"I was involved with about a dozen senators from both parties talking about where we go from here and what we can do to improve the Affordable Care Act, to improve the health care system, to deal with high premiums, high deductibles. You can't be terribly optimistic about what Congress is going to get done, but there's a feeling now of 'let's get on with it.'"
— Senator Angus King (I-ME)
Heads Up: Healthcare Is Still in Trouble The Fiscal Times by Rob Garver — The issue of the U.S. health insurance system was taken off the front burner with the evident failure of the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. But while it may not be in the headlines as much as it once was, the health care system in the United States is still in need of serious attention. Insurers, for example, still don’t know whether or not they can expect to continue to receive cost sharing reduction payments from the government, part of the original arrangement made under the law to keep them profitable without raising rates to unaffordable levels.
Trump Administration Shifts Tone on Obamacare, Signals Openness to Bipartisan 'Fix' Los Angeles Times by Noah Bierman — The Trump administration, thwarted in several attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, notably shifted tone Wednesday, opening the door for a bipartisan plan to "fix" the law. The change came even as a fight escalated between President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over who is to blame for the Republican Party's failure to repeal Obamacare. "Both folks in the House and the Senate, on both sides of the aisle frankly, have said that Obamacare doesn't work, and it needs to be either repealed or fixed," Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends.” "So the onus is on Congress," he said. Talk of fixing the law is new for most Republicans. Price and President Trump have long focused only on repealing or replacing it.
Bipartisan Health Policy Coalition Urges Congress to Strengthen the ACA Washington Post by Amy Goldstein — An unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative health policy leaders is calling on Congress to strengthen the existing health care law in a variety of ways to help Americans get and keep insurance. The group is urging the government, in particular, to continuing paying all the federal subsidies provided under the Affordable Care Act and to help Americans enroll in coverage. In a five-point set of principles issued Wednesday, the coalition lays out a potential bipartisan path forward after a Republican strategy to tilt federal health policies in more conservative directions failed in the Senate last month. The four-page consensus document by the Health Reform Roundtable is the product of eight months of discussions among an ideologically eclectic group of nine health-care experts based at think tanks, universities and advocacy groups — some of whom have held senior policy roles in the federal government or presidential campaigns.
Women—Young And Older—Reap Benefits Of Obamacare, Study Says NPR (Louisville) by Lisa Gillespie — For over three decades, Sarah Cox has given women pap smears, mammograms and advice about options for contraception. But her Louisville practice is small – only five people – and she can’t afford to provide her employees with health insurance. That benefit gap wasn’t usually a problem until one employee’s circumstances changed and they needed insurance. Cox said that’s when the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare — came to the rescue. “It’s made it possible for her to keep insurance because it’s been available, which is huge for us,” Cox said. “She’s’ been with us since day one, so to keep her as an employee was very important to us.” Cox’s employee gained coverage through Kentucky’s individual insurance market, known as Kynect at the time. But the employee didn’t just gain health insurance. She also received ACA-required maternity coverage and free contraception — neither were routinely covered before the law was implemented. Also prior to Obamacare, health insurers could charge higher premiums to women because of age and they could deny coverage based on gender. After the implementation of the ACA, the number of uninsured women in the U.S. fell from 20 percent in 2010 to 11 percent in 2016. That’s according to a new study out Thursday from the Commonwealth Fund.
Study Says Trump Moves Trigger Health Premium Jumps for 2018 Associated Press by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldiva — Actions by the Trump administration are triggering double-digit premium increases on individual health insurance policies purchased by many people, according to a nonpartisan study. The analysis released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that mixed signals from President Donald Trump have created uncertainty “far outside the norm” and led insurers to seek higher premium increases for 2018 than would otherwise have been the case. “The vast majority of companies in states with detailed rate filings have included some language around the uncertainty, so it is likely that more companies will revise their premiums to reflect uncertainty in the absence of clear answers from Congress or the administration,” the report said. Once premiums are set, they’re generally in place for a whole year.
Facing Trump Subsidy Cuts, Health Insurance Officials Seek a Backup Plan New York Times by Robert Pear — Congress is on vacation, but state insurance commissioners have no time off. They have spent the past three days debating what to do if President Trump stops subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of millions of low-income people. For administration officials and many in Congress, the subsidies are a political and legal issue in a fight over the future of the Affordable Care Act. But for state officials, gathered here at the summer meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the subsidies are a more immediate, practical concern. The insurance commissioners are frustrated with the gridlock in Washington, which they say threatens coverage for consumers and the solvency of some insurers. Without the payments, they say, consumers will face higher premiums in 2018, and more insurers will pull back from the individual insurance market.
