cost, 10/20)

With the potential for an unprecedented federal default two weeks away, House Republicans on Wednesday plan to pass legislation not to avert disaster, but rather to manage it, channeling daily tax collections to the nation’s creditors and Social Security recipients if the government’s borrowing limit is not lifted. The Obama administration and nonpartisan authorities say the plan is unworkable... A separate coalition of conservatives that includes most House Republicans, the Republican Study Committee, on Tuesday outlined conditions it would demand that Mr. Obama meet. These include $3.8 trillion in savings, mainly from entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid, and a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, which could not win congressional approval without the leverage of a debt crisis. (Calmes and Herszenhorn, 10/20)

With the debt ceiling deadline 14 days away, House Republican leaders will use a Tuesday night party meeting to discuss a Republican Study Committee proposal to lift the debt ceiling with a host of attached policy provisions, according to multiple senior GOP sources familiar with internal planning. (Sherman, 10/20)

The financial crisis sweeping through a network of 23 non-profit insurance plans created under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is jeopardizing the coverage of hundreds of thousands of Americans and putting at risk billions of dollars in federal loans. But as HHS officials struggle to find their way out of the latest morass in President Obama’s signature health care plan, Republican leaders are doing little to help. After years of failed efforts to derail Obamacare in the courts and on Capitol Hill, Republicans say the president is getting his comeuppance for ignoring their past warnings about the program. (Pianin, 10/21)

Ten House Democrats are urging the Obama administration to allow Medicare to pay for end-of-life discussions with doctors. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed in July to allow Medicare to start reimbursing doctors when they have discussions with patients about their end-of-life options, such as whether they want to be kept on life support. (Sullivan, 10/20)

This might seem to be a rough political patch for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The exponential price increases of several drugs have brought scrutiny to the overall rise in drug costs and have prompted several 2016 candidates, most notably Hillary Clinton, to vow action to rein in the industry. Meanwhile, thousands of complaints are pouring into the Food and Drug Administration about a contraceptive implant made by Bayer. In Congress, however, things are looking better for the manufacturers. Legislation is advancing that would speed up the FDA’s approval process for medications and medical devices, offering a rare example of how major initiatives can get traction even in today’s gridlocked Washington. (MacGillis, 10/20)

The White House has launched a bid to preserve a tax on generous, employer-sponsored insurance plans that underpins President Obama’s health care law, trying to stem a political tide after Hillary Clinton broke with Obama and called for its repeal. Targeting the unpopular “Cadillac tax,’’ which begins in 2018, Clinton says consumers and their employers should not be saddled with new costs to achieve reductions in medical spending. But many health care economists contend generous insurance plans lead to wasteful, unnecessary care. (Jan, 10/21)

From Oregon to New York, health insurance co-ops, which were designed to compete against the major insurers, are closing as fast as flop houses in a gentrifying neighborhood. Harvard’s Katherine Swartz said too many of the 23 co-ops lack deep pockets to sustain multi-year losses, and sophisticated software that makes enrolling consumers easy. But the third challenge may be the toughest problem to solve. (Gorenstein, 10/20)

Just two companies in South Dakota will offer individual health care policies on the federal exchange in 2016. DakotaCare offered about 7,000 individual health care policies this year on the federal health care exchange set up by the Affordable Care Act, but it won't offer the policies next year because the company can't afford them, DakotaCare CEO Kirk Zimmer said. "It's not sustainable to a point that we wouldn't want to endanger other policies," Zimmer said. (Ferguson, 10/20)

All four of Louisiana's major gubernatorial candidates have said they'd be open to expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a move that would expand health care coverage to nearly 300,000 people, according to one estimate, many of them working poor. But the three Republican candidates -- U.S. Sen. David Vitter, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle -- say they'd seek a different version of the Medicaid expansion offered now, opening up a potentially lengthy and expensive process to obtain what's known as a waiver. Democrat John Bel Edwards has said he would accept Medicaid expansion without the waiver. (Litten, 10/21)

