Last month, at an emotional in hearing in Sacramento and in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, we called for the state agency that oversees doctors to become a stronger regulator or to go out of business. The Legislature has to renew the doctor-run medical board every ten years, and that’s this year. Sacramento apparently agrees with us.

Courtesy Think Progress, here’s a pretty good chart detailing the health program savings that were included in the White House’s opening bid on the fiscal slope. You can get this information from the White House’s FY2013 budget request.

The substance of the Medicare debate in the 2012 election is completely at odds with the realities. The Romney campaign hammers away at the $716 billion in “Medicare cuts” imposed by the Affordable Care Act, designed to blunt a traditional Democratic advantage on the topic, as it did in 2010. So far this has worked; the last two national polls show the Romney-Ryan ticket aheadof Obama-Biden on the subject of Medicare.

A couple judicial rulings recently actually went against corporate America in favor of consumers and residents, in such a rare fashion that I feel compelled to report on it.

It was first reported back in 2009 that the Obama administration cut a deal with the PhRMA to break specific campaign promises he made about health care reform in exchange for PhRMA spending money to politically support the bill.

The Senate has spent the day on a must-pass FDA bill that reauthorizes a user fee from drug companies to finance FDA operations, in addition to making other changes to how the FDA deals with drug shortages. The bill is primed for passage in the House, so if it can get through the Senate without much controversy, it’s pretty well assured of a trip to the President’s desk. Which means that it was time for another round of failure on the common-sense proposal to reimport cheap and safe pharmaceuticals from Canada and elsewhere.

The Census Bureau’s revised way of measuring poverty takes into account changing costs and the offsetting effects of support programs. Importantly, it reveals that rising drug costs and health have left millions more seniors in poverty that previously thought.

The Obama Administration continued its “we can’t wait” initiative by ordering earlier notification of potential shortages and/or price gouging for medical drugs. But shortages and exorbitant prices are the natural outcomes of allowing drug monopolies and extended patent protection.

Next week in Chicago, the Administration kicks off the eighth round of Trans-Pacific free trade agreement talks with multiple Asian nations. The nine-day negotiation includes talks with Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Peru and Chile, but whatever comes out of the talks is intended to be a “docking agreement” to which larger nations in Asia and South America can sign up. That would include Japan, India and Taiwan; heck, it could include mainland China. This has been in the works for many years, and the Obama Administration has been negotiating since late 2009. The soft deadline for a Trans-Pacific FTA is November, just two months from now.

Idaho is one of the most conservative states in the country–McCain carried it with over 61 percent of the vote in 2008–yet, even in this deep-red state, the people overwhelmingly support allowing individuals access to medical marijuana, according to a new poll.