“We are now able to provide health insurance to 700,000 people. Let’s just say they just got rid of it, didn’t replace it with anything...What happens to the 700,000 people? What happens to drug treatment? What happens to mental health counseling? What happens to these people who have very high cholesterol and are victims from a heart attack? What happens to them?” 

—Ohio Gov. John Kasich

• Trump Tells Congress to Repeal and Replace Health Care Law ‘Very Quickly’: New York Times by Maggie Haberman & Robert Pear—President-elect Donald J. Trump demanded on Tuesday that Congress immediately repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass another health law quickly. His remarks put Republicans in the nearly impossible position of having only weeks to replace a health law that took nearly two years to pass. "We have to get to business," Mr. Trump told The New York Times in a telephone interview. “Obamacare has been a catastrophic event.” Mr. Trump appeared to be unclear both about the timing of already scheduled votes in Congress and about the difficulty of his demand—a repeal vote “probably some time next week” and a replacement "very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter." 
  
  

• State GOP Wary as Republicans Push Repeal of Health Law: Associated Press by Bill Barrow and Thomas Beaumont—Congressional Republicans' drive to repeal the 2010 health care law has financial and political repercussions for GOP leaders in the states and gives Democrats potential openings as they struggle to reclaim power lost during President Barack Obama's tenure. Some Republican governors, in particular, are wary about what their Washington colleagues might do with Obama's signature law, exposing a fissure in a party that has consolidated control in the nation's capital and dozens of statehouses around the country in accompaniment with President-elect Donald Trump's victory in November. Changes to the law could quickly impact states' Medicaid budgets, the financial standing of public and private hospitals, and the estimated 20 million Americans who have gained health insurance under the law. Ripple effects would reach health care providers from pharmacies to physical therapists.
  
  

• GOP Governors Fight Their Own Party on Obamacare: Politico by  Rachana Pradhan—Republican governors who reaped the benefits of Obamacare now find themselves in an untenable position—fighting GOP lawmakers in Washington to protect their states’ health coverage. This rift between state and federal GOP officials is the real battle on Obamacare at a time when Democrats have only marginal power in Congress. The voices of even a handful of Republican governors intent on protecting those at risk of losing coverage could help shape an Obamacare replacement and soften the impact on the millions who depend on the law.
  
  

• Senate Takes Major Step Toward Repealing Health Care Law: New York Times by Thomas Kaplan and Robert Pear—Senate Republicans took their first major step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, approving a budget blueprint that would allow them to gut the health care law without the threat of a Democratic filibuster. The vote was 51 to 48. During the roll call, Democrats staged a highly unusual protest on the Senate floor to express their dismay and anger at the prospect that millions of Americans could lose health insurance coverage.

• Millions Sign Up for Obamacare as Trump and GOP Lawmakers Scramble for a Way to Roll It Back: Los Angeles Times by Noam Levey—While Republicans struggle to find a way to roll back the Affordable Care Act without jeopardizing health care for tens of millions of people, Americans continue to sign up for Obamacare health plans. As of Dec. 24, more than 11.5 million people had enrolled in a health plan through one of the insurance marketplaces created by the law, including HealthCare.gov and Covered California, federal data released Tuesday show.

• GOP Governors Fight Uphill Battle to Save Medicaid Expansion: Modern Healthcare by Virgil Dickson—An effort by Republican governors in Medicaid expansion states to show the expansion is worth keeping is unlikely to influence congressional Republicans in their drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its expansion of coverage to low-income adults, Republican experts say. Instead, congressional Republicans are expected to push ahead to repeal the Medicaid expansion and convert Medicaid from an entitlement to a capped program of federal contributions to the states, said Jon Gilmore, a Republican strategist in Arkansas.
  
  
• Medicaid’s Data Gets An Internet-Era Makeover New York Times by Steve Lohr—Jini Kim’s relationship with Medicaid is business and personal. Her San Francisco start-up, Nuna, while working with the federal government, has built a cloud-computing database of the nation’s 74 million Medicaid patients and their treatment. Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income people, is administered state by state. Extracting, cleaning, and curating the information from so many disparate and dated computer systems was an extraordinary achievement, health and technology specialists say. This new collection of data could inform the coming debate on Medicaid spending.

• Trump Medicare Promise Causes Heartburn for GOP: The Hill by Scott Wong—Time and again on the campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to his supporters that he wouldn’t gut Medicare as president. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, doubled down on that position over the weekend, insisting that his boss wouldn't "meddle" with Medicare or Social Security.  But a week before Trump’s inauguration, that campaign promise is already encountering fierce resistance from Republicans on Capitol Hill. For years, GOP lawmakers—led by Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.)—have been sounding the alarm that a major overhaul to Medicare and other entitlements are needed to ensure they don’t go bankrupt.

• Cancer Death Rate in US Drops 25 Percent From Peak in 1991: Bloomberg News by Laurie McGinley—The cancer death rate in the United States has dropped by 25 percent since its 1991 peak, resulting in 2 million fewer cancer deaths than if the rate had stayed the same, the American Cancer Society said Thursday in a new report. The group attributed the decrease largely to reductions in smoking and improvements in the early detection and treatment of cancer. But there remains a significant gender gap: The cancer death rate is 40 percent higher for men than women, and the incidence of cancer is 20 percent higher in men.
  
  
• Best Preventive Care? Get Vaccines, and Don't Smoke: The Star Tribune by Jeremy Olson—Researchers in Bloomington, Ind., have found that tobacco counseling and pediatric immunizations outrank other preventive services in cost-effectiveness and the potential to save lives. The research findings, sponsored in part by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, could influence how doctors across the country conduct thousands of regular patient visits each year.
  
  
• Smoking Costs the World Economy $1 Trillion per Year, World Health Organization Says Washington Post by Amy Wang——Smoking and its side effects cost the world's economies more than $1 trillion and kill about 6 million people each year—with deaths expected to rise by more than a third by 2030, according to a new report from the World Health Organization and the National Cancer Institute. Those losses exceed annual global revenue from tobacco taxes, estimated to be $269 billion in 2013–14, according to the report released Tuesday. Of that, less than $1 billion was invested in tobacco control. The massive study called smoking one of the largest causes of preventable premature death in the world. And unless countries around the world begin putting more tobacco control policies in place, it warned, the ballooning consequences will become not just a global public health issue but an economic issue.

• It’s the Drug Industry’s Turn to Tremble Before Trump Bloomberg News by Robert Langreth, Caroline Chen and Jared Hopkins—In a hallway of a San Francisco luxury hotel, investors huddled around a computer screen watching dozens of drug stocks plummet as President-elect Donald Trump lit into pharma companies, declaring that “they’re getting away with murder.” As for Obamacare, he said, “it’ll be repeal and replace.” The mood was shock and disbelief as thousands of health care investors, bankers, and executives gathered at the cramped Westin St. Francis Hotel. Many had paid thousands of dollars to attend the industry’s biggest investing get-together of the year, the four-day J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. And they had spent the last days speculating about what policies Trump would push in health care. Then the bomb dropped.