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...

Politico: Biden To End Covid Health Emergency Declarations In May The Biden administration will end the Covid-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11, the White House said Monday in a major step meant to signal that the crisis era of the pandemic is over. The move would restructure the federal government’s coronavirus response and unwind a sprawling set of flexibilities put in place nearly three years ago that paved the way for free Covid treatments and tests. The White House disclosed its plan in response to two House Republican measures aimed at immediately ending the emergencies, calling those proposals “a grave disservice to the American people.” (Cancryn, 1/30)

Fierce Healthcare: White House Unveils New Cancer Programs On Moonshot Anniversary On the anniversary of the revived Cancer Moonshot, the Biden administration unveiled partnerships directed at cancer care and prevention such as providing clinical and patient navigation support to families facing childhood cancer and boosting access to screenings and early detection. The 13 initiatives announced Thursday are part of the White House's overarching effort to reduce cancer death rates and improve the experience for families surviving cancer. (Landi, 2/2)

KHN: As Pandemic-Era Medicaid Provisions Lapse, Millions Approach A Coverage Cliff States are preparing to remove millions of people from Medicaid as protections put in place early in the covid-19 pandemic expire. The upheaval, which begins in April, will put millions of low-income Americans at risk of losing health coverage, threatening their access to care and potentially exposing them to large medical bills. It will also put pressure on the finances of hospitals, doctors, and others relying on payments from Medicaid, a state-federal program that covers lower-income people and people with disabilities. (Galewitz, 2/2)

For a Deeper Dive...

Stat: From Industry ‘Greed’ To Workforce Shortages, Sanders And Cassidy Lay Out Health Committee Agenda The Senate finally made long-expected committee assignments official on Thursday, kickstarting a new session for the top health committee under an unlikely pair: Vermont Independent and drug-pricing firebrand Bernie Sanders, and Louisiana Republican and doctor Bill Cassidy. (Owermohle, 2/2)

Stat: Biden Administration Floats Major 2024 Pay Cut For Medicare Advantage Plans Medicare Advantage insurers could face an average 2.3% cut to baseline payments in 2024, the Biden administration said Wednesday. If the proposal stands, it would be a net cut of more than $3 billion to the industry. The major reason behind the proposed pay cut: Medicare officials want to update data and coding systems that are used to explain the health conditions of an insurance company’s enrollees. Under that new system, insurers would not get paid as much for members with certain diagnoses. (Herman, 2/1)

NBC News: Medicare Negotiating Drug Prices Will Likely Save The U.S. Billions, Study Says Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School estimated how much money the new policy would have saved the U.S. had it been in effect from 2018 to 2020 — the most recent years for which data is available on Medicare spending. They identified 40 drugs that would have been selected by Medicare for drug pricing negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act's provision. (Lovelace Jr., 1/27)

Harvard Public Health: New Gun Deaths Data In U.S. Show Continued Rise In Suicides Gun homicides, including mass shootings, are a pervasive and horrific issue, and we have rightly focused attention on reducing them. But a majority of gun deaths, 54 percent, in the U.S. aren’t homicides, they’re suicides. Indeed, as the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence puts it, suicide is “the untold story of gun violence in America.” Both suicides and gun deaths have increased over the last two decades, and there is a strong link between firearms and suicide deaths. Suicide-by-gun makes up most of both gun deaths and overall suicide deaths (over half of each). (Kelly, 2/1)

Axios: Drug Companies Brace For Chairman Bernie Sen. Bernie Sanders has long made no secret that he thinks drug companies and health insurers are ripping off Americans. But now he's chairman of the Senate health committee. (Sullivan, 1/30)

Bloomberg: US Leads World In Health-Care Spending Yet Key Health Outcomes Lag, Study Says The report adds to a litany of indicting data from the US, where half of adults are worried about medical costs that sometimes force them to delay or forgo care, according to a recent study, and life expectancy of 77 years ranks 39th among all nations. One glaring problem is that Americans visit the doctor just four times a year, trailing most other wealthy countries, perhaps because of cost and a lack of practicing physicians, the authors said. The American health system “can seem designed to discourage people from using services,” they wrote in the report, US Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes. “High out-of-pocket costs lead nearly half of working-age adults to skip or delay getting needed care.” (Fay Cortez, 1/31)

AP: Feds Expect To Collect $4.7B In Insurance Fraud Penalties The Biden administration estimated Monday that it could collect as much as $4.7 billion from insurance companies with newer and tougher penalties for submitting improper charges on the taxpayers’ tab for Medicare Advantage care. Federal watchdogs have been sounding the alarm for years about questionable charges on the government’s private version of the Medicare program, with investigators raising the possibility that insurance companies may be bilking taxpayers of billions of dollars every year by claiming members are sicker than they really are to receive inflated payments. (Seitz, 1/30)

USA Today: How Medicare And Social Security Benefits Factor Into The Kevin McCarthy Debt Ceiling Fight Speaker Kevin McCarthy left his first White House visit with confidence that he and President Joe Biden could negotiate a spending deal, but the real test may come in negotiations with his own Republican conference. McCarthy, who had to bargain with hardline conservatives to win his speaker bid after 15 rounds of voting, leads a fractious caucus where some members are willing to gamble with the nation's credit score and global economy to try and get the federal spending cuts they want. But what those cuts are, nobody seems to know. (Woodall, 2/1)

AP: How Will Life Change Once The COVID-19 Emergency Ends? COVID-19′s arrival rapidly accelerated the use of telehealth, with many providers and hospital systems shifting their delivery of care to a smartphone or computer format. The public health emergency declaration helped hasten that approach because it suspended some of the strict rules that had previously governed telehealth and allowed doctors to bill Medicare for care delivered virtually, encouraging hospital systems to invest more heavily in telehealth systems. Congress has already agreed to extend many of those telehealth flexibilities for Medicare through the end of next year. (Seitz, 1/31)

Reuters: Factbox: What Ending The U.S. COVID Health Emergency Means For Your Pocket Bearing the brunt of the PHE expiration will be the more than 27 million uninsured Americans, mostly adults under the age of 65, who will lose access to free COVID tests, vaccines and treatments. The uninsured rate hit an all time low of 8% in early 2022, according to the latest available government data, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that about another 15 million people - one-third of them children - will lose their health coverage by next year. (Aboulenein, 2/1)

You Might Also Enjoy...

JAMA: Salve Lucrum: The Existential Threat of Greed in US Health Care. DM Berwick

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?

-Gregg S. Margolis, PhD