Is Gov. Robert Bentley nudging closer to expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act? Listen to what the governor said Tuesday when asked the question. "You know I wouldn't say nudging toward it," said Bentley. "But we are certainly looking at that; not right now. We are not at that stage right now." But then the governor added this when asked about remarks he had just made to a group of seniors about the need to improve healthcare in rural areas and how Medicaid expansion might come into play: "But you know we do have to realistically look at whether we have adequate funding for rural doctors, primary care doctors. They cannot treat a third of their patients and stay in business. It is a business they run," said the governor. (Dean, 10/20)

Arkansas Department of Human Services Director John Selig said Tuesday he supports having a private company manage some portions, but not all, of the state's Medicaid program. Selig told a legislative task force that moving some of the program's more expensive clients to managed care makes more sense than shifting the entire program. A consultant told lawmakers this month that hiring a company to manage the care for the state's Medicaid program could save Arkansas billions of dollars. (DeMillo, 10/20)

Arkansas will have a better chance of controlling its Medicaid budget if it hires managed-care companies to handle benefits for nursing home residents, the disabled and other patients with expensive medical needs, the director of the state Department of Human Services told legislators Tuesday. John Selig, who plans to leave the Human Services Department at the end of this year, said the department has tried to implement changes in how it provides long-term services for the elderly, disabled and mentally ill, but with limited success. Private companies would likely have more flexibility, Selig said. (Davis, 10/21)

A bill under consideration in the state House would move the CHIP program, which provides free or low-cost health insurance to children, from the Department of Insurance to the Department of Human Services. Advocates say the switch would save the state money and would help families enrolled in the program. ... Thousands of children move between CHIP and Medicaid every month, however, as family incomes fluctuate and eligibility changes. Having one state agency manage eligibility determinations and one IT system would help provide more seamless coverage for children, state officials say. (Giammarise, 10/21)

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will abandon the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization program, the system confirmed Tuesday, after losing more than $3 million over the past two years in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid model. Instead, the ACO hopes to join CMS's Next Generation ACO model in 2016. (Morse, 10/20)

In August, Medicare officials released 2014 financial details showing that the so far the ACOs have not saved the government money. The 20 ACOs in the Pioneer program and the 333 in the shared savings program reported total savings of $411 million. But after paying bonuses, the ACOs recorded a net loss of $2.6 million to the Medicare trust fund, a fraction of the half a trillion dollars Medicare spends on the elderly and disabled each year. To help put this development in perspective, Kaiser Health News posed this question to several ACO experts: Three years in, the ACO program has many success stories, but it’s not yet saving Medicare money. Is it working? (10/21)

The American Cancer Society now says women should start mammograms later in life and get fewer of them, a stance that puts the trusted group closer to an influential government task force's advice. In new guidelines out Tuesday, the cancer society recommends that most women should begin annual screening for breast cancer at age 45 instead of 40, and switch to every other year at 55. The task force advises screening every other year starting at age 50. It's not a one-size-fits-all recommendation; both groups say women's preferences for when to be scanned should be considered. (Tanner, 10/20)

Richard Wender, a member of the breast cancer guideline panel and a former president of the ACS, said that the new recommendations confirm that mammography is the most important thing a woman can do to reduce her chance of dying of breast cancer but that they provide a more “personalized and tailored approach.” (Cha, 10/20)

At age 55, women should cut back to one mammogram every two years and continue that pattern for as long as they are healthy and expect to live at least 10 more years, the cancer society said. That is because breast cancer in that age group grows slowly enough that yearly screenings add only a small benefit while raising the risk of false positives. (Beck, 10/20)

The organization also said it no longer recommended clinical breast exams, in which doctors or nurses feel for lumps, for women of any age who have had no symptoms of abnormality in the breasts. Previously, the society recommended mammograms and clinical breast exams every year, starting at 40. (Grady, 10/20)

Researchers say that, across a 10-year period of getting annual mammograms, women overall have a 50-50 chance of being called back at least once for further testing that turns up nothing cancerous. And that's one reason why the American Cancer Society changed its advice Tuesday. (Neighmond, 10/21)

There have been years of debate and numerous studies questioning the value of these screenings and the age at which they should begin, often forcing women to weigh the risk of false diagnoses and overtreatment vs. early treatment that can save a woman’s life. (10/20)

