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Trump’s promise to let Obamacare ‘implode’ key to cities’ fight to preserve law. Opponents of President Trump’s effort to expand access to cheap plans to compete with Obamacare aim to use Trump’s rhetoric on Obamacare against him in court. A group of cities filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday that said Trump is violating the constitution with his, as they say, “sabotage” of Obamacare. The group cites a litany of Trump statements and tweets to the effect that he wants Obamacare to “implode” in order to make it easier to repeal it, as well as his claim that the law is already “essentially dead.”

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Plaintiffs rely on Trump’s own words: “President Trump said himself that he wanted the Affordable Care Act to explode, and his administration has been busy laying the dynamite and lighting the fuse,” said Anne Harkavy, executive director of the progressive legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the cities. The cities are: Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Columbus, Ohio. Also, two individuals from Charlottesville, Va., who claim they would be affected, are plaintiffs. But will referencing Trump’s tweets be enough to prove a campaign of sabotage? “I agree his tweeting is arbitrary and capricious, but that doesn’t mean his regulations are,” said Tom Miller, resident fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute. “Tweeting isn’t the same thing as regulatory rulemaking.”

Congo likely to use experimental vaccine on latest Ebola outbreak. Medical teams in the Democratic Republic of the Congo hope once again to use an experimental vaccine to prevent the latest outbreak of Ebola from becoming an epidemic. Preliminary testing suggests that the strain of Ebola that has emerged is known as “Zaire,” the same deadly kind swirling in recent months in another province 1,550 miles away, for which the experimental vaccine had been successfully used. Medical workers are doing additional lab testing and hope to confirm by Tuesday that this is the strain the area is facing. Around 20 deaths have occurred in the province, known as North Kivu, but not all have been confirmed to be linked to Ebola. Health officials will face the added difficulty of an ongoing military conflict that has seen roughly 1 million people in the area displaced. “We are responding to an outbreak with one of the highest mortality rates of any diseases, but in the context of a war,” Dr. Peter Salama, World Health Organization deputy director general, said in a press conference. “We are at the top of the difficulty scale in terms of responding to this outbreak.”

Chuck Schumer aims to force GOP senators to vote on ‘junk’ insurance plans. Senate Democrats are planning to introduce a resolution opposing the Trump administration’s expansion of short-term health plans, hoping to put Republicans on record on a move experts say could impact Obamacare premiums. The resolution would go through the Congressional Review Act process, which allows for an expedited vote, bypassing the filibuster, on striking down new agency regulations. The maneuver would force Senate Republicans to pick a side for or against the administration’s short-term plans, which Democrats have said is part of a larger campaign by the Trump administration to “sabotage” Obamacare. “These plans are nothing short of junk,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on a call with reporters Thursday. “When people buy them, they are always going to be disappointed.”

Democrats are optimistic about such a measure clearing the Senate based on a successful resolution earlier this year against the Trump administration’s net neutrality rules in which several Republicans joined with them. “As we saw with net neutrality vote, passing this in the Senate is possible,” Schumer said. “All we need is 51 votes.” Currently the GOP has a 51-49 majority in the Senate.

Trump tells Congress to keep work requirements for food stamps in farm bill. Trump urged Congress on Thursday to keep work requirements for food stamp recipients included in a Republican farm bill passed in the House last month. “When the House and Senate meet on the very important Farm Bill – we love our farmers – hopefully they will be able to leave the WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROVISION that the House approved. Senate should go to 51 votes!” Trump tweeted Thursday. The House passed legislation that would enforce stricter work requirements for many able-bodied people who receive food stamps though the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The legislation requires anyone under 60 without young children and who doesn’t have a disability to either work at least 20 hours each week or attend a program to prepare that person to work. The House bill also makes it harder for states to waive the work requirements. The Senate’s version of the bill, though, doesn’t include the provision, and getting work requirements through the upper chamber is unlikely.

