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For those currently living with ALS and for the hundreds of passionate ALS advocates like me who were involved, President Joe Biden did his best Santa impression and delivered an incredible gift to us just in time for the holidays. On Dec. 23, he signed the Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies for ALS (ACT for ALS) bill into law, giving those fighting ALS some real hope for the first time in a long, long time. (Lori Larson Heller, 1/25)

For decades, geography heavily influenced who received kidney and other organ transplants in the United States and who didn’t. An assessment released late last year of a new national policy, which takes a more logical approach to allocating kidneys, indicates that the days when an individual’s place of residence dictates whether they live are on the wane. This is good news for those needing a kidney, who make up the vast majority of patients on the transplant waitlist. (Vincent Casingal, 1/28)

The frequency and intensity of discussions around the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care continue to increase at the payer and provider level. Little has been said about how medical technology companies should navigate this coming change. Into that vacuum has crept an abundance of misperceptions. Perhaps the most dangerous one is a belief that simply structuring the terms of contracts as performance and risk-share guarantees will lead to success. (James Biggins, 1/27)

Two years and 5.6 million deaths into the worst pandemic in a century, I know what you’re thinking: When can we have a real global health crisis? Well, seek no further: A far more nightmarish catastrophe is already brewing in patients’ bodies, hospitals and other places where deadly microbes gather, writes Therese Raphael. And it’s not just one disease but a microscopic Hydra of bugs, all evolving to become more resistant to lifesaving medicines. (Mark Gongloff, 1/27)

The electric engine, invented in 1834, was touted as the productivity booster that would revolutionize manufacturing. Yet it took three decades before it had a real impact. When factories replaced steam engines with electric motors but left in place systems built around the old steam-based drivetrain, electricity offered no new efficiencies. It wasn’t until factories were designed from the ground up, with production lines intentionally built for the electric era, that manufacturers made enormous productivity gains — up to 90% — with the introduction of new production lines. In health care, the equivalent of replacing the steam engine with the electric motor is removing the stranglehold of the doctor-patient visit. (Jennifer Goldsack and Soujanya (Chinni) Pulluru, 1/28)

The liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, revealed many horrors. Among them were the atrocities perpetrated by doctors who took ethics very seriously, albeit with an unusual code of ethics with the State as the “patient.” When SS physician Fritz Klein was asked by a prisoner-physician how he reconciled his actions in concentration camps with his ethical obligations as a physician, he answered, “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a purulent appendix from a diseased body. The Jews are the purulent appendix in the body of Europe.” (Hedy S. Wald, Herwig Czech and Shmuel P. Reis, 1/27)