The American Cancer Society’s new guidelines for mammograms have raised many questions for women. Here are the answers to some of them. (Beck, 10/20)

A high-quality screening mammogram is still considered the best way to catch breast cancer as early as possible. But members of the medical community disagree on what age all women should start getting annual mammograms, and breast cancer screening has become an increasingly polarizing topic as a result. ... But other experts strongly believe all women in their forties should get mammograms, including Daniel Kopans, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and director of breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. (Kim, 10/20)

A new analysis by an activist group called Hedge Clippers shows that at least 19 other drugs have experienced stunning price hikes of between 300% and 1,200% in just the past two years. In most of the cases, the drugs are produced by firms that have either been backed by hedge funds, private-equity firms or venture capital firms. (Egan, 10/20)

While sharp overnight increases in the cost of prescription drugs have recently dominated headlines, critics say another pharmaceutical industry practice that has added billions of dollars to the price that consumers pay for their medicines continues unabated. Known as "reverse settlement payments," or "pay-to-delay" deals, the financial arrangements are a unique but common practice in the pharmaceutical industry. Essentially, they allow drug manufacturers in some instances to pay competitors not to manufacture generic versions of their products, thereby ensuring that they maintain patent protection for as long as possible. (Thompson, 10/21)

In the booming biotech world, it’s easy to forget that there are speed bumps. ... “You’re going to see more of these setbacks,” said former venture capitalist Jonathan J. Fleming, president of the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, a Cambridge health policy institute. “We’ve had an investment boom since 2013 that has seen 138 new biotech companies going public. Just the law of averages tells you that all their drugs can’t work.” (Weisman, 10/21)

While many start-ups have sought to make their name in the health care industry, fewer are taking on the knotty health insurance information services sector. Collective Health, which provides tools to help companies with their employer-provided insurance, said on Tuesday that it had raised $81 million in a new round of financing. The round was led by Google Ventures, a new investor, and existing backers New Enterprise Associates, Founders Fund, Maverick Capital, Redpoint Ventures and RRE Ventures. de la Merced, 10/20)

Gritstone Oncology Inc., the latest company in Cambridge’s booming life sciences hub to focus on developing personalized treatments for cancer, has received $102 million in funding. The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco but does bioinformatics and gene-sequencing work in Cambridge, said it would seek to discover and develop tumor-specific therapies, with an initial focus on lung cancer. It’s one of several companies to focus on “precision medicine,” which could improve cancer treatment but is still in its early stages. (Newsham, 10/20)

David Vivero and his team at Amino, a San Francisco start-up, have been assembling for the last two years an unusual collection of health data for a consumer service. The online service, which was introduced on Tuesday, is built on a database that includes nearly every practicing doctor in America and the treatment of more than 188 million people. (Lohr, 10/20)

AmSurg Corp., a provider of outsourced physician services to hospitals and others, is seeking to combine with Team Health Holdings Inc. in an effort to gain scale amid a wave of consolidation in the health-care industry. Team Health rebuffed the offer in a statement Tuesday, pointing to insufficient value and the benefits tied to its planned deal to buy another outsourced-services provider, IPC Healthcare Inc., for about $1.4 billion. (Cimilluca, 10/20)

Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen will no longer recuse himself from the review of a proposed $54 billion merger between Anthem and Cigna, his office disclosed on Tuesday. Throughout his tenure as attorney general, Jepsen has recused himself from all matters regarding Cigna because his wife, Diana Sousa, worked there. On June 23 he recused himself from matters regarding Anthem because of the merger talks between Anthem and Cigna. (Radelat, 10/20)

A sizable chunk of his earnings is attributable to Mr. Bush’s work with three companies — Tenet Healthcare, Lehman Brothers (later Barclays) and Rayonier Inc. — that had business interests with the state while he was governor. In April 2007, four months after leaving office, Mr. Bush was named to the board of Tenet, which paid him more than $2 million in cash and stock over the next eight years, according to the company’s public filings. Florida was among Tenet’s biggest markets. (Flegenheimer and Eder, 10/20)

