New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has gone public about the fact that he secretly underwent lap band surgery in February, not long after his 50th birthday, at the encouragement of his family and friends. The governor’s weight has come under constant media scrutiny throughout his time in politics. “I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years,” Christie told the New York Post. “For me, this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.”

So what’s a lap band procedure, and how common is Christie’s decision to address his weight with surgical intervention? In fact, the governor — who says he has already lost 40 pounds — opted for an increasingly popular weight loss surgery among Americans struggling to combat epidemic rates of obesity.

Lap bands, which were first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2001, are considered to be the least traumatic type of weight loss surgery. Unlike gastric bypass procedures, which permanently reduce the capacity of the stomach, lap band surgeries are reversible. The procedure involves fitting a plastic belts around a patient’s stomach, creating a small pouch that can only hold a certain amount of food. That allows the patients to feel fuller sooner and prevents them from overeating. Since the diameter of the lap band is adjustable, patients’ stomach capacities can be adjusted to suit their needs, and some people gradually move back toward a normal stomach capacity as they lose weight. If the lap band needs to be removed for any reason, the stomach will return to its normal size without any lasting side effects.

Gastric bypass has long been the most popular weight loss surgery. But lap band surgery, touted as a safer and less invasive option, has steadily grown in popularity since it was first introduced. Between 2004 and 2007, its use rose from 7 percent to 23 percent. And in 2011, the FDA approved the lap band procedure for an expanded population of Americans, lowering the recommended body mass index (BMI) needed to qualify for getting a lap band and allowing even more people to pursue the surgery.

Patients who opt for the lap band typically take a longer time to lose all of the weight, but some studies have suggested they’re more likely to keep it off than the patients who undergo gastric bypass. A recent study found that one year after undergoing the procedure, nearly 85 percent of the lap band patients had lost at least 30 percent of their excess body weight, and about 66 percent of the patients were no longer considered obese. Most importantly, the obesity-related health conditions improved for many of the subjects of the study — 64 percent of those with high cholesterol, 59 percent of those with high blood pressure, and 85 percent of those with diabetes all saw better health outcomes after using the lap band for a year.

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Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) vetoed L.D. 272 on Thursday, a bill that would prohibit Mainers under the age of 18 from using indoor tanning salons in an effort to protect youth from skin cancer risk. In his veto message, the governor ridiculed the measure as “government run amok” that “tells parents that Augusta knows better than they do when it comes to their children.”

To explain his veto decision, LePage claimed that the bill would do nothing to “stop teenagers from lying in the sun or spending hours in privately owned tanning beds” in their homes. But arguing that a public health and safety initiative banning indoor tanning is toothless just because it doesn’t prevent private use is akin saying that tobacco and alcohol restrictions also serve no purpose, since kids can just sneak into personal stashes at home. And the kids who soak up natural rays from the sun are much less at risk for skin cancer than the kids who are exposed to the the highly concentrated UV rays in tanning beds, according to a 2010 American Association for Cancer Research study.

In fact, there is zero doubt in the scientific and medical communities that the use of tanning beds increases the risk for melanoma by exposing users to unhealthy levels of UV radiation. The Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) website has an entire section dedicated to debunking myths about indoor tanning safety, noting that tanning bed use is “particularly dangerous for younger users” as “people who begin tanning younger than age 35 have a 75% higher risk of melanoma.” Nevertheless, tanning salons often outright ignore U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety recommendations governing minors’ use of commercial tanning beds. A 2009 National Cancer Institute (NCI) investigative study found that less than 11 percent of tanning facilities followed FDA’s safety schedule limiting young people’s use of the beds to three times a week at most, and the vast majority would allow teens to use their facilities all seven days for the first week.

Back in 2006, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that “policymakers should consider enacting measures, such as prohibiting minors and discouraging young adults from using indoor tanning facilities, to protect the general population from possible additional risk for melanoma.” It should consequently come as no surprise that L.D. 272′s strongest proponents are doctors in Maine’s legislature. Sen. Geoffrey Gratwick (D), a physician, said of LePage’s veto, “There are times when science and medicine should supersede politics. This is one of those times.”

Vermont and California already have laws similar to L.D. 272 on the books, and just last week, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) signed a bill banning minors under age 17 form using commercial tanning beds and children under age 14 from using spray tans in his state. Christie asserted that the bill was “important for protecting the safety of minors” in New Jersey.

