Politico: “The Democratic research group American Bridge is preparing a $50 million campaign to win over a slice of President Donald Trump’s base, and new polling has convinced the organization that Trump is vulnerable on pocketbook issues, especially health care, among white working-class voters.”

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to draw attention away from the politically explosive topic of impeaching President Trump by putting health care back at center stage for Democrats,” Bloomberg reports.

“Pelosi said more than 140 House Democrats held home-district events on health care over the weekend. This focus is especially important for moderate Democrats eager show voters they’re trying to deliver on their campaign promises even as some of their colleagues push ahead with investigations of Trump’s business, associates and administration.”

President Trump told ABC News that he’ll be rolling out a new health care plan in a couple of months, saying it will be a key focus in his 2020 reelection campaign. 

Sid Trump: “We’re going to produce phenomenal health care, and we already have the concept of the plan. We’ll be announcing that in two months, maybe less.”

New York Times: “While the president has acknowledged that no plan would be voted on in Congress until 2021, when he hopes to be in a second term with Republicans back in charge of the House, he is gambling that putting out a plan to be debated on the campaign trail will negate some of the advantage Democrats have on the issue.”

“But nervous Republicans worry that putting out a concrete plan with no chance of passage would only give the Democrats a target to pick apart over the next year.”

“California is beefing up Obamacare, restoring an individual mandate, expanding health insurance subsidies well into the middle class and covering some undocumented adults through Medicaid,” Politico reports.

“It’s an incremental step toward universal coverage that can animate the Democrats’ party-defining debate over how best to cover everyone — through a mixed public-private system or through Medicare for All.”

“The Trump administration announced Wednesday that the federal government would sharply curtail federal spending on medical research that uses tissue from aborted fetuses,” the New York Times reports.

“The move fulfills a top goal of anti-abortion groups that have lobbied hard for it, but scientists say the tissue is crucial for studies that benefit millions of patients.”

Politico: “Among some of these officials, that libertarian demand for medical freedom has displaced the traditional GOP view that it’s a civic responsibility to immunize your kids to prevent the spread of disease. As more politicians take an anti-mandate stand, some end up adopting bogus theories about the supposed harms of vaccination — threatening to roll back one of public health’s great achievements.”

“In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin said vaccine mandates were un-American. In Oregon, the state party used vaccine mandates to bash Democrats as violating parental rights. And in the California Senate, all 10 Republicans last Wednesday opposed a measure aimed at stopping bogus medical exemptions from vaccination.”

“The Trump administration moved to roll back health-care protections for transgender patients by replacing an Obama-era policy that expanded nondiscrimination protections,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“A section in the Affordable Care Act bans sex discrimination in federally funded health care. The Obama administration issued a regulation that included gender identity as sex discrimination, and the Trump administration wants to define that more narrowly by revising provisions in the regulation.”

Alabama state Sen. Jim McClendon (R) was asked on the Matt and Aunie Show why he voted against a medical marijuana bill.

Said McClendon: “I guess what bothers me as much as anything is I know what we’re doing is, some time along the way we are going to open a door that will eventually lead to recreational marijuana.”

He added: “If there is someone that needs it, let’s say there is someone doing the cancer treatment, they have nausea problems and they need something to control it, they can get it!”

Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R) responded to a top vaccine scientist’s tweets about vaccination exemptions by accusing him of ‘sorcery,'” The Hill reports.

Said Strickland: “Parental rights mean more to us than your self enriching ‘science.’”

He continued: “Make the case for your sorcery to consumers on your own dime. Like every other business. Quit using the heavy hand of government to make your business profitable through mandates and immunity. It’s disgusting.”

The Trump administration offered its first full argument Wednesday for its reversal on the Affordable Care Act, arguing in new court filings that the entire law “should not be allowed to remain in effect,” CNN reports.

“The government argues that the so-called ‘individual mandate’ requiring Americans to have coverage is unconstitutional and that the rest of the law should therefore also be struck down, even if the government ‘might support some individual provisions as a policy matter.'”

ABC News: “The key issue of the 2018 midterms may stick around to trouble President Trump in 2020: Americans, by a 17-point margin, say his handling of health care makes them more likely to oppose than support him for a second term.”