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...

Bloomberg: Medicare Premiums Cut After Lower Than Forecast Drug Spending In his remarks, Biden also touted measures to curb costs in Democrats’ massive health, tax and climate package, in particular allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time, calling it “a godsend to many families.” The law also capped the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, but Republicans blocked a provision that would have extended the cost cap to private insurance. Republicans uniformly opposed the Inflation Reduction Act that introduced those measures in the House and Senate. (Tozzi and Fabian, 9/27)

The Washington Post: White House Hosts Conference On Hunger, With $8B In Commitments Among the specific policies Biden previously promised: expanding free school meals to 9 million more children in the next decade; improving transportation options for an estimated 40 million Americans who have low access to grocery stores or farmers markets; reducing food waste (one-third of all food in the United States goes uneaten, the White House says); conducting more screenings for food insecurity; educating health-care providers on nutrition; reducing sodium and sugar in U.S. food products; addressing marketing that promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy and unhealthful snacks; and building more parks in “nature-deprived communities.” (Viser, 9/28)

The Wall Street Journal: U.S. Suicide Rates Rose In 2021 After Two Years Of Decline The U.S. suicide rate rose in 2021 after two consecutive years of declines, federal data showed, underscoring concern about mental health in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. The suicide rate last year increased 4% compared with the rate in 2020, provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed on Friday. The rise was driven largely by suicides among men. Males ages 15 to 24 experienced the sharpest increase at 8%, the report found. (Abbott, 9/30)

For a Deeper Dive...

Reuters: Opioid Crisis Cost U.S. Nearly $1.5 Trillion In 2020 -Congressional Report Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic toll of the opioid addiction and overdose crisis on the United States reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020 alone and is likely to grow, a Congressional report seen by Reuters shows. Opioid-related deaths soared during the pandemic, including from the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl, exacerbating an already tragic and costly nationwide crisis that accounted for 75% of the 107,000 drug overdose fatalities in 2021, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. (Aboulenein, 9/28)

Healthcare Dive:  Almost half of Americans have inadequate healthcare coverage, survey finds  About 43% of working-age adults were inadequately insured in 2022, meaning they were either uninsured, had a coverage gap in the past year or had unaffordable coverage, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey out Wednesday.  For those on employer coverage, 29% were underinsured, while 44% of those with individual market and marketplace coverage were underinsured, the survey found. (Mensik, 9/28)

Reuters: Biden Medicare Costs Victory Due Mostly To Alzheimer's Drug Change The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs the Medicare health plan, said on Tuesday the bulk of the drop comes from its limiting coverage of Biogen Inc's Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm to patients in clinical trials. "The 2022 premium included a contingency margin to cover projected Part B spending for a new drug, Aduhelm. Lower-than-projected spending on both Aduhelm and other Part B items and services resulted in much larger reserves," the agency said. (Aboulenein, 9/27)

AP: ALS Drug Wins FDA Approval Despite Questionable Data The latest approval followed a remarkably turbulent path, including two negative reviews by the FDA’s internal scientists, who called the company’s results “borderline” and “not persuasive.” A panel of outside advisers backed that negative opinion in March, narrowly voting against the drug. But the FDA has faced intense pressure from ALS patients, advocates and members of Congress. In recent weeks the agency received more than 1,300 written comments from the ALS community supporting the treatment. (Perrone, 9/30)

Stat: Insurer Report On Medicare Advantage Savings Is Misleading, Experts Say The health insurance industry is continuing its campaign to convince the public that Medicare Advantage saves taxpayers money, but experts say federal data still concludes the exact opposite — and that the program as currently designed is a drain on Medicare’s trust fund. (Herman, 9/26)

The New York Times: Physician Burnout Has Reached Distressing Levels, New Research Finds Ten years of data from a nationwide survey of physicians confirm another trend that’s worsened through the pandemic: Burnout rates among doctors in the United States, which were already high a decade ago, have risen to alarming levels. Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63 percent of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44 percent in 2017 and 46 percent in 2011. Only 30 percent felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43 percent five years earlier. (Whang, 9/29)

Modern Healthcare: Telehealth, In-Person Visits Comparable In Quality: Study Telehealth visits for primary care can be comparable in quality to in-person visits, suggesting remote testing and screenings are valuable tools to augment patient care. The finding follows a study of more than 500,000 patients across 200 outpatient care sites in Pennsylvania and Maryland who either had exposure to telemedicine or only had in-person visits between March 1, 2020, and November 30, 2021. (Devereaux, 9/27)

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The following graphic perspective, A Hidden Crisis, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (ST Velasquez, J Cleveland, DO Diaz, D Ferguson, R Moote, K Parke, B Piernik-Yoder, G Floz, JA Zorek, 9/29)

For the Visual Among Us...