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 Wall Street Journal: The Key Takeaways From The 2023 Election Results—And What They Mean For 2024 They were disparate elections in different states—for governor, state Senate, a supreme court seat and on a constitutional amendment. But the results of off-year races on Tuesday pointed in one direction: Voters will come to the polls to defend abortion rights. In the Republican strongholds of Ohio and Kentucky, as well as politically purple Virginia and Pennsylvania, abortion-rights supporters spent millions of dollars to tell voters that GOP lawmakers couldn’t be trusted to set state abortion policy after the Supreme Court last year eliminated a right to the procedure under the U.S. Constitution. (Zitner and Kusisto, 11/8)

USA Today: Biden Tackles Medicare Advantage Plans: These Are The Proposed Changes “We want to ensure that taxpayer dollars actually provide meaningful benefits to enrollees,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. If finalized, the proposed rules rolled out Monday could also give seniors faster access to some lower-cost drugs. Administration officials said the changes, which are subject to a 60-day comment period, build on recent steps taken to address what they called confusing or misleading advertisements for Medicare Advantage plans. (Groppe, 11/6)

Modern Healthcare: Senate Moves To Delay $16B Hospital Cut, Trim Doctor Pay Hit The Senate Finance Committee approved the Better Mental Health Care, Lower-Cost Drugs, and Extenders Act of 2023, which would delay pending reductions in Medicaid disproportionate share hospital funding for safety-net facilities, scale back a Medicare pay cut for physicians that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized last week, extend expiring healthcare programs, expand Medicare coverage of mental healthcare and impose new limits on pharmacy benefit managers. (McAuliff, 11/8)

For a Deeper Dive...

KFF Health News: Nursing Homes Say They Can’t Afford Higher Staffing. But Their Finances Are Often Opaque. Perhaps the biggest mystery, as the Biden administration moves to force nursing homes to boost staffing, is this: how much extra money do the nation’s 15,000 homes actually have to hire and retain more nurses and aides? Public comments are due Monday on the most sweeping regulatory changes to hit the industry in decades. The proposal has provoked a fierce lobbying battle between nursing homes and patient advocates, with more than 22,000 comments filed already to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Rau, 11/3)

The New York Times: Senate Confirms Monica Bertagnolli As NIH Director The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who currently leads the National Cancer Institute, as the next director of the National Institutes of Health, overriding the objections of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate health committee. The vote was 62 to 36, with Mr. Sanders voting no. In a statement last month, he said that while Dr. Bertagnolli was an “intelligent and caring person,” he would vote against her because she “has not convinced me that she is prepared to take on the greed and power of the drug companies and health care industry.” (Stolberg, 11/7)

Politico: Supreme Court Looks Poised To Uphold Ban On Guns For Accused Domestic Abusers Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — two conservatives who may provide key votes in the case — did not seem particularly troubled by the domestic-abuser restriction Congress adopted in 1994, even as they expressed concerns that some government efforts to deny guns to people deemed dangerous could run afoul of the Second Amendment or of due process rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another potentially pivotal vote, was fairly quiet during the argument, though he did raise the prospect that striking down the law could imperil portions of a federal background-check system. (Gerstein, 11/7)

Stat: Senate Panel Clears PBM, Hospital Reforms A prominent Senate panel on Wednesday passed a new package of health policy reforms that would rein in certain pharmacy middlemen practices and ensure Medicare patients aren’t paying more than insurers do for medications. The package passed the committee 26-0 with no amendments added. (Cohrs, 11/8)

KFF Health News: Ohio Voted On Abortion. Next Year, 11 More States Might, Too. As activists parse the results of Tuesday’s vote to protect abortion rights in Ohio, Jamie Corley is already well on her way to putting a similar measure in front of Missouri voters next year. Corley, a former Republican congressional staffer, filed not one, but six potential ballot measures in August to roll back her state’s near-total ban on abortion, triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to end federal protections for terminating pregnancies. (Sable-Smith, 11/8)

Stat: Ambulance Rides For Just $100? Advisers Want Major Billing Fixes A panel of government advisers finally has endorsed ideas for Congress to solve the particularly thorny problem of surprise ambulance bills, including a cap on how much patients would have to pay if they took an ambulance. (Herman and Bannow, 11/9)

Stat: 10 Million People Disenrolled From Medicaid Over Past Six Months More than 10 million people were disenrolled from Medicaid over the past six months, according to the latest data published by a KFF tracker. The tracker has collected data on Medicaid enrollment since the first states began redetermining eligibility in April, after the expiration of the federal requirement of continuous coverage during the Covid-19 public health emergency. (Merelli, 11/3)

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