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...

CBS News: U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate Far Exceeds Other High-Income Nations. Here's What's Different Approximately 22 women died from childbirth-related causes for every 100,000 live births in the United States in 2022, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a private research foundation, making the U.S. the country with the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation analyzed. In comparison, the three countries with the lowest rates are Sweden, with nearly three deaths for every 100,000 births, Switzerland, with one, and Norway, with zero. (Moniuszko, 6/4)

Modern Healthcare: Medicare Pay Bundling Program May Overwhelm Providers: AHA, FAH Hospital groups say a proposed mandatory Medicare payment bundling program may prove overly burdensome to an industry already working to implement other Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reimbursement experiments. Last month, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation requested comments on its Transforming Episode Accountability Model, or TEAM, which would employ episode-based reimbursement for ... procedures at select hospitals for five years starting in 2026. (Early, 5/31)

Modern Healthcare: Change Healthcare Hack Notification Requirements Set By HHS UnitedHealth Group must take responsibility for informing people about privacy breaches resulting from the Change Healthcare cyberattack, the Health and Human Services Department announced Friday. Providers, health insurance companies and other affected entities may direct UnitedHealth Group, which operates Change Healthcare through its Optum subsidiary, to notify their patients, customers and business partners under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. (Berryman, 5/31)

For a Deeper Dive...

The Guardian: Delays, Denials, Debt And The Growing Privatization Of Medicare Private insurers now cover roughly half of the nation’s 68 million Medicare beneficiaries. Their dominance of this space has grown rapidly over the past two decades – at the expense of patient care, according to healthcare activists and patients, as corporations often deny medical care directed by doctors. (Sainato, 6/3)

The Washington Post: Conservative Attacks On Birth Control Could Threaten Access Republican lawmakers in Missouri blocked a bill to widen access to birth-control pills by falsely claiming they induce abortions. An antiabortion group in Louisiana killed legislation to enshrine a right to birth control by inaccurately equating emergency contraception with abortion drugs. An Idaho think tank focused on “biblical activism” is pushing state legislators to ban access to emergency contraception and intrauterine devices (IUDs) by mislabeling them as “abortifacients.” Since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion two years ago, far-right conservatives have been trying to curtail birth-control access by sowing misinformation about how various methods work to prevent pregnancy, even as Republican leaders scramble to reassure voters they have no intention of restricting the right to contraception, which polls show the vast majority of Americans favor. (Weber, 6/5)

The Wall Street Journal: Anthony Fauci Defends Federal Covid Response Grilled about comments he made in January about a protocol that people maintain a distance of 6 feet from one another, Fauci said that the policy had been developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not his agency. He said that when he said in January that he wasn’t aware of studies supporting the 6-foot rule, he meant that he wasn’t aware of formal clinical trials. (McKay, 6/3)

Stat: Physicians Take Medicare Advantage To Task For Rural Patients’ Care Gaps In January, the Biden administration asked, once again, for ideas on how to improve Medicare Advantage. And it got, once again, a flood of people sharing horror stories about the embattled program when the comment period closed last week. Most of the comments came from doctors, home health and hospice providers, medical device suppliers, and hospitals. Many of the commenters, like the doctors in California, urged CMS to ensure MA plans contract with enough providers so that members don’t have to travel far for care. Others shared the usual concerns: insurers using the prior authorization process to avoid paying bills and underpaying providers. New Biden administration rules around prior authorization and other aspects of MA took effect this year, including the requirement that a prior authorization approval remain valid throughout the full course of an enrollee’s treatment. (Bannow, 6/3)

Bloomberg: Why Prescription Drug Prices In The US Are So High Americans spend more on prescription drugs than anyone else in the world. It’s true that they take a lot of pills. But what really has set the US apart is how much drugs cost. Unlike in most other countries, their prices are set without direct government intervention. A new law aims to change that for certain drugs for elderly and disabled patients who rely on the government’s Medicare health program. The pharmaceutical industry opposes the change, and the law faces a raft of lawsuits seeking to stop it from taking effect. (Langreth, 6/6)

Axios: The Health Care Workforce Crisis Is Already Here Demoralized doctors and nurses are leaving the field, hospitals are sounding the alarm about workforce shortages and employees are increasingly unionizing and even going on strike in high-profile disputes with their employers. Why it matters: Dire forecasts of health care worker shortages often look to a decade or more from now, but the pandemic — and its ongoing fallout — has already ushered in a volatile era of dissatisfied workers and understaffed health care facilities. (Owens, 6/7)

End of Pandemic Internet Subsidies Threatens a Health Care Lifeline for Rural America As the Affordable Connectivity Program runs out of money, millions of people face a jump in internet costs or lost connections if federal lawmakers don't pass a funding extension. (Sarah Jane Tribble, 6/7 )

ABC News: New Study Finds Most Maternal-Related Deaths In The US Happen After Birth In the United States, 22% of maternal deaths happened during pregnancy, most often the result of heart conditions and stroke. Approximately 13% of all deaths occurred on the day of delivery. After delivery, 12% of deaths took place in the first week postpartum, the most common contributors being high blood pressure, severe bleeding and infection. Twenty-three percent of deaths occurred up to 42 days after birth. Late deaths, which accounted for 30% of all deaths, happened up to one year after birth and were frequently associated with cardiomyopathy. (Merchan and Jafari, 6/5)

NPR: Why Fat Joe Advocates For Hospital Price Transparency Rapper Fat Joe says, "Millions of people are getting robbed." In a public service announcement by Power to the Patients, he adds that it's "not by the guys you might think. But by hospital and insurance company executives. They crooks." That's why the Bronx-born rapper is urging officials in Washington, D.C., for price transparency in health care. (Guevara, Bearne and Martínez, 6/5)

AP: In Cities Across The US, Black And Latino Neighborhoods Have Less Access To Pharmacies Parts of the north side of Montgomery are defined by what it has lost: restaurants, grocery stores and a convenient pharmacy, the latter of which closed five years ago. People who still live in the historically Black neighborhood of Newtown, like Sharon Harris, are frustrated. She goes to a different location of the same pharmacy chain, which is four miles from her home. “You have to come back sometimes,” she said, “and then they wait so long to fill the prescription.” (Hunter, 6/4)

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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