Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

Health policy impacts everyone, but it can be hard to know what is important. If you can only read three things about health policy this week, I suggest...

The Top Three...

Modern Healthcare: CMS: National Health Expenditures To Surpass $7T A Year National health expenditures will surpass $7 trillion and consume nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy in 2031, according to projections the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Office of the Actuary published Wednesday. Healthcare spending will rise by an average of 5.4% a year from 2022 through 2031, when it will reach $7.17 trillion, or 19.6% of gross domestic product. "Health spending over the course of the next 10 years is expected to grow more rapidly, on average, than the overall economy," CMS actuaries wrote in the journal Health Affairs. (Turner, 6/14)

Politico: Compromise Struck To Preserve Obamacare’s Preventive Care Mandate The Texas conservatives challenging Obamacare’s preventive care mandate have reached a tentative compromise with the Justice Department that preserves free coverage for a range of services — from syphilis tests to depression screenings. The agreement, which still needs approval from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, keeps coverage intact nationwide while the case proceeds. The Biden administration, in exchange, pledged not to enforce the mandate to cover HIV prevention drugs and other preventive care services against the employers and individual workers who sued claiming that doing so violated their religious beliefs. This means that even if the Affordable Care Act rules are upheld on appeal, the government can’t penalize the challengers for refusing to cover required services. (Ollstein, 6/12)

KFF Health News: Biden Admin Implores States To Slow Medicaid Cuts After More Than 1M Enrollees Dropped Too many Americans are losing Medicaid coverage because of red tape, and states should do more to make sure eligible people keep their health insurance, the Biden administration said Monday. More than a million Americans have lost coverage through the program for low-income and disabled Americans in the past several weeks, following the end of pandemic protections on April 1, according to the latest Medicaid renewal data from more than 20 states. (Recht, 6/13)

For a Deeper Dive...

Reuters: US Drug Overdose Deaths Top 109,000 In The Past Year More than 109,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending January 2023, a slight increase from the previous year, according to provisional data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Wednesday. The figure is up 0.7% from 108,825 overdoses recorded in the 12-month period ending January 2022, according to U.S. data. (Srinivasan and Mandowara, 6/14)

NBC News: FDA Panel Recommends Updating Covid Boosters For The Fall Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday recommended updating the Covid vaccines to target a circulating strain of the virus, while pushing for newer vaccines that provide longer-lasting protection. The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted unanimously in support of tweaking the shots to target an XBB strain, as well as dropping the original coronavirus strain from the formulation. (Lovelace Jr., 6/15)

ABC News: Supreme Court Upholds Law Giving Native American Families Priority In Adoption The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a major challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, upholding a landmark law long hailed by tribes for giving priority to Native American families in the adoption of Native children. The state of Texas and a group of non-Native foster parents had challenged the preferences as an infringement on state authority in child welfare policy and unlawful discrimination on the basis of race. (Dwyer, 6/15)

Stat: Health Insurance Stocks Tumble On UnitedHealth Comments Atop executive at UnitedHealth Group said Tuesday that the health insurance and services conglomerate has noticed “a meaningfully higher number” of outpatient visits among Medicare patients in the second quarter of this year. The trend indicates a lot of older adults are getting care they had previously put off, which would eat into insurers’ earnings. (Herman, 6/14)

Stat: Key House Republican Suggests Breaking Up PBMs A key House Republican ramped up his criticism of pharmacy benefit managers Tuesday, calling for the government to dismantle companies that have consolidated drug supply chain operations. (Wilkerson, 6/13)

Modern Healthcare: AI In Healthcare Needs More Oversight, AMA Delegates Say Delegates voted Monday to study the benefits and unforeseen circumstances of A.I., including large language models such as GPTs and other intelligence-generated medical content, and propose appropriate state and federal regulations, according to AMA documents. In those documents, A.I. is defined as augmented intelligence, a type of technology that still requires human involvement. (Hudson, 6/13)

Modern Healthcare: HHS, HRSA Establish Student Loan Repayment Program For Pediatric Clinicians Efforts to recruit and retain clinicians caring for children and adolescents, particularly in schools and underserved areas, are getting a $15 million boost from the federal government. The need for the services is growing. Over the course of the pandemic, pediatric behavioral health in particular has been a major area of concern with delays in treatment due to a lack of qualified personnel and access to specialized care. (Devereaux, 6/12)

The New York Times: Hospice Is A Profitable Business, But Nonprofits Mostly Do A Better Job In the nearly 20 years that Megan Stainer worked in nursing homes in and around Detroit, she could almost always tell which patients near death were receiving care from nonprofit hospice organizations and which from for-profit hospices. “There were really stark differences,” said Ms. Stainer, 45, a licensed practical nurse. Looking at their medical charts, “the nonprofit patients always had the most visits: nurses, chaplains, social workers.” The nonprofit hospices responded quickly when the nursing home staff requested supplies and equipment. By contrast, she said, “if you called and said, ‘I need a specialized bed,’ with for-profits it could take days — days when the patient is in a bed that’s uncomfortable.” (Span, 6/10)

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The New York Times: The Moral Crisis Of America’s Doctors
Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide. Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered. The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland. Dean started asking the physicians she knew how they felt about their jobs, and many of them confided that they were struggling. (Press, 6/15)

For the Visual Among Us...

I came across these slides that do a great job of explaining Medicare Advantage Plans

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