HHS will give Planned Parenthood clinics family planning funding, but doesn’t say how much. The Trump administration will continue to give family planning grants to Planned Parenthood as it considers a new regulation to cut future funding to the women’s health and abortion provider. Health and Human Services released the names of 96 organizations that will get family planning grants for the 2018 fiscal year. The grant announcement on Thursday comes as the agency is considering a major overhaul to the Title X program that involves cutting off funding to organizations that provide abortion, such as Planned Parenthood. Title X gives grants to facilities that provide services like birth control, pregnancy testing, disease screening, and counseling. The organizations provide services for roughly 4 million people. The grants themselves will be awarded by Sept. 1. HHS did not disclose how much money it will be providing to each grantee. Of the 96 healthcare providers that will get family planning grants, 11 are Planned Parenthood clinics. That’s up from 10 Planned Parenthood clinics that got grants in fiscal 2017, according to data from HHS.

Planned Parenthood questions decision to not disclose funding numbers. Planned Parenthood said that all of the clinics who applied for grants appear to have been funded, but questions still remained over what the dollar amount would be, and that it was atypical for the grant information to be shared in this way. The announcement comes after the Trump administration recently closed a comment period on a proposal that would install a series of changes to Title X to revamp family planning grants to restrict funding to groups that provide abortion and restrict  whether doctors can refer patients to get an abortion. Federal law already prohibits any direct federal funding of abortions, except in the case of rape, incest, or if a woman’s pregnancy threatens her life. Supporters of cutting off funds say that the provision of federal dollars to organizations like Planned Parenthood frees up other money for the organization to provide abortions.

Anti-abortion group to kick off tour to pressure red state Democrats to confirm Kavanaugh. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony’s List will hold a series of press conferences starting Monday to press red-state Democrats to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. “Vulnerable senators up for re-election this year have a choice: stand with the President and their constituents and vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh, or cave to pressure from Chuck Schumer and the extreme abortion lobby,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. The conferences will be held in North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Alabama, Montana and West Virginia. Democratic senators are up for re-election in most of the states this fall. The only exception is Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones is up for re-election in 2020.

House lawmakers probe opioid makers’ role in epidemic. House lawmakers are pressing major opioid manufacturers for information on the sales, marketing, and distribution of the substances and how they contributed to the current epidemic. Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to three major opioid makers seeking documents and answers on the issue. The letters sent on Thursday are part of a larger probe by the committee into the factors contributing to the opioid crisis. The lawmakers sent letters to Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt, and Insys Therapeutics. In a letter to Purdue Pharma, makers of popular painkiller OxyContin, the lawmakers press the drugmaker about marketing. “For more than five years after it was introduced, Purdue explicitly marketed OxyContin as carrying less of a risk of addiction and abuse than other commercially available pain medications,” the letter said. All of the companies are facing lawsuits from numerous states over marketing, sales, and other matters regarding the opioid epidemic.

FDA issues proposal on vaping regulation. The Food and Drug Administration is asking for comments on how to approve e-cigarettes. FDA has been looking at whether the devices could be a gateway to getting people to quit smoking, and will be collecting data and evidence on this, and potentially approving products, in the coming years. In particular, the agency will examine the effect of e-cigarettes on the lungs in the long term. Should the evidence pan out, companies who apply and are approved for e-cigarette sales will receive a stamp of approval saying that their products are less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

Omarosa writes in forthcoming book Trump’s ‘mental decline could not be denied.’ Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman said she became concerned about Trump’s mental state during his interview with Lester Holt last May. In an excerpt of the forthcoming book, “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” published by the Daily Mail, Manigault-Newman said she “knew something wasn’t right” during the interview, in which Trump contradicted earlier claims from the White House that former FBI Director James Comey had been fired on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “His mental decline could not be denied,” she writes. “Many didn’t notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when.”

RUNDOWN

New York Times FDA did not intervene to curb risky fentanyl prescriptions

Reuters U.S. subpoenas AmerisourceBergen over opioid products

Axios Healthcare industry on track for massive profits

STAT News To pay for cutting edge CART-T therapies, Medicare plays it safe, for now

CNBC Medicare’s most indefensible fraud hotspot: Hospice care

Kaiser Health News Doctors reckon with high rate of suicide in their ranks

Bloomberg Allergan sues Pfizer over damages in opioid legislation