Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

If you can only read three things about health policy this week, I suggest...

The Top Three...

The Wall Street Journal: How Health Insurance Costs Outpace Inflation, In Charts Inflation is easing across much of the economy. For healthcare? Not yet. The cost of employer health insurance rose 7% for a second straight year, maintaining a growth rate not seen in more than a decade, according to an annual survey by the healthcare nonprofit KFF. The back-to-back years of rapid increases have added more than $3,000 to the average family premium, which reached roughly $25,500 this year. (Evans, 10/9)

Modern Healthcare: The Biden Healthcare Regulations At Risk If Trump Wins If former President Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, he's likely to revive policies President Joe Biden repealed and eliminate some of the Democrat's own initiatives, shifting the healthcare system to the right. Trump hasn’t been forthcoming about healthcare during the campaign, his policy platform doesn’t feature specifics and he confessed during his debate last month with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, to having mere "concepts of a plan" for healthcare. (Early, 10/10)

Reuters: US Health Agency Releases 2025 Quality Ratings For Medicare Plans The U.S. government announced quality ratings for 2025 Medicare health and prescription drug plans on Thursday, the first indication of which large health insurers, including CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group and Humana, will get bonus payments in 2026. Sixty-two percent of people currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans that cover prescription drugs are covered by plans rated four or more stars, the Medicare agency said in its release, down from 74% last year. (Niasse, 10/11)

For a Deeper Dive...

The New York Times: U.S. Races To Replace IV Fluid Supplies After Hurricane Helene U.S. officials approved airlifts of IV fluids from overseas manufacturing plants on Wednesday to ease shortages caused by Hurricane Helene that have forced hospitals to begin postponing surgeries as a way to ration supplies for the most fragile patients. On Tuesday, workers at B. Braun, makers of a fourth of the nation’s IV fluids, loaded trucks at the company’s plant in Daytona Beach with the medical bags and drove them north through the night to what they hoped would be a safer location. (Jewett, 10/9)

AP: Harris Proposes Expanding Medicare To Cover In-Home Senior Care Vice President Kamala Harris is proposing to provide federal funding to cover home care costs for older Americans, aiming to help the “ sandwich generation " of adults caring for aging parents while raising their children at the same time. Appearing Tuesday on ABC’s “The View,” Harris talked about taking care of her mother when she was dying and personally experiencing the challenges many families face when seeking affordable in-home care for their aging loved ones. (Weissert, 10/8)

Politico: US Disaster Programs Are Teetering. Milton Could Topple Them. The federal government could be nearing a collapse of its ability to help with major disasters as the second catastrophic hurricane in less than two weeks bears down on Florida. Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm whose winds reached 180 mph late Monday, is whirling toward a possible landfall in Tampa Bay just as the main federal disaster programs are facing financial instability amid a series of recent calamities, including Hurricane Helene’s flooding of communities throughout the Southeast. (Frank, 10/7)

KFF Health News: Even Political Rivals Agree That Medical Debt Is An Urgent Issue While hot-button health care issues such as abortion and the Affordable Care Act roil the presidential race, Democrats and Republicans in statehouses around the country have been quietly working together to tackle the nation’s medical debt crisis. New laws to curb aggressive hospital billing, to expand charity care for lower-income patients, and to rein in debt collectors have been enacted in more than 20 states since 2021. (Levey, 10/7)

Modern Healthcare: Microsoft, Epic Partner On AI Tool To Reduce Nursing Burnout Microsoft is adding new artificial intelligence tools for healthcare customers, the big tech company announced Thursday. The company said it has partnered with electronic health record vendor Epic Systems along with several health systems to build an ambient AI solution that will allow nurses to efficiently document in the electronic health record. It was important for the company to create a solution that’s differentiated from the numerous physician-centric AI documentation tools, said Mary Varghese Presti, vice president of portfolio evolution and incubation at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, during a briefing with reporters. (Perna, 10/10)

Politico: CBO Evaluates The Drug Pricing Policy Menu A slate of popular policies commonly bandied about to help reduce drug costs would each cut average prices by only a handful of percentage points, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report. But even small percentage savings could be consequential: By 2031, the retail drug market is slated to grow to more than $690 billion, according to the CBO. That includes both public and private buyers. (Lim and Gardner, 10/8)

KFF Health News: Employers Haven’t A Clue How Their Drug Benefits Are Managed Most employers have little idea what the pharmacy benefit managers they hire do with the money they exchange for the medications used by their employees, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday morning. In KFF’s latest employer health benefits survey, company officials were asked how much of the rebates collected from drugmakers by pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, is returned to them. (Allen, 10/9)

You Might Also Enjoy...

NEJM: The Failing US Health System. D Blumenthal, E Gumas, A Shah

NEJM: Addressing Health Care Cost Growth—Why and How States Should Lead. ES Fisher, C Colla, CF Koller, A Berube

Newsweek: Map Reveals US States Where Healthcare Is Least Accessible 

For the Visual Among Us...

A few years ago I started a weekly e-mail for friends and colleagues who want to keep up on major federal health policy developments but did not have time to plod through all the minutiae--they were busy doing important things like running organizations and taking care of patients! Much to my surprise, it became pretty popular. I have now converted to a weekly newsletter format so you can manage your own subscription preferences and forward to others that might be interested.

These summaries represent my judgement on health policy issues that may not on the front pages, but are relevant to clinicians, administrators, and educators. I monitor many news sources and clipping services to identify content for this newsletter and I try hard to be as factual, balanced, and non-partisan as possible. While the articles are written by others (with credit attributed), the choice of what to include is entirely mine. If you are interested in receiving a daily summary of health policy news, you might consider signing up for the KHN Morning Briefing. If you enjoy podcasts, I suggest What the Health? and Tradeoffs.

-Gregg S. Margolis, PhD