Modern Healthcare: Antitrust Experts, Providers Warn Against CVS-Aetna Merger At Calif. Hearing 
CVS Health and Aetna executives defended their $69 billion proposed merger before the California insurance commissioner on Tuesday, as a panel of antitrust experts and healthcare providers chipped away at the companies' promise to lower U.S. healthcare costs and improve the quality of care without harming competition. Although California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones doesn't have direct approval authority over the merger because Aetna isn't based in California, his opinion could influence how other state regulators view the deal. (Livingston, 6/20)

San Francisco Chronicle: San Mateo County Sues Drug Distributors Over Opioid Crisis
San Mateo County sued McKesson Corp. on Wednesday, accusing the San Francisco drug distributor and two other major pharmaceutical distributors over their alleged role in exacerbating the nation’s opioid epidemic. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, is the latest in a slew of legal actions by California counties and cities against companies that manufacture and distribute prescription opioids. (Ho, 6/20)

Los Angeles Times: Rapper Sirah Is Leading A Movement To Better Understand Mental Health In The Music Community
Sirah, who is also a certified peer-to-peer recovery coach, has become an influential advocate in the music industry, helping others navigate issues of mental health and addiction. Recently, she was named to the board of directors at the nonprofit Young People in Recovery; in January, she spoke about overdose prevention at the Echoplex during the first in a series of gatherings intended to encourage tough conversations within the nightlife community. (Swann, 6/21)

In other public health news —

CALmatters: Out With Soda, Juice And Chocolate Milk - California Could Become First State To Restrict Kids’ Meals
Under a bill advancing in the Capitol, restaurants could offer only water or milk with meals marketed for children. ...It’s the Legislature’s latest attempt to combat obesity and diabetes by limiting how much soda Californians drink. (Castillo, 6/20)

KPBS: Oceanside Council To Take Up Medical Marijuana Again 
The city council agreed to allow the cultivation, distribution, manufacturing and testing of medical marijuana, but so far, there is nowhere to legally buy medicinal marijuana in Oceanside. At 1 p.m. Wednesday, the Oceanside City Council is holding a workshop on medical marijuana and may make some changes to a city ordinance passed three months ago. (St John and Ruth, 6/20)

In other news from across the state —

The San Diego Union-Tribune: East Village Residents Air Concerns About Navigation Center 
The opening of an East Village housing navigation center for homeless people still is a few months away, but some residents in the neighborhood already have concerns about how it will affect their neighborhood. About 50 people attended an update on the planned center Wednesday night in the Neil Morgan Auditorium of the Central Library, and participants included members of several East Village groups that asked for assurance that the new center will not add more homeless people to their neighborhood. (Warth, 6/20)

The New York Times: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway And JPMorgan Name C.E.O. For Health Initiative
It’s a marquee name for a marquee venture. Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, the powerful triumvirate that earlier announced its hope to overhaul the health care of its employees and set an example for the nation, said on Wednesday that it had picked one of the country’s most famous doctors to lead the new operation. Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, will become chief executive of the new company, which will be based in Boston, on July 9. (Abelson and Hsu, 6/20)

The Associated Press: Amazon, Buffett, JPMorgan Pick Gawande To Lead Health Firm
Berkshire Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett has described health costs as a "hungry tapeworm on the American economy." And the leaders of the three companies see a lot they want to fix, even though they have said little yet about how that will be done. "We said at the outset that the degree of difficulty is high and success is going to require an expert's knowledge, a beginner's mind, and a long-term orientation," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement Wednesday. "(Gawande) embodies all three, and we're starting strong as we move forward in this challenging and worthwhile endeavor." (6/20)

NPR: Atul Gawande: CEO Of Health Venture By Amazon, JPMorgan And Berkshire Hathaway
"I have devoted my public health career to building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery that are saving lives, reducing suffering, and eliminating wasteful spending both in the US and across the world," Gawande said in a press release announcing his new job. "Now I have the backing of these remarkable organizations to pursue this mission with even greater impact for more than a million people, and in doing so incubate better models of care for all. This work will take time but must be done. The system is broken, and better is possible." (Hensley, 6/20)

The Washington Post: Atul Gawande Named To Head Cost-Cutting Health-Care Venture From Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway And JPMorgan Chase
Choosing Gawande, a practicing surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a writer for the New Yorker magazine, suggests that the company will be focused on innovation that could ripple broadly. Gawande was praised Wednesday by colleagues as a creative, visionary leader who has devoted his career to devising health-care solutions that can be widely adopted to improve surgery, childbirth and end-of-life care around the world. He is best known for making surgery safer through the implementation of a simple checklist. "He's never one to shy away from a problem, particularly a problem that appears to be unsolvable," said Elizabeth Nabel, the president of Brigham Health. "For Atul, it’s always about reducing suffering, saving lives and creating efficiencies in the health system. So I think the best is still ahead of him. He's such a creative and talented individual, I think we don’t know yet what his scalable solutions will be." (Johnson, 6/20)

The Washington Post: Fact-Checking Claims About Trump’s Plan To Stop Family Separations
A new executive order signed by President Trump lays out steps to end the separation of immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. We see this as a tacit admission by the Trump administration that many of its previous claims about family separations were bunk. Until Trump signed the order June 20, the administration was insisting that it didn’t have a policy of separating families (false), that several laws and court rulings were forcing these separations (false), that Democrats were to blame (false), that only Congress could stop family separations (false) and that an executive order wouldn’t get the job done. (Rizzo and Kelly, 6/21)

The New York Times: Trump’s Executive Order On Family Separation, Explained
President Trump on Wednesday sought to quell the uproar over his administration’s systematic separation of immigrant children from their families at the border, signing an executive order he portrayed as ending the problem. (Savage, 6/20)

