Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

The Top Three...

This is a HUGE week in health policy with the House likely to pass the Inflation Reduction Act today and send it to the President for signature. It was hard to narrow down to three articles, and you will find more content in the "For a Deeper Dive" and "For the Visual Among Us" sections than usual. These are great resources to help you understand the substantial health care provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act.

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...

AP: House Dems Set To Overcome GOP For Climate, Health Care Win A flagship Democratic economic bill perched on the edge of House passage Friday, placing President Joe Biden on the brink of a back-from-the-dead triumph on his climate, health and tax goals that could energize his party ahead of November’s elections. Democrats were poised to muscle the measure through the narrowly divided House Friday over solid Republican opposition. They employed similar party unity and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote Sunday to power the measure through the 50-50 Senate. (Fram, 8/12)

AP: Biden Signs 'Burn Pits' Help For Vets; A Personal Win, Too President Joe Biden, whose elder son Beau died of cancer years after deploying to Iraq, signed legislation on Wednesday expanding federal health care services for millions of veterans who served at military bases where toxic smoke billowed from huge “burn pits.” ... The law, which Biden described as long overdue, caps a years-long battle to ensure treatment for chronic illnesses that veterans have blamed on burn pits, which were used to dispose of chemicals, tires, plastics, medical equipment and human waste on military bases. Estimates of affected troops run to 3.5 million. (Megerian, 8/10)

NPR: 'Staggering' Number Couldn't Get Care During Pandemic, Poll Finds Among households that had a serious illness in the past year, one in five respondents said they had trouble accessing care during the pandemic. That's a "staggering" number of people unable to access care, says Mary Findling, the assistant director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program. "From a health and a good care standpoint, that's just too high." (Chatterjee, 8/8)

For a Deeper Dive...

KHN: Democrats Didn’t Achieve All Their Goals, But Inflation Reduction Act Makes Historic Medicare Changes The giant health care, climate, and tax bill expected to pass the House on Friday and be sent to the president for his signature won’t be as sweeping as the Democrats who wrote it had hoped, but it would help millions of Americans better afford their prescription drugs and health insurance. The Inflation Reduction Act is estimated to spend about $485 billion over 10 years on health and alternative energy programs while raising about $790 billion through tax revenue and savings. The difference would be used to help reduce the deficit. (McAuliff, 8/12)

AP: A Look At What Is, And Isn't, Included In The Senate's Big Bill Launching a long-sought goal, the bill would allow the Medicare program to negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, saving the federal government some $288 billion over the 10-year budget window. Those new revenues would be put back into lower costs for seniors on medications, including a $2,000 out-of-pocket cap for older adults buying prescriptions from pharmacies. The money would also be used to provide free vaccinations for seniors, who now are among the few not guaranteed free access, according to a summary document. (Mascaro, 8/7)

USA Today: 'Significant Victory': How The Inflation Reduction Act Would Save Medicare Drug Costs David Mitchell, founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs Now, said the Democrats' sweeping climate and health care bill, called the Inflation Reduction Act, is a hard-fought win for patients like himself. "It's a monumental change – a really significant victory," Mitchell told USA TODAY. Mitchell pays more than $16,000 each year for a prescription drug he takes to treat multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer he's battled for over a decade. He said the annual $2,000 cap on prescription drug spending is "going to make a big difference." (Alltucker, 8/11)

NPR: What You Should Know About Drug Price Reform PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, [was] making its case in an ad campaign that the drug-pricing provisions in the bill could lead to fewer new medicines coming to market by "chilling research and development." The trade association also pointed NPR to this industry-funded analysis from Avalere, which estimates the bill could reduce drug manufacturer revenue by $450 billion by 2032.But an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimates the effect on drug development would be quite modest. About 15 out of 1,300 drugs would not come to market over the next 30 years – that's about 1% of new drugs. (Simmons-Duffin and Aubrey, 8/6)

Healthcare Dive: HHS Investing $60M To Boost Rural Healthcare Workforce While the pandemic caused massive shifts in the healthcare labor market, rural communities have always faced shortages and issues recruiting and retaining a sufficient amount of talented medical staff. About 14% of Americans live in rural communities, though those areas represent nearly 75% of primary care health professional shortage areas in the county, according to a February report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. (Mensik, 8/9)

KHN: Big Pharma Went All In To Kill Drug Pricing Negotiations For decades, the drug industry has yelled bloody murder each time Congress considered a regulatory measure that threatened its profits. But the hyperbole reached a new pitch in recent weeks as the Senate moved to adopt modest drug pricing negotiation measures in the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill “could propel us light-years back into the dark ages of biomedical research,” Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said last month. Venture capitalists and other opponents of the bill said that it “immediately will halt private funding of drug discovery and development.” (Allen, 8/12)

The Washington Post: How The Inflation Reduction Act Might Affect Your Health Care The spending package includes a three-year extension of enhanced financial aid for roughly 13 million Americans who buy health coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. Last year, Democrats passed the beefed up tax credits in their coronavirus aid bill, but such subsidies are slated to expire at the end of this year. The economic package poised for final passage this week extends the aid through 2025. (Roubei, 8/9)

AP: Study Connects Climate Hazards To 58% Of Infectious Diseases Climate hazards such as flooding, heat waves and drought have worsened more than half of the hundreds of known infectious diseases in people, including malaria, hantavirus, cholera and anthrax, a study says. Researchers looked through the medical literature of established cases of illnesses and found that 218 out of the known 375 human infectious diseases, or 58%, seemed to be made worse by one of 10 types of extreme weather connected to climate change, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change. (Borenstein, 8/9)

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JAMA: Improving Prescription Drug Affordability Through Regulatory Action. L Bush, BD Sommers

JAMA: Projecting the Health Care Workforce Needed in the US. MB Buntin, J Connell, P Buerhaus

For the Visual Among Us...