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...

The Hill: Britt: High Maternal Mortality Rate ‘American Issue,’ Not Democrat Or Republican Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) encouraged elected officials to work across the aisle in tackling the United States’s high maternal mortality rate during a panel discussion Thursday on maternal mental health. “I think it is so important that we continue to talk about this in a bipartisan way because this is not a Democrat or Republican issue, this is an American issue,” said Britt during The Hill’s Moms Matter: Closing the Maternal Mental Health Gap event, which was sponsored by Sage Therapeutics. (O’Connell-Domenech, 5/16)

The Wall Street Journal: Surging Hospital Prices Are Helping Keep Inflation High One reason U.S. inflation is still high: Increases in prices for procedures to prop open clogged arteries, provide intensive care for newborns and biopsy breasts. Hospitals didn’t raise prices as early in the pandemic as supermarkets, retailers and restaurants. But they have been making up ground since then. Their increases have contributed to stubbornly high inflation readings from the consumer-price index, which in April increased 3.4% from a year ago. (Evans, 5/16)

Modern Healthcare: Hospitals Charged Private Insurers 254% Of Medicare In 2022: Rand Hospital-negotiated prices rose from 2020 to 2022, especially among dominant facilities in their respective markets, a new report shows. Commercial insurers' payments to hospitals amounted to, on average, 254% of Medicare rates in 2022, up from 243% in 2021 and 241% in 2020, according to data from Rand, a nonprofit research firm. Rand researchers used claims data from more than 4,000 hospitals in 49 states and Washington, D.C. (Kacik, 5/12)

For a Deeper Dive...

AP: Justice Department Formally Moves To Reclassify Marijuana The Justice Department on Thursday formally moved to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, a historic shift in generations of U.S. drug policy. A proposed rule sent to the federal register recognizes the medical uses of cannabis and acknowledges it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. The plan approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland would not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use. (Whitehurst, 5/16)

Politico: Push To Create Universal Health Care In California Gets Scrapped In Committee A bill to make California the first state to create universal health care through a single-payer system was shot down Thursday during a state Assembly appropriations hearing. The proposal, Assembly Bill 2200 from Bay Area Democrat Ash Kalra, would have established CalCare, a state-run insurance system for all residents without premiums, deductibles or copays. (Lynch, 5/16)

The Hill: Most States Receive D’s, F’s In Maternal Mental Health Report Card Jaqueline Sharp, 35, remembers her anxiety “went through the roof” shortly after she gave birth to her son in 2019. ... Sharp is one of the millions of women whose mental health declined after delivery. About 1 in 5 pregnant or postpartum women in the United States will experience a mental health disorder like depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation, according to the American Psychiatric Association. But very few of these women will receive treatment. (O’Connell-Domenech, 5/15)

AP: Will AI Replace Doctors Who Read X-Rays, Or Just Make Them Better Than Ever? How good would an algorithm have to be to take over your job? It’s a new question for many workers amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI programs that can hold conversations, write stories and even generate songs and images within seconds. For doctors who review scans to spot cancer and other diseases, however, AI has loomed for about a decade as more algorithms promise to improve accuracy, speed up work and, in some cases, take over entire parts of the job. (Perrone, 5/14)

Modern Healthcare: Rural Hospitals Facing Low Medicare Advantage Pay Risk Closing To explain how the accelerating penetration of Medicare Advantage is harming rural hospitals in ways that will likely require action by Congress and regulators to fix, Nemaha Valley Community Hospital CEO Kiley Floyd pointed to patients in her northeastern Kansas community who previously were covered by traditional Medicare. One diabetic man who was not competent to mind his own finances used to have his care covered by regular Medicare and his veteran's benefits, Kiley said — until a Medicare Advantage marketer called and he said the magic word: "Yes." (McAuliff, 5/14)

Modern Healthcare: Change Healthcare Update: How Providers May Be Liable It’s been two-and-a-half months since Change Healthcare’s systems went dark due to a cyberattack, and questions remain unanswered about when its customers will know the full extent of the damage. Meanwhile, providers are wondering what regulatory or legal consequences they could face — and whether they will bear costs associated with lawsuits and patient notifications for a breach that occurred outside their own systems. (Hudson, 5/13)

USA Today: AI, ChatGPT Show Promise In Making Medical Visits More Effective Dr. Rebecca Mishuris remembers her mother, also a doctor, bringing home her patients' medical charts every night and working on them long after she'd gone to bed. ... But no more. Since last summer, she's been piloting two competing software applications that use large-language models and generative artificial intelligence to listen in on, transcribe and summarize her conversations with patients. At the end of a patient visit it takes her just two to three minutes to review the summary for accuracy, cut and paste a few things into the patient's health record and hit save. (Weintraub, 5/11)

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