The New York Times: How The Senate Health Care Bill Failed: G.O.P. Divisions And A Fed-Up President
President Trump was fed up with the grind of health care legislation, and at a dinner with Republican senators on Monday at the White House, he let them know it. He told the lawmakers how annoyed he was with one Republican who was not there, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who had gone on television over the weekend to oppose a Senate health care bill that once held the promise of victory for Mr. Trump. It is one thing to vote no, Mr. Trump told the group, according to one of the guests. It is another, the president said, to go on all of the Sunday shows and complain about it. The scene on Monday night was an exasperating end for Mr. Trump to a month of negotiations between the White House and Senate Republicans in an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legacy. (Steinhauer, Thrush and Pear, 7/18)

The Washington Post: ‘It’s An Insane Process’: How Trump And Republicans Failed On Their Health-Care Bill
Vice President Pence arrived at the National Governors Association summer meeting with one mission: to revive support for the flagging Republican plan to rewrite the nation’s health-care laws. He failed. Instead of rousing cheers on the waterfront in Providence, R.I., Pence was greeted with an icy air of skepticism Friday as he pitched the legislation, which would reduce federal Medicaid funding and phase out coverage in dozens of states. (Costa, Snell and Sullivan, 7/18)

The New York Times: The 3 Republican Women Who Doomed A Senate Repeal Of The Health Law
It was men who started it. It may be women who finished it. The Senate effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a process that began with 13 Republican men drafting a plan behind closed doors, collapsed Tuesday, as three Republicans said they would not support an ultimately futile attempt to simply roll back the current health care law without a replacement. (Huetteman, 7/18)

The Washington Post: Senate Republicans’ Effort To ‘Repeal And Replace’ Obamacare All But Collapses
Hours after GOP leaders abandoned a bill to overhaul the law known as Obamacare, their fallback plan — a proposal to repeal major parts of the law without replacing them — quickly collapsed. A trio of moderate Republicans quashed the idea, saying it would irresponsibly snatch insurance coverage from millions of Americans. “I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” tweeted Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who joined Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in opposing immediate repeal. (Eilperin, Sullivan and O'Keefe, 7/18)

Politico: New GOP Plan To Repeal Obamacare Meets Fatal Opposition
But McConnell said Tuesday evening that he would hold a vote to proceed to the bill "early next week," which would put senators on the record even if the vote's outcome was preordained. McConnell said the vote was "at the request of the president and vice president and after consulting with our members." (Kim, Haberkorn and Everett, 7/18)

Politico: Medicaid Shows Its Political Clout
Medicaid may be the next “third rail” in American politics. Resistance to cutting the health care program for the poor has emerged as a big stumbling block to Obamacare repeal, and Republicans touch it at their political peril. “If they’d gone ahead ... clearly I would think we’d be seeing a transfer of power in a year and a half,” said John Weaver, a GOP strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has called the Medicaid overhaul proposals of his fellow Republicans “unacceptable.” (Pradhan, 7/19)

The Associated Press: Crumbling Health Bill Dents McConnell Image As Top Tactician
When the banner Republican effort to scuttle and rewrite President Barack Obama's health care law crumbled this week, the falling debris popped a hefty dent into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's image as a dauntless legislative tactician three chess moves ahead of everyone else. (7/19)

The Wall Street Journal: Why Obamacare Passed But The GOP Health Bill Failed
In 2010, Democrats passed a sweeping health-care bill that polls showed to be unpopular with no support from the other party. In 2017, Republicans sought to do the same. Each party touted the respective merits of its bills, but here is a look at some of the differences that meant one passed and the other stumbled. (Bendavid, 7/18)

The Wall Street Journal: Odd Position For The GOP: Working To Boost The Health Law, Not Kill It
Republicans could soon find themselves in a situation they didn’t expect: shoring up rather than dismantling the Affordable Care Act. With the demise of the Senate Republican health push, a growing number of lawmakers and governors from both parties say the urgent next step is to bolster the ACA insurance exchanges, which have suffered from rising premiums and fleeing insurers. (Armour, 7/18)

San Francisco Chronicle: Will Health Bill’s Collapse Force GOP To Work With Democrats?
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat and chief architect of the Affordable Care Act, offered Democratic help. Acknowledging that the law, commonly referred to as Obamacare, needs to be “updated,” she urged the Trump administration and the GOP Congress to stop threatening to withhold vital payments to insurers to cover high-cost patients and other actions that have destabilized some insurance markets. “We would have been working with them from day one,” Pelosi said in an interview Tuesday. “Call it something else, name the provision something else, save face, get yourself a victory, but protect the American people.” (Lochhead, 7/18)

