To bring New York into compliance with the Affordable Care Act, Governor Andrew Cuomo had to create the new exchange in his state through executive order.

Instead of setting clear limits, or just banning multiple types of antibiotics for use in livestock (as this legislation from Louise Slaughter would do), the FDA just prescribed “voluntary limits.” Why? Because they’ve been trying to ban antibiotics in livestock since 1977. And agribusiness along with pharmaceutical companies lobby against it, and it doesn’t happen. So we’re reduced to begging drugmakers to stop facilitating the fact that the hamburger on our plates is filled with penicillin and tetracycline.

For years, Xavier University, a Jesuit school in the Cincinnati area, had a health care plan that included birth control coverage. Faculty and other employees at the college, including non-Catholics, could get birth control under their health plans. When the Obama Administration mandated this as part of their preventive health services, the President of Xavier looked at his insurance plan, and finding birth control on there, he swiftly moved to cancel it.

Nine medical specialty boards are recommending that doctors perform fewer of the 45 most common tests and procedures as part of the Choosing Wisely campaign created by the ABIM Foundation. Procedures that should be cut back include CT scans for people who have only fainted, stress test imaging for people with no history of cardiac symptoms and antibiotics for sinusitis. This is helpful, but it doesn’t get to the core reason US health care is so expensive.

National Public Radio told listeners that, “Like the U.S., Europe Wrestles With Health Care.” If the wrestling in Europe is anything like the U.S., then we must be talking about professional wrestling. (“Hit him over the head with a chair!”)

I don’t care what you think about the health care law, a structure of government with a judicial review that feels free to parse legislation line by line and make what amount to ideological pronouncements on what can go forward and what cannot sounds a death rattle for progressive governance over time.

Your worship of your own economic freedom is no reason for me to pay for your health care.

Giving post-mortems on the question of health care at the Supreme Court is premature, and as law professor David Cole writes, you can find as much evidence for upholding Obamacare in the text of the arguments as you can evidence for tossing it out.

However, as a political spectacle, with the eyes of the nation upon them, it was clear to see that we have a large contingent, perhaps a majority, of committed judicial activists on the Court.

Earlier this week I chronicled the backlash against Jim Yong Kim, President Obama’s nominee to run the World Bank. That has continued, including a critique from a close pal of Larry Summers.

I never got around to summarizing the arguments from the fourth and last health care question at the Supreme Court, looking at whether or not the Medicaid expansion in the bill is unconstitutional. If the Court found this, it would unravel decades of federal-state partnerships in social policy and would create far more chaos than striking down just the mandate. Plus, more than half of the coverage expansion in Obamacare comes from this expansion of Medicaid, so it matters at a practical level as well.