[Marco Rubio] drew his loudest applause in conservative Utah with calls to repeal President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law and beef up military spending. About 300 people attended the indoor rally at fairgrounds in Salt Lake City, about a mile away from the headquarters of the Mormon church. (Price, 10/19)

Hillary Clinton is wading into the controversy over Gov. Terry Branstad’s decision to hand over management of Iowa’s Medicaid program to private corporations. The Democratic presidential candidate has routinely drawn applause on the campaign trail for denouncing the Republican governor’s earlier decision to close two state mental institutions. On Tuesday, she ripped his plan to hire four national corporations to run the Medicaid program, which provides health coverage for more than 500,000 poor or disabled Iowans. (Leys, 10/20)

Appointment wait times at the Department of Veterans Affairs are not getting better. Despite billions of extra dollars poured into the agency in the last year and numerous reforms intended to improve veterans' access to care, whistleblowers and internal documents obtained by CNN reveal some VA facilities continue to grapple with appointment wait times of months or more. (Griffin, Black, Bronstein and Devine, 10/20)

Some patients with bladder and prostate cancer died waiting for care, and medical treatment for almost 1,500 others was delayed because of short-staffing and mismanagement of urology care at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix, a new investigation has found. Senior officials at the medical center, the center of a national scandal last year over fudged wait times, did little to respond to a severe staffing shortage as recently as April 2015, investigators for the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general found. (Rein, 10/20)

A legislative committee is calling for changes to help sustain health insurance companies that manage care for Medicaid patients and last year suffered millions of dollars in losses. Medicaid, known locally as MassHealth, is the government program that provides health coverage to 1.8 million low-income Massachusetts residents. About 42 percent of these people are members of six health insurers, known as Medicaid managed care plans. (Dayal McCluskey, 10/21)

State House and Senate leaders are expressing serious skepticism with a part of Gov. Charlie Baker’s plan to tackle the opioid abuse crisis: a proposal to let doctors hold addiction patients against their will for up to three days while trying to place them in treatment. House Speaker Robert DeLeo is worried that the governor’s plan for involuntarily holding drug users takes a judge out of the decision-making process. (Guzman, 10/20)

Several New York state lawmakers raised concerns Tuesday about federal and state policies to move more disabled people from institutions to community residences and managed care for behavioral treatment. The state Office for People with Developmental Disabilities currently supports 38,000 New Yorkers in residences and 80,000 with day services. It has about 400 people in institutional settings, a total the agency plans to reduce to 150, Deputy Commissioner Helen DeSanto told lawmakers. (Virtanen, 10/20)

Led by Senate President Andy Gardiner, the 2016 Legislature will consider another increase in funding for Early Steps, which serves infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities and delays --- and which has been struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Experts say that the younger children are diagnosed and treated for disabilities and delays, the greater the chance they'll reach school age ready to learn. (Menzel, 10/20)

Virginians can now check the patient safety record of their local hospitals online in an easy to read format. The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, a health system advocacy group, introduced its Quality and Patient Safety Scorecard on its website www.vhha.com this week. Each scorecard provides information about health care-associated infections, patient safety, hospital readmission rates, mortality data, patient satisfaction, and the efficiency of Medicare spending per beneficiary from 2010 through 2014. (Salasky, 10/20)

CalPERS has shed 18,000 people from its employer-provided medical insurance rolls, fund officials said Monday, after a rigorous two-year review that looked for ineligible dependents who received coverage even though they didn’t qualify. The system figures state and local governments and school districts with health insurance plans administered by CalPERS have saved a combined $122 million annually in lower premiums and avoided medical costs since the inception of the review in 2013, including savings from 6,700 ineligible people voluntarily removed by members. (Ortiz, 10/20)

CalPERS is about to implement a new investment policy that will reduce risks and future profitability. But the giant pension fund is being urged by Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, and some of CalPERS’ own board members, to dial back those risks more quickly. A schism over the CalPERS plan arose at a meeting Tuesday of the fund’s finance and administration committee. Committee member Bill Slaton, a Brown appointee, urged CalPERS to move more aggressively to reduce the fund’s “discount rate,” a target for investment profits. Other committee members, however, said they prefer the more gradual proposal that’s on the table. (Kasler, 10/20)

