The next wave of state actions to combat the opioid crisis may focus on taxing prescription painkillers, my colleague Caitlin Owens reports this morning.

What's new:

• More than a dozen states saw the introduction of bills to tax opioids last year, but only one — New York’s — made it into law.
• The New York law will collect $600 million over 6 years from drugmakers and distributors, and use it to fund addiction treatment and prevention.
• The next states to watch include California, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont, per Kaiser Health News.

The other side: Opponents, including the pharmaceutical industry, say these taxes could make it harder for people to get the pain medication they need.

• Industry groups responded to New York's opioids tax with 3 lawsuits arguing that the law is unconstitutional. If they succeed, those suits could make lawmakers in other states think twice about going down the same path.

What to watch: Oral arguments in the New York suits are scheduled for Monday.

Public health officials — including some state and local governments — want a lot of people to be carrying naloxone, so that they can easily help save a life if they see someone who has overdosed on opioids.

• But people who carry it are now finding that they can't get life insurance, because the insurance companies see a naloxone prescription as a sign that you're likely to overdose on opioids.

"We want naloxone to be available to a wide group of people, people who have an opioid use disorder themselves but also [those in] their social networks and other people in a position to rescue them," Alex Walley, a doctor who works on Massachusetts' anti-opioids initiative, told Boston's WBUR.

• "My biggest concern is that people will be discouraged by this from going to get a naloxone rescue kit at the pharmacy," Walley said. "So this has been frustrating."

WBUR found multiple people who had been denied life insurance because of a naloxone prescription, including a nurse who does not use opioids but participated in a state program that involves standing prescriptions for health care professionals to fill.

• She has stopped carrying the drug out in public until she's able to find life insurance.

AbbVie spent billions of dollars to acquire a potential cancer drug known as Rova-T, but the drug is looking more and more like a bad investment, Business Insider reports.

Details: AbbVie has stopped enrolling new patients in a Phase 3 clinical trial for Rova-T, which an outside monitoring committee had recommended.

• The drug was intended to treat advanced lung cancer.
• But in the clinical trial, patients taking Rova-T were dying sooner than patients treated with standard chemotherapy, per BI.

Among the hallmarks of 2018 are news items that present as feel-good stories unless you think about them for more than 15 seconds, in which case they become vividly apparent as feel-bad stories. Here’s one of them, from the New York Times.

Two women in New York state have helped pay off medical debt for nearly 13,000 people, through a charity called R.I.P. Medical Debt.

• They raised nearly $13,000 for the charity over the summer, which then used that money to purchase and forgive $1.5 million in medical debts, covering roughly 13,000 people.
• Medical debt can often be purchased for pennies on the dollar — especially debts that have already passed through multiple collection agencies and have been on patients’ credit reports for years.
• R.I.P Medical Debt says every $10,000 donation helps pay off roughly $1 million in debt.

Yes, but: “It is a drop in the bucket,” Craig Antico, one of the charity’s founders, told NYT.

• R.I.P. Medical Debt says it has forgiven about $434 million in debt — and that Americans owe a total of roughly $750 billion.

Most people haven’t gotten a flu shot yet, and 41% say they don’t intend to, according to a new survey from NORC at the University of Chicago.

• More older people have been vaccinated than younger people — which is good, because older people are more susceptible to the flu virus.
• But getting vaccinated isn’t just about protecting yourself from infection. It also helps limit the spread of what can be a deadly virus.

Get a flu shot.