Stateline: Just How Profitable Should Your Disease Be?
Dialysis, which treats patients with advanced kidney disease, is lifesaving. The question is whether California’s ballot initiative to limit the profit of dialysis clinics, Proposition 8, would be more likely to protect lives or end them. ...The number of kidney disease patients in the state rose 46 percent from 2009 to 2016, mostly because patients are living longer, according to the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. In that time, 123 new dialysis centers were opened in the state, mostly by DaVita and Fresenius, the two largest dialysis companies nationwide. (Povich, 8/10)

The Associated Press: Doctors Nudged By Overdose Letter Prescribe Fewer Opioids
In a novel experiment, doctors got a letter from the medical examiner's office telling them of their patient's fatal overdose. The response: They started prescribing fewer opioids. Other doctors, whose patients also overdosed, didn't get letters. Their opioid prescribing didn't change. (8/9)

Los Angeles Times: Coroner Sent Letters To Doctors Whose Patients Died Of Opioid Overdoses. Doctors' Habits Quickly Changed
Addressed directly to the doctor, the letter arrived in a plain business envelope with a return address of the San Diego County medical examiner’s office. Its contents were intended, ever so carefully, to focus the physician on a national epidemic of opioid abuse — and his or her possible role in it. “This is a courtesy communication to inform you that your patient [name, date of birth inserted here] died on [date inserted here]. Prescription drug overdose was either the primary cause of death or contributed to the death,” the letter read. (Healy, 8/9)

The Washington Post: Death Reports Make The Opioid Crisis Personal For Doctors
The letters were successful, although the effects were modest. Doctors who were informed of their patients' deaths were 7 percent less likely to start new patients on opioids and issued fewer high-dose prescriptions over the next three months, compared with those who did not receive a letter. In total, there was a 9.7 percent reduction in the total amount of opioids they prescribed, according to results published Thursday in the journal Science. (Johnson, 8/9)

NPR: 'Dear Doctor' Letters Reduce Opioid Prescribing
"What's important about what we've found is that you can do very simple things to change prescribing and make prescribing safer," says coauthor Jason Doctor, an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of Southern California. (Watson, 8/9)

Capital Public Radio: Emergency Room Visits, Wait Times On The Rise In California 
New data from the California Health Care Foundation shows that emergency department visits rose 44 percent from 2006 to 2016. California patients who get admitted to the hospital spend about an hour longer in the emergency room than patients nationally. (Caiola, 8/9)

In other news from across the state —

KPBS: State Still Seeking Vendor For Medical Interpretation Study Nearly Two Years Later
A state agency is searching for a company to evaluate medical interpretation services for Medi-Cal patients nearly two years after the Legislature approved the study. San Diego's immigrant communities, including in City Heights, have complained the current process is inadequate. (Mento, 8/9)

Sacramento Bee: Sacramento Welfare Fraud Office Tracks Drivers With License Plate Data 
It is rare for a welfare agency to use data collected by automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, which snap photos of all license plates from street poles and police cars as vehicles drive by, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. The organization is particularly concerned that the Sacramento County agency violated state law by accessing the database without rules in place for its use. (Browning, 8/10)

PBS NewsHour: How Wildfires Can Threaten Your Health
For many Californians, the crimson sky was another reminder of the 19 wildfires burning across the state, a larger and more destructive threat than in recent years. It could become the worst fire season in state history. For [Thomas] Dailey, a pulmonologist who has treated asthma patients for 29 years, it also signaled a growing health risk for his patients and the public. (Santhanam, 8/9)

The Washington Post: Trump Administration Proposes Further Dismantling Of Affordable Care Act Through Medicare
The Trump administration is proposing to restrict an innovation in the Affordable Care Act, which was intended to improve Medicare and slow spending in the vast federal insurance system for older Americans. Health-care researchers hail the model’s promise to improve quality and efficiency, but government data suggest it is not saving enough money. The changes, announced Thursday by the administrator of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would significantly curtail Accountable Care Organizations. The ACOs can be teams of doctors, hospitals or other providers who become responsible for all the health-care needs of a specific group of patients. (Goldstein, 8/9)

In other national health care news —

The New York Times: Companies Respond To An Urgent Health Care Need: Transportation
As America’s baby boomers are hitting 65 at a rate of 10,000 a day, and healthier lifestyles are keeping them in their homes longer, demand is escalating for a little talked-about — yet critical — health care-related job: Transporting people to and from nonemergency medical appointments. “It’s going to become a massive phenomena,” said Ken Dychtwald, founder and chief executive of Age Wave, a consulting firm specializing in age-related issues. “This is an unmet need that’s going to be in the tens of millions of people.” (Morrissey, 8/9)

The Associated Press: Court Orders Ban On Harmful Pesticide, Says EPA Violated Law
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration endangered public health by keeping a widely used pesticide on the market despite extensive scientific evidence that even tiny levels of exposure can harm babies' brains. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to remove chlorpyrifos from sale in the United States within 60 days. (8/9)

