Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

The Top Three...

With so much going on, if you can only read three things about health policy this week, I suggest...

The New York Times: Social Security And Medicare Funds Improved, But The Long Term Is Dire The forecast for Medicare’s hospital trust fund improved. It is now expected to encounter a shortfall in 2028, two years later than forecast in last year’s report. That change is due mostly to the improved economic forecast, since the program is funded through payroll taxes. The actuaries do not expect the pandemic to have any substantial long-term impact on the trajectory of Medicare spending, according to the report. Spending on many elective services declined during the pandemic, while spending on vaccines and treatment for Covid-19 increased. The actuaries said they expected medical spending to return to its normal trend in a few years. But they noted that there was “a large degree of uncertainty” about the future of spending related to the virus. (Bernard and Sanger-Katz, 6/2)

AP: Medicare Recipients To See Premium Cut — But Not Until 2023 Medicare recipients will get a premium reduction — but not until next year — reflecting what Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Friday was an overestimate in costs of covering an expensive and controversial new Alzheimer’s drug. Becerra’s statement said the 2022 premium should be adjusted downward but legal and operational hurdles prevented officials from doing that in the middle of the year. He did not say how much the premium would be adjusted. (5/27)

NPR: 'Red Flag' Laws Become Bipartisan Option As Senators Look For Compromise On Guns In what might be characterized as an exercise in the art of the possible, a bipartisan group of senators led by John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., have spent the past few days focused on a limited set of new policies targeting gun violence. They're still in the earliest phases of brainstorming, but three broad areas are showing promise: incentivizing states to pass red flag laws, updates to school safety protocols, and possibly some narrow changes to background checks. (Hopkins and Snell, 6/2)

For a Deeper Dive...

Bloomberg: Baby Formula Shortage Worsens To 74% Out Of Stock In US Out-of-stock rates climbed to 74% nationally for the week ending May 28, according to data on 130,000 stores followed by Datasembly. The increase comes after rates spiked to 70% for the week ending May 21 from 45% the week prior. Ten states now have out-of-stock rates at 90% or greater, including Arizona, Mississippi, California, Nevada, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Florida and Washington. Georgia is the hardest hit at 94%, a jump from 74% the week before. (Paris, 6/2)

Axios: Americans Overpay For Generic Drugs, Paper Says U.S. consumers overpay for generic drug prescriptions by as much as 20% and it's largely because of the industry middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), according to a white paper from the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. PBMs are powerful, secretive and heavily consolidated, and have a big impact on drug prices in America. This report focuses specifically on generics, which account for more than 90% of U.S. prescriptions and 18% of drug spending. (Reed, 6/1)

AP: Gridlock Could Delay COVID Funds Until Fall — Or Longer The U.S. is headed for “a lot of unnecessary loss of life,” the Biden administration says, if Congress fails to provide billions more dollars to brace for the pandemic’s next wave. Yet the quest for that money is in limbo, the latest victim of election-year gridlock that’s stalled or killed a host of Democratic priorities. President Joe Biden’s appeal for funds for vaccines, testing and treatments has hit opposition from Republicans, who’ve fused the fight with the precarious politics of immigration. Congress is in recess, and the next steps are uncertain, despite admonitions from White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha of damaging consequences from “every day we wait.” (Fram, 6/1)

The Hill: Gun Groups Ready For Aggressive Effort Against ‘Red Flag’ Legislation No-compromise gun rights groups are preparing to mount an aggressive campaign against any “red flag” legislation in Congress as a response to the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas. ... Nine states currently have “red flag” laws, protection orders that allow a court to prevent an individual deemed a danger to themselves or others from possessing or obtaining firearms. Those include New York, where it did not stop a shooter from targeting black people at a grocery store in Buffalo last month. It is unclear if such a law would have stopped the shooter in Uvalde. (Brooks, 6/2)

The Wall Street Journal: Less Than 5% Of Violent Acts Are Linked To Mental Illness, Research Shows Mass shootings in the U.S. have revived discussion around the interplay between mental health and violent acts. Most violent acts are carried out by people with no diagnosed mental illness, say psychologists and epidemiologists. Mental illness can contribute to violence, research shows, but predicting who might act violently is all but impossible. The American Psychiatric Association on Wednesday said stigmatizing people with mental illness could dissuade them from seeking treatment. “The overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent and are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators thereof,” the group said. (Wernau, 6/1)

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