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: State Of The Union Address Lays Out Biden’s Healthcare Priorities President Joe Biden mostly painted in broad strokes in his State of the Union Address Thursday when it came to healthcare, touting a raft of healthcare accomplishments and proposals aimed at lowering costs for patients but perhaps raising costs for companies. He also pointed to some new proposals, including expanding the number of drugs that can be negotiated by Medicare to 50 a year, extending a $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs to all Americans, and launching a $12 billion women's healthcare initiative. (McAuliff, 3/7)

The Washington Post: HHS Opens Probe Into UnitedHealth’s Cybersecurity As Hack Fallout Continues The Biden administration is opening an investigation into UnitedHealth Group following a cyberattack on a subsidiary that has crippled health-care payments and probably exposed millions of patients’ data. The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday said its probe would focus on identifying the extent of the breach and compliance by UnitedHealth and its subsidiary, Change Healthcare, with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — widely known as HIPAA — which is intended to protect patients’ private data. (Diamond, 3/13)

Modern Healthcare: Biden’s Budget Includes Health Cybersecurity, Insurance Subsidies The White House released its fiscal 2025 budget blueprint Monday, and its healthcare provisions are very much as President Joe Biden previewed them during his State of the Union address last week. The Health and Human Services Department budget request offers more detail about Biden's plans, including how his administration wants to respond to cyberattacks such as the one that has crippled UnitedHealth Group unit Change Healthcare for nearly three weeks. (McAuliff, 3/11) (Gregg’s note: Click here for a great analysis of the President’s budget conducted by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget Analysis.)

For a Deeper Dive...

The Wall Street Journal: Takeaways From Biden’s State Of The Union Address Biden confronted the Supreme Court—with some justices in the audience looking on—over the decision that eliminated the right to an abortion. “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral or political power,” Biden said. “You’re about to realize just how much.” It was an unusually direct rebuke of the court by Biden, an institutionalist who has long said he respects the independence of the court. (Lucey, 3/8)

Modern Healthcare: Healthcare Provider Anti-Burnout Bill Advances In Congress A bill to support healthcare workers struggling with burnout, stress and other work-related mental health problems advanced in Congress on a unanimous subcommittee vote Tuesday. The Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Reauthorization Act of 2024, named after a New York physician who died by suicide in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorizes five years of grant programs, building on the previous, shorter-term legislation, which expires at the end of the year. (McAuliff, 3/12)

The Hill: Trump Cleans Up Remarks About ‘Cutting’ Social Security And Medicare Former President Trump in a new interview sought to clarify comments from earlier in the week in which he said there are ways to go about “cutting” entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.” (Samuels, 3/14)

Axios: Health Care Providers Losing Up To $1B A Day From Cyberattack
Disruptions from the Change Healthcare cyberattack are costing health providers as much as $1 billion a day and creating enough of a drag to depress first-quarter earnings, analysts and industry officials say. (Reed, 3/11)

Modern Healthcare: Senators Push To Include PBM Bills In March 22 Spending Bill A congressional effort to stiffen regulations on pharmacy benefit managers may not be dead after all. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) aim to attach measures their panel has already approved to a spending bill Congress must pass by next Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown, they said at a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday. (McAuliff, 3/14)

USA Today: Biden's Cancer Moonshot Is Expanding: New Patient Navigators, Insurance Coverage More than a half dozen large private health insurance companies have agreed to cover the cost of navigators who guide cancer patients and their families through the confusing array of medical appointments and drug treatments that follow a diagnosis. The expansion of the cancer navigator program, part of President Joe Biden's ambitious Cancer Moonshot, is among a handful of health initiatives unveiled this week to coincide with the president's State of the Union address. (Alltucker, 3/8)

Modern Healthcare: White House Presses UnitedHealth On Change Outage At Meeting Senior federal officials met with a wide array of healthcare company and trade group executives Tuesday as they urged UnitedHealth Group and other insurance companies to do more to aid providers harmed by the ongoing Change Healthcare outage. UnitedHealth Group — which operates Change Healthcare through its Optum subsidiary and sells insurance through its UnitedHealthcare subsidiary — and the rest of the industry can do more to mitigate cash flow problems arising from a cyberattack that has disrupted healthcare operations for weeks, the White House, the Health and Human Services Department and other authorities said during the meeting, according to an HHS news release. (Berryman, 3/12)

You Might Also Enjoy...

JAMA: Investing in Long-Term health. K Baicker, A Chandra

Forbes: The Top Threat to Americans Health Is Not A Virus. It’s Disinformation. AL Kellermann

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: Analysis of the President’s FY 2025 Budget

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? and Tradeoffs.

-Gregg S. Margolis, PhD