The Wall Street Journal: The Democratic Party’s New Litmus Test: Gun Control
During her 2010 U.S. House campaign, Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona highlighted her “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. She opposed gun-control measures and regaled constituents in her largely rural district with stories of hunting with her father. In 2018, Ms. Kirkpatrick is running to return to the House espousing a gun-control platform that is among the country’s most aggressive. She is for universal background checks and a ban on guns described as assault weapons. She disavows her longstanding position as a “proud gun owner,” saying she gave away the hunting rifles inherited from her father. “I do not have any guns in my home,” she says. (Epstein, 8/9)

The Hill: Ocasio-Cortez: 'Medicare For All' Is ‘Not A Pipe Dream’
New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) on Wednesday said her policy proposal of "Medicare for all" is "not a pipe dream." "I think at the end of the day, we see that this is not a pipe dream," Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time." (Birnbaum, 8/9)

Stat: Tumor Cells Can Unleash Tiny Weapons To Ward Off Immune System Attacks 
Scientists have discovered that cancer cells can release tiny weapons called exosomes that target immune cells before they have a chance to reach a tumor. The findings, published Wednesday in Nature, point to the exosomes as a potential biomarker to predict which patients might respond to anti-PD-1 therapies. The cancer treatments target PD-1, a checkpoint protein on immune T cells. Tumor cells that express another protein, PD-L1, can bind to the PD-1 on T cells to inhibit the immune system’s ability to attack cancer cells. The University of Pennsylvania researchers are hoping that measuring exosome levels might offer insight into whether an anti-PD-1 therapy would work for a particular patient. (Thielking, 8/9)

Los Angeles Times: Sorry About Your Stage 3 Cancer. Here's A Bill For $21,000 In Charges You Thought Were Covered
When Michele Brough was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in April, her oncologist wasted no time in reaching out to her insurer, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, to obtain pre-approval for a drug that would strengthen her immune system to better withstand chemotherapy. The good news came shortly afterward. “We are pleased to authorize benefits for the service(s),” Anthem informed Brough, 56, by letter. ... It wasn’t until after the second round of treatment that Brough’s oncologist informed her Anthem wasn’t covering the injections, sticking her with the staggering cost of $7,000 for each shot. As if that weren’t devastating enough, Anthem’s reasoning was downright absurd. (David Lazarus, 8/7)

CNN: Waking Up To A Burning California
Monday morning, by the time I woke up, the poet Brenda Hillman, who lives up the hill from me in Kensington had already posted a picture to Instagram of the eerie sky out over the San Francisco Bay: a layer of low-lying fog, blanketing the hills, a small gap of sky, and then above it a huge dark plume of looming smoke, lurking like a dark genie over the metropolis. (Tess Taylor, 8/7)

The Washington Post: Trump’s Tweets On California Water And Wildfires Are Dangerous
As if water and wildfire policies in the West weren’t contentious enough, President Trump decided to toss confused and ill-conceived tweets into the mix over the past few days, reigniting fights over water and land use in California. “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized,” Trump said in a tweet Sunday. He was back at it again Monday morning, decrying water that is “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.” (Peter Gleick, 8/8)

Los Angeles Times: New In GOP Logic: Antipoverty Programs Worked So Well, We Must Get Rid Of Them
For many decades now the GOP has sought to undo the New Deal and the Great Society. But a report released last month from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, lost in a sea of grabbier news items, applies a new logic to the goal of shredding the safety net. According to “Expanding work requirements in non-cash welfare programs,” comprehensive antipoverty programs are no longer necessary because 50 years of antipoverty programs — yes, those same interventions long hated, and their effectiveness belittled, by the GOP — have succeeded so spectacularly that poverty is largely a thing of the past. (Sasha Abramsky, 8/10)

Sacramento Bee: With Kavanaugh Nomination To Supreme Court, Abortion Rights Are Hanging By A Thread
In May 1972, I was a freshman at Northwestern University and one night at the cafeteria I walked through the line with a woman I knew, but not particularly well. As we sat down and talked, she seemed visibly upset. She told me what had happened at a fraternity party a couple of months earlier -- what today would be regarded as date rape – and said she was sure she was pregnant. (Erwin Chemerinsky, 8/7)

The Mercury News: Rural Areas Need Affordable Air Ambulances
Unless we spend billions of dollars to build trauma centers 30 minutes away from each other all across rural areas, the access void is filled instead by air ambulances that reduce critical transport time for emergency patients. Simply put, air medical providers save lives, particularly in underrepresented communities. However, air medical bases are at risk of closing. (Ken McEldowney, 8/7)

Sacramento Bee: Older Adults Have Mental Health Needs, Too
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and state Sen. Scott Weiner make a reasonable case for why youth should be prioritized for Mental Health Service Act funding. ... Yet the bill narrowly defines prevention and early intervention outreach as targeting “secondary school and transition age youth, with a priority on partnerships with college mental health programs.” This cuts out all other population groups. (Janet C. Frank, 8/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: AIDS Group Kicks In $10 Million More To Expand Rent Control 
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has contributed an additional $10 million to Yes on 10, the coalition supporting a November ballot measure that would let California cities to impose stricter rent control laws. ...Prop. 10 would overturn the 1995 Costa Hawkins Rent Control Act, which prohibits cities from imposing rent control on certain properties including multi-family apartments built February 1995 (unless the city had rent control with a previous cutoff date) and single-family homes and condos of any age. (Kathleen Pender, 8/8)