The New York Times: Trump Retreats On Separating Families, But Thousands May Remain Apart
“We’re going to have strong — very strong — borders, but we are going to keep the families together,” Mr. Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.” But ending the practice of separating families still faces legal and practical obstacles. A federal judge could refuse to give the Trump administration the authority it wants to hold families in custody for more than 20 days, which is the current limit because of a 1997 court order. (Shear, Goodnough, and Haberman, 6/20)

The Washington Post: The Trauma Of Separation Lingers Long After Children Are Reunited With Parents
Long after the wailing and tears, the trauma of separation can linger in children’s minds, even after they are reunited with their parents, experts say. On Wednesday, under pressure from around the globe and his own party, President Trump signed an executive order to keep migrant families together. For some, the crisis may now seem resolved. But experts warn that for many of those children, the psychological damage of their separation will require treatment by mental health professionals — services they are extremely unlikely to receive because of U.S. government policies for undocumented migrants. (Wan, 6/20)

Los Angeles Times: The Long-Lasting Health Effects Of Separating Children From Their Parents At The U.S. Border
Researchers have long looked upon wars, famines and mass migrations as grim but important opportunities to understand how adversity affects children’s health. They’ve culled the experiences of orphans warehoused in government facilities, Jewish children dispatched to foreign families ahead of a Nazi invasion, and young refugees fleeing guerrilla warfare in Central America. They’ve conducted experiments in child development labs, taken brain scans, used epidemiological methods, examined the narratives of children torn from their parents — all in an effort to find meaning in tragedy. (Healy, 6/20)

Los Angeles Times: 'Children Must Not Be Abused For Political Purposes': What Health Groups Say About Family Separation
America’s medical and public health organizations have been unanimous in their criticism of the Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border. President Trump signed an executive order ending the policy on Wednesday, after U.S. border officials placed more than 2,300 children in facilities away from their parents, who were detained for criminal prosecution. Here’s a roundup of why these groups opposed the family separation policy, and what they’ve said about it. (Healy, 6/20)

Modern Healthcare: Fraud Fears Rise As Feds Expand Access To Association Health Plans
Regulators and insurance experts worry the Trump administration's new rule expanding association health plans for small businesses and self-employed people will lead to a spike in insurance fraud and insolvencies that plagued consumers and healthcare providers in the past. The Labor Department's 198-page final rule, issued Tuesday in response to President Donald Trump's executive order in October, will make it easier for small firms and individuals to band together across state lines in association health plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. (Meyer, 6/20)

The New York Times: Trump To Propose Government Reorganization, Targeting Safety Net Programs
President Trump plans to propose a reorganization of the federal government as early as Thursday that includes a possible merger of the Education and Labor Departments, coupled with a reshuffling of other domestic agencies to make them easier to cut or revamp, according to administration officials briefed on the proposal. The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title. (Thrush and Green, 6/20)

Stat: What's In The House's Bills To Address The Opioid Crisis — And What's Not
The House spent much of the last two weeks passing dozens of bills aimed at addressing the opioid crisis, an effort top lawmakers from both parties have long identified as a priority. Many are consensus proposals, though a few have generated controversy. Some are substantial in their scope, though many fund pilot programs or studies, or enact grants for which funding will expire within years. (Facher, 6/21)

The Washington Post: Senate Rejects Billions In Trump Spending Cuts As Two Republicans Vote ‘No’
The Senate on Wednesday rejected billions in spending cuts proposed by the Trump administration as two Republicans joined all Democrats in voting no. The 48-50 vote rebuffed a White House plan to claw back some $15 billion in spending previously approved by Congress — a show of fiscal responsibility that was encouraged by conservative lawmakers outraged over a $1.3 trillion spending bill in March. The House had approved the so-called rescissions package earlier this month. But passage had never been assured in the Senate, where a number of Republicans had been cool to the idea from the start. (Werner, 6/20)

Bloomberg: The ‘Right To Try’ Could Cost Dying Patients A Fortune
A small biotechnology company may be the first to offer dying patients unproven drugs under a new U.S. law called Right to Try that deregulated access to such experimental treatments. But it won’t be for free: Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics Inc. would charge for a therapy it is developing for the deadly condition known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. While details are still being worked out, the company’s chief executive officer pointed to the price of bespoke cell therapies used to treat cancer that cost more than $300,000. (Cortez, 6/20)

The Associated Press: New Flu Vaccine Only A Little Better Than Traditional Shot
A newer kind of flu vaccine only worked a little bit better in seniors this past winter than traditional shots, the government reported Wednesday. Overall, flu vaccines barely worked at all in keeping people 65 and older out of the hospital, with roughly 24 percent effectiveness. The best performance was by a new shot called Flucelvax; it was about 26.5 percent effective in that age group. The difference wasn't as large as some had hoped. (6/20)

Stat: Experimental Type 1 Diabetes Vaccine Offers Big Improvement In Small Study
An experimental therapy for type 1 diabetes, widely derided by mainstream diabetes researchers, lowered blood sugar levels to near normal, a small, ongoing trial found. Patients in the trial, whose blood sugar levels have remained near normal for five to eight years, take about one-third less insulin than they did before, reducing their risk of hypoglycemia, in which insulin lowers blood sugar to dangerously low levels. (Begley, 6/21)

The Associated Press: Kate Spade Foundation To Donate $1M For Suicide Prevention
Kate Spade New York has announced plans to donate $1 million to support suicide prevention and mental health awareness causes in tribute to the company's late founder. To start, the company said Wednesday the Kate Spade New York Foundation is giving $250,000 to the Crisis Text Line , a free, 24-hour confidential text message service for people in crisis. (6/20)