Medical marijuana’s hazy legal status is a well-known flash point for tension between state and federal law. While those discrepancies tend to manifest themselves in the form of raids on suppliers and dispensaries, the conflict over medical marijuana laws doesn’t just affect business owners — it can also take a toll on Americans who use the drug for painful, chronic medical conditions such as cancer.

But New Jersey’s Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee is taking action to prevent some of those unforeseen consequences from affecting medical marijuana-using Garden State residents — specifically, to protect them from getting kicked off transplant lists due to their physician-prescribed marijuana use. On Tuesday, the panel passed S-1220, legislation that “would provide that a registered, qualifying patient’s authorized use of medical marijuana would be considered equivalent to using other prescribed medication rather than an illicit substance and therefore would not disqualify the person from needed medical care, such as an organ transplant.”

According to a press release from the bill’s co-sponsors, state Sens. Joseph Vitale (D) and Nicholas Scutari (D), the bill is a precautionary measure to prevent cases like that of a California cancer patient who was kicked off of a liver transplant list due to his medical marijuana use:

“We are hearing of cases in other states of sick and dying patients being kicked off organ transplant waiting lists for their legal use of medical marijuana,” said Senator Vitale, D-Middlesex, and Chairman of the Senate Health Committee. “This practice is unconscionable as the patients have followed their doctors’ orders and have taken a legal medication to reduce the pain and suffering associated with their illness. Transplant centers should not be able to discriminate against people for using this prescription pain killer.”

“Medical marijuana is a compassionate and humane way to manage pain and provide relief from side effects that often accompany chronic and terminal ailments,” said Senator Scutari, D-Union and Middlesex. “Our medical marijuana law is already the most restrictive in the nation with built in protections to ensure that people are using the prescribed drug as a treatment for prolonged and chronic medical conditions rather than for recreational use. The thought that someone would be denied treatment that could help cure their condition or greatly reduce their suffering because of their legal use of this prescribed drug is abhorrent. We must address this issue.”

New Jersey’s medical marijuana law is indeed the most stringent in the nation, with potency caps, restrictions limiting medical marijuana purchases to state-approved “Alternative Treatment Centers,” and the country’s first — and only — public registry of state-approved physicians who can prescribe the drug.

S-1220 may be a preventative measure, but it underlies the complexities of an issue that rests at the awkward intersection of controlled substance policy and real-world public health concerns. For instance, many medical marijuana users have to dole out hundreds of dollars per month on treatment costs since they don’t receive prescription drug benefits for their medication through health insurance. That financial toll is particularly burdensome for the most common medical cannabis users — cancer patients — who already pay exorbitant bills for chemotherapy, despite the pain relief and other medical benefits that many users have reported.

If the bill does eventually pass both New Jersey state chambers, it’s still an open question whether or not Gov. Chris Christie (R) will sign it. Christie has publicly opposed any efforts to decriminalize marijuana in his state, but has also assured cannabis advocates that he does not wish to hamstring sick and suffering Americans’ access to treatments under New Jersey’s medical marijuana law.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has accepted Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, which will extend insurance coverage to an additional 300,000 low-income people in the state. As Republican opposition to the health care reform law finally begins to wane, Christie is the eighth GOP leader to agree to expand the Medicaid program under Obamacare — and the first potential 2016 presidential contender to embrace that provision.

The governor announced his decision at a state budget address on Tuesday. Although Christie remains a staunch Obamacare opponent — and has refused to set up a health insurance marketplace, the law’s other major state-level provision — he explained that expanding Medicaid represents a smart financial decision for his state. Thanks to the increased federal funding allocated for the states that choose to add more low-income residents to their Medicaid rolls, New Jersey will reap up to $300 million in the upcoming budget year.

“It’s simple. We are putting people first,” Christie explained in his address. “We have an opportunity to ensure that an even greater number of New Jerseyans who are at or near the poverty line will have access to critical health services beginning in January 2014.” The governor added that the federal government’s funding toward the public insurance program will mean that “expanding Medicaid will ensure New Jersey taxpayers will see their dollars maximized.”

That position is resonating with a growing number of deeply conservative Republicans. Just last week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott — who has been one of the health reform law’s most vehement critics — also announced his support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. GOP governors in Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, and Nevada have also come out in favor of expanding Medicaid, which leaves nine Republican leaders who are still making up their minds about whether to increase the eligibility levels for their programs.

But the larger Republican establishment, which has increasingly moved further to the right, may not be particularly receptive to Christie’s decision. The governor has not been invited to speak at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference because he is “simply not a conservative in the eyes of organizers” — largely, as the National Review suggests, because of his positions on Medicaid and gun violence prevention.