In West Virginia, the number of heroin overdoses has increased almost five-fold since 2010. So today, President Obama will visit the state to host a community discussion about what's needed to help prevent and stop drug addiction across the U.S. (Todd, 10/21)

A medical marijuana dispensary in California won relief Monday from a Justice Department crackdown thanks to a policy rider included in a federal spending bill in September 2014. U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer found that Section 538 of the 2015 appropriations bill (PL 113-235) means exactly what it says. The measure includes a provision that prevents the Justice Department from spending money to enforce any law that interferes with state marijuana laws. (Ruger, 10/20)

A pilot project in the Ann Arbor area is providing in-home care from paramedics to people without life-threatening symptoms. The program that began in August is meant to save such patients a hospital trip by sending community paramedics in response to 911 calls when appropriate, The Ann Arbor news reports. (10/20)

On Monday, Sonoma County officials released results of a first-of-its-kind survey of farmworkers in the county. It found that most workers in the county weren't really migrants, that most of the workers live in the area and many have established families here. And according to survey results, about 23% of farmworker children who are eligible for health care coverage still remain uninsured. (Gorn, 10/20)

As many as 4,000 people are expected to receive free medical, dental and vision care at a giant health clinic offered Thursday through Sunday in KeyArena at the Seattle Center. Between 750 and 1,000 health-care providers — doctors, dentists, ophthalmologists and others — are set to volunteer with more than $2.5 million in health services to people without regular care, said Deborah Daoust, director of communications for Seattle Center. (Aleccia, 10/20)

Christiana Care Health System has been on a campaign, vaccinating nearly all of its 11,100 employees against the flu. By the end of this month, it should easily top the 77% vaccination mark set last year among the nation's healthcare workforce. Employee-vaccination rates for the two-hospital, Wilmington, Del.-based system have been around 93%, exceeding national records for the last four flu seasons. Officials are proud that they've accomplished this without making flu vaccination mandatory, as many healthcare systems have. But, it acknowledged that peer pressure is involved. (Robeznieks, 10/20)

An unusual number of rare cancers has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention taking a close look at a community outside St. Louis, Missouri. "You'll never forget the moment they tell you, 'We found lesions on your lung and your liver,'" said Mary Osckso, who has stage 4 lung cancer. CBS News met with Osckso and six of her neighbors, all of whom lived in the same north St. Louis suburbs. Every one of these people either has cancer, or lost a parent or child to it. (Nair, 10/20)

More than two dozen lawsuits related to a laparoscopic device used to break up fibroid tissue in women’s bodies have been consolidated in federal court in Kansas City, Kan. The device, known as a power morcellator, was the subject of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration warning in November 2014. The agency said it posed a risk of spreading unsuspected cancerous tissue, notably uterine sarcomas, beyond the uterus and shouldn’t be used on most women. (Margolies, 10/20)

Health company Concerted Care Group, known for its heroin addiction treatment programs, said it plans to invest $8.6 million to open two new Baltimore area medical centers next year. Concerted Care Group wants to increase access to mental health counseling and primary care with a focus on people suffering from addiction to heroin, opiates and other drugs. (McDaniels, 10/20)

Republicans say they’re waiting to see if Paul Ryan will decide to lead them as House Speaker, but the better way to think about this is whether Republicans will follow Mr. Ryan if he does accept what amounts to a draft by most of the GOP conference. ... Mr. Ryan is part of the GOP’s modern growth wing, which was founded by Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. He has impeccable conservative policy credentials, having pushed budget and tax reform in the Tom DeLay era before the tea party existed. In 2011 he promoted Medicare reform, the most perilous issue in politics, and he rallied both House and Senate Republicans to vote for it. The left targeted Mr. Ryan’s blueprints precisely because they threaten the entitlement state. (10/20)

