Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

The Top Three...

With so much going on, it can be hard to know what to read.  If you can only read three things about health policy this week, I suggest...

NBC News: Gun Deaths In 2021 Hit Highs Not Seen Since Early '90s, CDC Finds "We had hoped after a 35% increase in one year, that it would either level off or go down," said Thomas Simon, the lead author of the new study and the associate director for science in the CDC's division of violence prevention. "But instead, it continued to climb in 2021. And now the suicide rate also climbed." Simon said disparities in gun homicide rates among racial groups have widened.(Griffith, 10/6)

Bloomberg: Get Ready For US Health Insurers To Raise Prices Next Year Benefits brokers expect rate increases of 6% to 12%, according to a survey conducted by BofA Global Research. Increases for employers will be higher than usual as inflation and labor expenses get priced into insurance premiums, analysts wrote. (Tozzi, 10/5)

Healthcare Dive:  Providers now required to share greater scope of patient data A regulatory deadline kicked in Thursday requiring providers and other healthcare entities to be able to share a significantly larger scope of data with patients, despite major provider groups arguing they’re not ready to comply.  As of Thursday, information blocking regulations apply to all electronic health information in a record that qualifies as protected health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Previously, providers only had to make available data elements in a specific dataset called United States Core Data for Interoperability. (Pifer, 10/6)

For a Deeper Dive...

Fierce Healthcare: JAMA Study Finds Medical Debt A Predictor Of Housing And Food Insecurity A new study has found a link between patients' medical debt and a higher risk of experiencing housing and food insecurity. Of the 142,000 adults surveyed, 18% held medical debt. Such debt was found to be a predictor of worsening social determinants of health, a recent JAMA study found. Decreases in health status and coverage loss left those surveyed with a 1.7-fold to 3.1-fold higher risk of worsening housing and food security. (Burky, 10/5)

The Washington Post: What Happens If Republicans Take The House, Senate (Or Both) In 2023? This November, voters will determine which party controls Congress for the last half of President Biden’s first term. Democrats control both the House of Representatives and Senate now. What was once widely expected to be a wipeout for their party has turned into a competitive battle. It’s possible that Republicans pick up one or both chambers of Congress — or neither. What happens in these elections will drastically reshape the next two years before Biden potentially runs for reelection — and potentially runs against Donald Trump again. Here are the three likeliest scenarios for who will win Congress, and what they’ve talked about doing with that power. (Phillips, 10/2)

KHN: Nursing Home Surprise: Advantage Plans May Shorten Stays To Less Time Than Medicare Covers After 11 days in a St. Paul, Minnesota, skilled nursing facility recuperating from a fall, Paula Christopherson, 97, was told by her insurer that she should return home. But instead of being relieved, Christopherson and her daughter were worried because her medical team said she wasn’t well enough to leave. “This seems unethical,” said daughter Amy Loomis, who feared what would happen if the Medicare Advantage plan, run by UnitedHealthcare, ended coverage for her mother’s nursing home care. The facility gave Christopherson a choice: pay several thousand dollars to stay, appeal the company’s decision, or go home. (Jaffe, 10/4)

Fierce Healthcare: Congress Passes Spending Bill That Extends Rural Programs The House voted 230 to 201 to advance to President Joe Biden’s desk a continuing resolution that funds the federal government through Dec. 16. Biden is expected to sign the legislation. The short-term package gives providers another chance to include key end-of-the-year policy priorities such as delays to Medicare doctor payment cuts and extensions of a key quality bonus. The legislation also extends through Dec. 16 the hospital payment adjustment for certain low-volume hospitals (LVH) and the Medicare-Dependent Hospital (MDH) program. Both programs were set to expire after September. (King, 9/30)

Forbes: Big Health Insurers Will Expand Medicare Advantage To Hundreds Of New Counties For 2023 Health insurance companies that are big players in Medicare Advantage, including Humana, Cigna, CVS Health’s Aetna unit, Elevance Health and UnitedHealth Group are launching popular plans in several new states and hundreds of new counties for 2023. Aetna, which is in 1,875 counties and 46 states plus Washington, D.C. with 3.2 million Medicare Advantage enrollees today is expanding to 2,014 counties and 46 states plus Washington, D.C. (Japsen, 10/1)

Reuters: Amylyx Prices Newly Approved ALS Drug At $158,000 Per Year Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Inc on Friday set the list price of its newly approved drug to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at about $158,000 per year in the United States, a discount to its most recently approved competitor. The drug Relyvrio was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday, making it the third ALS treatment to get the regulator's nod after Japanese firm Mitsubishi Tanabe's Radicava, priced at around $170,000 per year, and the generic drug riluzole. (Leo, 9/30)

You Might Also Enjoy...

JAMA:  The Dr Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act:  A Modest Step in the Right Direction.  KK Sindhu and EY Adashi

JAMA:  Health Insurance Coverage After the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Ends.  G Wilensky

JAMA:  Emotional Exhaustion Among US Health Care Workers Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2019-2021.  JB Sexton, KC Adair, J Proulx  

JAMA:  Readmission Reduction as a Hospital Quality Measure-Time to Move on to More Pressing Concerns?  P Cram, RM Wachter, BE Landon

For the Visual Among Us...