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The most enduring legacy of the Affordable Care Act may be emerging now in midterm races across the country, and our health care system may never be the same.For the first time in our history, Americans are agreeing that even if you are sick you should be able to find private health insurance coverage you can afford. Not only do 81 percent of voters now think it should be illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, but both political parties have embraced this central tenet of Obamacare. (David Blumenthal, 10/10)

Well, this seems to make it official: The Trump administration only cares about vertical mergers in media. Or at the very least, it has no problem when it comes to these types of deals and health care. CVS Health Corp.’s $69 billion purchase of insurer Aetna Inc. — the fifth-largest health-care deal ever — got conditional approval from the Department of Justice on Wednesday. The DOJ only requires the already in-progress divestiture of Aetna’s Medicare drug plans in order to approve the deal. The decision comes less than a month after the approval of Cigna Corp.’s purchase of Express Scripts Holding Co., another so-called vertical deal that will join together an insurer and pharmacy benefit manager — not direct competitors, but both players in the health-care process. (Max Nisen, 10/10)

Scrolling down the list of my primary care patients, I wondered who might be affected. A pregnant woman from Cameroon. An elderly woman with brittle bones from the Dominican Republic. A man with cancer from Ecuador. The Trump administration’s proposal to deny green card status to people who use services like food assistance and Medicaid threaten several of my patients with a harrowing choice: their health, or their immigration status. (Douglas Jacobs, 10/10)

The measured poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged only because the Census Bureau doesn’t count most of the transfer payments created since the declaration of the War on Poverty. The bureau measures poverty using what it calls “money income,” which includes earned income and some transfer payments such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. But it excludes food stamps, Medicaid, the portion of Medicare going to low-income families, Children’s Health Insurance, the refundable portion of the earned-income tax credit, at least 87 other means-tested federal payments to individuals, and most means-tested state payments. If government counted these missing $1.5 trillion in annual transfer payments, the poverty rate would be less than 3%. (Phil Gramm and John F. Early, 10/10)

The United States is at a moment of reckoning when it comes to women’s lives and safety. The avalanche of outrage we’re witnessing — brought on by #MeToo moments, stubborn gender pay inequities and unconscionable maternal death rates — has shaken us from our slumber. What matters now is what we do about these systemic failures.Plenty of issues divide us. But prioritizing the health of women, mothers and babies should not be among them. Politics has no place in the maternity ward or the neonatal intensive care unit. (Stacey D. Stewart, 10/11)

I have stopped telling doctors that I am in pain. I have stopped telling doctors that I spend days each month so dizzy I have to sit down, that I miss work because of nausea. I have stopped telling doctors that my birth control is making my day-to-day life hellish. Six years ago — three days after my Paragard IUD was inserted — my knees slammed into the linoleum floor of my kitchen as I fell to the ground in pain, screaming. I got myself to the emergency room, where nurses gave me morphine, Percocet, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. It was not enough to ease my pain. When I told the nurses, they refused to increase my dosage. (Katie Simon, 10/11)

The Biden Cancer Initiative recently hosted a meeting in Washington, D.C., pursuant to former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign to create a better cancer research and care system. As the conference came to a close, I marked the 10th anniversary of my youngest brother’s death from cancer, which came only the month after his first grandchild was born. (Edward Hudgins, 10/10)

Keeping the American people safe is government’s most important duty. After all, we can’t have a strong economy, an effective education system or a functioning democracy if it is not safe to leave your home or walk the streets of your neighborhood. In recent years, this obligation has taken on even greater importance. From 2014 to 2016, violent crime increased by more than 8 percent nationwide, and murders spiked by 21 percent. The increase in the murder rate in 2015 was the largest one-year increase since 1968. (Rod Rosenstein, 10/8)

It was one of those findings that brings on thoughts of the future — both scary and exciting: Scientists showed they could use brain imaging to sort out experienced surgeons from novice students. There’s been a history of extraordinary, often dubious, claims involving brain-imaging studies — everything from finding the seat of love to religion to attachment to one’s iPhone — but this claim looks plausible and potentially useful. Studying expertise this way became possible once there were imaging devices portable enough to monitor peoples’ brain activity while engaged in complex tasks. And so a team of doctors and engineers set up an experiment to monitor the brains of medical students and doctors performing in a simulator developed to test surgical skills. (Faye Flam, 10/10)

The public’s waning faith in science is only partly a reflection of our social and political times. Yes, there are the willfully ignorant people who refuse to admit that climate change is real and caused in large part by human activity, because that would mean giving up gas guzzlers and other polluting comforts of life. Others get their woeful information about vaccines from social media instead of finding out the facts about the billions of lives that have been saved by immunization – half a billion from smallpox alone, compared with the last century before its eradication. (Karin Klein, 10/10)