Taking a U-Turn on Benefits, Big Employers Vow to Continue Offering Health Insurance Kaiser Health News by Jay Hancock — The shrinking unemployment rate has been a healthy turn for people with job-based benefits. Eager to attract help in a tight labor market and unsure of Obamacare’s future, large employers are newly committed to maintaining coverage for workers and often their families, according to new research and interviews with analysts. Two surveys of large employers — one released Aug. 2 by consultancy Willis Towers Watson and the other out Tuesday from the National Business Group on Health, show companies continue to try to control costs while backing away from shrinking or dropping health benefits.
Trump to Declare Opioid Crisis a 'National Emergency' Associated Press by Jill Covin and Jonathan Lemire — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will officially declare the opioid crisis a “national emergency” and pledged to ramp up government efforts to combat the epidemic. “The opioid crisis is an emergency. And I am saying officially right now: It is an emergency, it’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” Trump told reporters during a brief question-and-answer session ahead of a security briefing Thursday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Deaths from Drug Overdoses Soared in the First Nine Months of 2016 Washington Post by Lenny Bernstein — Deaths from drug overdoses rose sharply in the first nine months of 2016, the government reported Tuesday, releasing data that confirm the widely held belief that the opioid epidemic worsened last year despite stepped-up efforts by public health authorities. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that overdose deaths reached a record 19.9 per 100,000 population in the third quarter, a big increase over the 16.7 recorded for the same three months in 2015. Similarly, the first two quarters of last year showed death rates of 18.9 and 19.3, far greater than the corresponding periods for 2015. Data for the fourth quarter of 2016 are not yet available.
One in 12 Doctors Receive Payments from Opioid Makers Modern Healthcare by Steven Ross Johnson — One in 12 U.S. doctors accepted payments from opioid manufacturers from 2013 to 2015, raising questions over how drug companies may influence prescribing practices. All in all, more than 68,000 physicians received more than $46 million between 2013 and 2015 in non-research payments from drugmakers that create pain-killing opioids or medication-assisted opioid treatments like buprenorphine, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health on Wednesday. Although researchers found the doctors received an average payment of $15, the top 1 percent of physicians received 82 percent of all opioid drugmaker payments, or $38 million at an average of $2,600 per top physician.
More Undocumented Immigrant Children in U.S. to Receive Health Care Stateline by Michael Ollove — Last year, California extended full Medicaid benefits to child immigrants, no matter their immigration status, if their families otherwise meet the income thresholds for the joint federal-state health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Oregon just followed suit, joining the five other states plus Washington, D.C. that extend Medicaid health benefits to children living in the country illegally. Immigration advocates welcomed the news, but with the Trump administration cracking down on illegal immigration, they don’t expect to see similar laws enacted in other states in the near future. “When it comes to covering kids here illegally, there aren’t that many more states that are going to join that camp and a fair number of states that are definitely in the other camp,” said Randy Capps, research director of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that studies migration in the United States and abroad.
Medicaid, Explained: Why It's Worse to Be Sick in Some States Than Others Vox by Liam Brooks, Liz Scheltens and Mallory Branga — Medicaid, an insurance program that covers one in five Americans, can look completely different depending on where you live. That’s because Medicaid is not one program but 50. Unlike Medicare, which covers all Americans 65 and older, Medicaid is administered at the state level. Individual states have a huge amount of control when it comes to deciding who qualifies and what care they can receive. While the federal government sets some requirements, the decision-making power of individual states means there are some places where it’s worse to be sick than others. Put simply, Medicaid works, even if it works better in some states than others. But how did we arrive at this complicated system in the first place? Many countries around the world offer single-payer health care or tightly regulate private insurers to make sure every person can get coverage for what they need. So why didn’t that system catch on in the U.S.?
Generic Drug Prices Are Falling, but Are Consumers Benefiting? New York Times by Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas — Not all drug prices are going up. Amid the public fury over the escalating costs of brand-name medications, the prices of generic drugs have been falling, raising fears about the profitability of major generic manufacturers. Last week, Teva Pharmaceuticals reported that it had missed analysts’ earnings estimates in the second quarter and planned to lay off 7,000 workers. Its share price plummeted 24 percent in one day as investors worried there was no end in sight...Generic drug prices have been declining in the United States since at least 2010, according to an August 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office.
Editor: Peter Van Vranken