[A] Paul Ryan-led House could work harder to put forth a replacement to Obamacare, and work with the Senate to send meaningful entitlement reform to the President’s desk. Ryan has in fact been working on an Obamacare replacement plan for some time, and has reached across the aisle to propose bipartisan Medicare reforms with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden (D.) ... I feel for Paul Ryan. He knows there’s a good chance that his term as Speaker could go down in flames. But he also has an opportunity: to show that Republicans can govern in the political environment of the internet age. As Ronald Reagan might have advised him: If not him, who? If not now, when? (Avik Roy, 10/20)

There has recently been considerable criticism of the ACA’s “Cadillac tax,” which imposes a 40% levy on the excess premiums of high-cost group health plans. These are expensive plans with low cost sharing, access to the most expensive providers, and few limits on access to costly new technologies. I signed onto the statement of dozens of economists supporting the tax—not as ideal but as better than staying with the status quo. My reasons are somewhat different from those generally expressed in the debate. (Mark V. Pauly, 10/20)

Horrific as it is for the victims, drug addiction’s impact reverberates beyond them, to include families, friends, whole communities. Thanks to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, we can begin to quantify those wider consequences in our area. Nearly 3 in 10 Marylanders say they have a close friend or family member who was or is addicted to opiates such as prescription pain pills or heroin. The figures range from 4 in 10 in Baltimore to 1 in 6 in Montgomery County; but whether in the city or the suburbs, these numbers are far too high and fully warrant Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) promise to focus on the problem. (10/20)

A groundbreaking new study adds to a growing body of evidence that people with schizophrenia can do much better if they get the right treatment at the right time. ... A key focus of early intervention, as the name suggests, is to reach patients shortly after they first experience serious psychotic symptoms, like hearing voices or having delusions about conspiracies. That doesn’t typically happen today. It can take a year or more between the onset of psychosis and treatment. ... In countries like Australia and the United Kingdom, early intervention is becoming the standard of care -- thanks in part to decisions by government officials to pay for services through their national health insurance systems. In the U.S, with its patchwork insurance system and history of underfunding mental health care, early intervention is generally available only through small pilot programs that operate out of academic research centers and reach a fraction of the potential population. (Jonathan Cohn, 10/20)

Should a woman who donates eggs to help people with fertility problems conceive a child be able to charge as much as she can get in a free-market transaction? Or are there ethical reasons to limit her reimbursement? That is the issue raised in a federal lawsuit that accuses two professional societies and the fertility clinics associated with them of illegal price-fixing that limits donor compensation. A federal judge in northern California has ruled that the claim can move forward and certified it as a class action, which could go to trial next year. (10/21)

Retired real estate agent Charles Selsberg, 77, was not what anyone would call an activist. But ravaged by Lou Gehrig’s disease in his dying days, Selsberg made a public plea to the Colorado legislature to legalize physician-assisted suicide. “Living with this disease is a cruelty we wouldn’t tolerate for a pet,” Selsberg wrote with his daughter’s help in a commentary for The Denver Post last year. ... Out of decency and respect for the wishes of people suffering excruciating declines, doctors should be legally allowed to assist terminally ill patients end their lives, with strict safeguards against abuse. A Gallup Poll last May found that nearly 70% of Americans agree. (10/20)

California required legislative sleight of hand to pass physician-assisted suicide in a special legislative session that bypassed committee votes. This broke a string of defeats — even in liberal states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and previously in California. ... Oregon reports that pain doesn’t even make the top five reasons people seek doctor-assisted suicide. Instead, people are afraid of losing autonomy and dignity. Notably, they’re afraid of becoming a burden on others. In the face of a youth-worshiping country that marginalizes the sick and dying, we should resist making the vulnerable feel like a burden — not make it easier for them to kill themselves. Dignity doesn’t come from the illusion of power and control, but from mutual dependence and love. (Charles C. Camosy, 10/20)

California has joined four other states allowing physicians to write lethal prescriptions that dying patients can administer to themselves. Oregon was the first, blazing that trail in 1997. But with only five state "victories" in nearly 20 years, you can't really call physician-assisted suicide legislation a trend. Indeed, there is a lot of public resistance to it. Why? There is widespread concern that embracing physician-assisted suicide will change the culture of medicine and the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, as well as undermine the country's longstanding value for the sanctity of life. (Merrill Matthews, 10/20)