The Washington Post: Affordable Care Act Remains Intact, But Consumers And Insurers Are Left With New Worries
The implosion of the Senate Republicans’ health-care ambitions leaves the Affordable Care Act intact for the moment — but immediately creates worrisome unpredictability for the 10 million Americans who buy health plans through the law’s insurance marketplaces. These consumers could face a rocky few months at the least, as the insurers on which they rely decide how to respond to the political chaos. Some companies could become more skittish about staying in the marketplaces for 2018, while others could try to ratchet up their prices depending on how events in Washington unfold. (Goldstein and Winfield Cunningham, 7/18)

The Washington Post: A Republican Party At War With Itself Hits The Wall On Health Care
By any measure, the collapse of the Senate health-care bill represents an epic failure for the Republican Party and a major embarrassment for President Trump. The crusade that animated — and bound — conservatives for seven years proved to be a mirage, an objective without a solution. Power comes with consequences. There is no way to spin to those who were promised that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed and replaced once Republicans held full power in Washington that what has happened is the fault of forces outside the party. This has been a GOP undertaking from start to finish. It is as though Republicans unknowingly set a trap and then walked into it without having prepared escape routes. (Balz, 7/18)

The Washington Post: Republicans’ Health-Care Split Goes All The Way To The Party’s Soul
At the heart of the failed Senate effort to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act were irreconcilable differences over the proper role of entitlements and how far the party should go to pursue its small government mantra. Both wings of the GOP revolted — senators who rejected steep cuts to Medicaid, a health program for low-income Americans, and others who felt the cuts were not deep enough. (Paletta, 7/18)

Orange County Register: Southern California Patients Uneasy About Future Of Health Care After Senate Bill Fails 
Across Southern California on Tuesday, July 18, patients, doctors and insurance experts reacted to the collapse of a Senate bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with a mixture of relief, worry and calls for a bipartisan solution. While much is unknown about what lawmakers might do next and how the Trump administration could choose to undermine the law, insurers are expected to raise rates sharply for next year. (Perkes, 7/18)

Fresno Bee: Fresno Groups Celebrate Failure Of GOP Health Plan
Advocacy groups met outside Fresno’s federal courthouse on Tuesday to celebrate the demise of the GOP health-care plan, but warned the fight is not over. “We are deeply concerned about the Better Care Reconciliation Act and its provisions that would cut federal funding for Medi-Cal recipients if it were to pass,” said Nu Vang, with the Fresno Center for New Americans. “Over 500,000 San Joaquin Valley residents would lose health coverage, and that would have drastic negative affects on our families, young children and communities of color.” (Mays, 7/18)

The New York Times: ‘Let Obamacare Fail,’ Trump Says As G.O.P. Health Bill Collapses
Mr. Trump declared that his plan was now to “let Obamacare fail,” and suggested that Democrats would then seek out Republicans to work together on a bill to bury the Affordable Care Act. If he is determined to make good on that pledge, he has plenty of levers to pull, from declining to reimburse insurance companies for reducing low-income customers’ out-of-pocket costs to failing to enforce the mandate that most Americans have health coverage. “It’ll be a lot easier,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. (Kaplan, 7/18)

Politico: Trump To Pitch GOP Senators One Last Time To Repeal Obamacare
President Donald Trump is trying to save the GOP's near-dead effort to repeal Obamacare. The president has invited all 52 GOP senators to the White House for lunch on Wednesday to see if he can revive the GOP's moribund plans to repeal and replace the 2010 health law. (Everett, 7/18)

The Associated Press: Analysis: Trump Unlikely To Avoid Blame For Health Care Loss
It was a far cry from "The buck stops here." President Donald Trump, dealt a stinging defeat with the failure of the Republican health care bill in the Senate, flipped the script from Harry Truman's famous declaration of presidential responsibility and declared Tuesday, "I am not going to own it." He had tweeted earlier, "We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans." (Lemire, 7/19)

The Washington Post: Senators Pushed Trump To The Sidelines. He Happily Stayed There. Republicans Are Paying The Price.
In early May, when Senate Republicans began working on health-care legislation, they quickly turned away from two spectacles: the unpopular House bill and the president of the United States’ premature White House Rose Garden celebration of its passage. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to work up a different bill inside his Capitol office — and left Trump on the sidelines, where he happily stayed. (Kane, 7/18)

The Washington Post: Trump’s Grand Promises To ‘Very, Very Quickly’ Repeal Obamacare Run Into Reality
One week before the election, Donald Trump traveled to the Philadelphia suburbs to deliver a health-care policy speech that was light on details and heavy on grand promises and dramatic warnings. In a hotel ballroom in King of Prussia, his running mate, Mike Pence, introduced him as a dealmaker, fighter and winner “who never quits, who never backs down.” Trump promised to “convene a special session” of Congress as soon as he was sworn in — an idea that confounded many, as Congress was already set to be in session — so that lawmakers could “immediately repeal and replace Obamacare.” All of this would happen “very, very quickly,” he said. (Johnson, 7/18)

Capital Public Radio: Covered California Delays Premium Rates Release, Citing ACA Concerns
As the fate of the Affordable Care Act teeters in Congress, the Covered California exchange is holding off on releasing premium rates for participating health plans, officials announced Tuesday. The rates were supposed to be made public in July, but the continued debate on federal health care has pushed that announcement to Aug. 1. (Caiola, 7/18)

KPCC: How Much Will CA Health Insurance Cost Next Year? Wait A Little Longer To Find Out. 
Californians who buy individual health insurance plans on the state exchange won’t know how much their 2018 monthly premiums might be until Aug. 1. Covered California had originally planned to release its proposed rates this week, but it said Tuesday that it's waiting because of the "unprecedented uncertainty" in Washington, DC over the future of the Affordable Care Act. (Faust, 7/18)

Politico: Trump Threatens To Gut Obamacare Markets
Donald Trump holds a fuse in his hands — and he could decide to light it and blow up Obamacare insurance markets as soon as Thursday. That’s the deadline for sending out the next monthly Affordable Care Act subsidies to health plans to defray the cost of care for individuals with low incomes. The president has toyed for months with the idea of stopping the payments to force Democrats to the negotiating table to avoid the prospect of millions of vulnerable Americans losing access to health coverage. (Demko and Dawsey, 7/18)

Bloomberg: Health Insurers’ Next Obamacare Scare Is Just Two Days Away 
The health insurance industry’s Obamacare drama reached a climax on Tuesday, but it isn’t over. With Senate Republicans’ failure to advance their bill to replace Obamacare, insurers are facing a summer of uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s administration won’t commit to making critical payments under Obamacare. Health plans have pulled out of some markets, and raised rates in others. And there’s always the chance that Republicans could revive their effort to repeal the law. (Tracer, 7/18)

Sacramento Bee: Sacramento's Western Health Advantage Expands Health Coverage In Bay Area
Western Health Advantage, the managed-health plan founded by Sacramento and Solano County doctors in 1996, is further expanding its coverage in the Bay Area and will partner with providers in the UCSF medical system and John Muir Health to cover more populous counties, CEO Garry Maisel said Tuesday. ... Those North Bay counties are home to roughly 911,132 residents, according to January 2017 population estimates by the California Department of Finance, compared with 4,429,303 in the counties now being added: San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. (Anderson, 7/18)

Los Angeles Times: USC President Tries To Quell Outrage Over Drug Allegations Against Former Medical School Dean
Acknowledging widespread concern on campus, USC President C.L. Max Nikias said Tuesday the university would “examine and address” a report in The Times that its former medical school dean abused drugs and associated with criminals and drug users. Nikias, speaking about the controversy for the first time in a letter to the campus community, said that “we understand the frustrations expressed about this situation” involving Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito and “we are working to determine how we can best prevent these kinds of circumstances moving forward.” (Parvini and Hamilton, 7/18)

Los Angeles Times: Half Of Americans Have Diabetes Or A High Risk For It — And Many Of Them Are Unaware
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and … diabetes. That’s right. The metabolic condition is about as American as you can get, according to a new national report card on diabetes released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Kaplan, 7/18)

In other public health news —

KPCC: LA To Debut Rapid Response Pilot Program To Help Stroke Patients 
A pilot program designed to provide stroke patients with emergency care more quickly will kick off next month in Westwood, San Pedro and Long Beach. The project will use a modified ambulance equipped with a mobile CT scanner to diagnose and start treating stroke patients while they're still en route to the hospital. (Lower, 7/18)

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Shady Clinical Trials Advertised On Prominent Government Website 
Potentially dangerous stem cell treatments are being marketed on a website the federal government established to help patients find experimental therapies, according to a prominent professor of bioethics. ClinicalTrials.gov is run by the National Institutes of Health to give a comprehensive list of all registered clinical studies around the world. But the site, mandated by an act of Congress, doesn’t properly vet these studies for legitimacy, said Leigh Turner, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics...California had 113 of these clinics, the most of any state, the study found. And Southern California was the epicenter. Beverly Hills had the most of any city in the country, with 18 such clinics. (Fikes, 7/19)