Tag: COVID-19

Sen. Sanders Shows Fire, but Seeks Modest Goals, in His Debut Drug Hearing as Health Chair

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who rose to national prominence criticizing big business in general and the pharmaceutical industry in particular, claimed the spotlight Wednesday on what might at first seem a powerful new stage from which to advance his agenda: chairmanship of the Senate health committee.

But the hearing Sanders used to excoriate a billionaire pharmaceutical executive for raising the price of a covid-19 vaccine showed the challenges the Vermont independent faces.

Though its formal name is the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), the panel Sanders chairs has little if any authority over drug prices. In the Senate, most of that leverage lies with the Finance Committee, which oversees Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare.

As far as drug prices go, the platform Sanders commands is essentially a bully pulpit. So Sanders was left to bully his way toward results. And while some committee Republicans sympathized with his complaints, others bristled at his approach.

By the end of the hearing, seeming to acknowledge the limits of his power, the former presidential candidate was pleading with Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel for a relatively modest concession on vaccine pricing.

The CEO made no promises. Then again, pulpit proclamations can lead to corporate action, even if delayed and informal; in the weeks following President Joe Biden’s State of the Union call for cheaper insulin, the companies that make it drastically cut their prices.

Sanders began Wednesday’s hearing with his usual fire and brimstone.

“All over this country people are getting sicker, and in some cases dying, because they can’t afford the outrageous cost of prescription drugs, while companies make huge profits and executives become billionaires,” Sanders thundered.

Bancel had won his place in the witness chair with federal assistance. Moderna, which was founded in 2010 and had not brought a drug to market before the pandemic, received billions in government funds for research, guaranteed purchases, and expert advice to help develop and produce its successful covid vaccine. The payoff has been handsome. As of March 8, Bancel held $3 billion in Moderna stock. He also held options to buy millions of additional shares.

Government research and support are foundational to many of the expensive drugs and vaccines in use today. But Bancel made himself the perfect foil for Sanders when he announced in January that Moderna planned to increase the price of its latest covid shot from about $26 to $110 — or as much as $130.

Denouncing greed, Sanders expounded on his dream of a system in which the government fully funds drug development — and in exchange controls drug prices. “Is there another model out there where, when a lifesaving drug is made, it becomes accessible to all those who need it?” he asked. “What am I missing in thinking that it’s cruel to make a medicine that people can’t afford?’”

Sanders’ overt moralizing and harsh attacks on big business make him an outlier in the Senate, even in his own party. Yet distaste for soaring drug prices extends across the aisle. On the HELP Committee, at least, Republican politicians seem about evenly split between populist and pro-business takes on the problem, showing both the possibilities and the pitfalls that Sanders faces.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) expressed disgust with the lack of transparency in the health care system and called Moderna’s planned price hike “preposterous.” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) called it “outrageous.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who often bucks mainstream GOP views and has expressed rancor for the biomedical establishment, claimed Bancel was downplaying vaccine injuries to make money. (Paul vastly exaggerated those risks.)

Ranking member Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has pledged to work with Sanders, responded to the chairman’s opening remarks with both a hedge and a warning. “I’m not defending salaries or profits,” Cassidy said, but he added that he hoped the hearing’s goal wasn’t to “demonize capitalism.”

Only Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a former private equity executive, came heartily to Bancel’s defense. “If I’m an investor, I have to expect that if a product I’m backing works, I get to make an awful lot of money,” he said. “I’ve heard people say, ‘That’s corporate greed.’ Yeah, that’s how it works.”

Sanders’ idealized vision of the pharmaceutical industry is, in any case, moot. Even the Biden administration, which successfully browbeat insulin makers into drastically lowering prices in March, revealed this week it would not use “march-in” rights to lower the price of a cancer drug, Xtandi, developed with government-licensed patents.

March-in rights were established in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which enabled companies to license federally funded research and use it to develop drugs. But federal courts and administrations have consistently said the government can seize a product only if the license holder has failed to make it available — not because the price is too high. The administration did, however, announce a review of whether price might be considered in future march-in decisions.

Sanders said before the hearing that he was “extremely disappointed” with the Xtandi decision. But he was ultimately realist enough to aim his bully pulpit at a lower target. Late in Wednesday’s hearing, Sanders pushed for a minimal gimme from Moderna. “Will you reconsider your decision to quadruple the price of your vaccine to the U.S. government and its agents?” he asked politely.

Bancel dodged, saying pricing was more complex now that Moderna faced an uncertain market, had to fill separate syringes with its vaccine, and needed to sell and distribute the vaccine to thousands of pharmacies, where previously the government did all that work. Later, he left open the possibility that negotiations could drive down the price paid by some government agencies or private insurers.

For all the theatrics of such hearings and the mix of opinions among the senators, interrogations of figures like Bancel may help inspire a shift in how the National Institutes of Health “does business in giving away its science to the private sector,” said Tahir Amin, co-executive director of I-MAK, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable access to medicines.

“You have to prosecute it so you at least get these public comments on record,” Amin said. Eventually, he said, this type of hearing could lead to a recognition that, ‘Hey, we need to do this.’”

Despite the HELP Committee’s lack of direct jurisdiction over drug prices, said John McDonough, a Harvard professor who was senior adviser for health reform on the HELP Committee from 2008 to 2010, Sanders “uses his position of authority and influence to draw attention to this in a way that has been helpful.”

KHN correspondent Rachana Pradhan contributed to this report.

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The Policy, and Politics, of Medicare Advantage

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Medicare Advantage, the private-sector alternative to original Medicare, now enrolls nearly half of all Medicare beneficiaries. But it remains controversial because — while most of its subscribers like the extra benefits many plans provide — the program frequently costs the federal government more than if those seniors remained in the fully public program. That controversy is becoming political, as the Biden administration tries to rein in some of those payments without being accused of “cutting” Medicare.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has signed a bill to declassify U.S. intelligence about the possible origin of covid-19 in China. And new evidence has emerged potentially linking the virus to raccoon dogs at an animal market in Wuhan, where the virus reportedly first took hold.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KHN, Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Jessie Hellmann of CQ Roll Call, and Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • The Biden administration recently changed the formula used to calculate how much the federal government pays private Medicare Advantage plans to care for patients with serious conditions, amid allegations that many of the health plans overcharge or even defraud the government. Major insurers are making no secret about how lucrative the program can be: Humana recently said it would leave the commercial insurance market and focus on government-funded programs, like its booming Medicare Advantage plans.
  • The formula change is intended to rein in excess spending on Medicare — a huge, costly program at risk of insolvency — yet it has triggered a lobbying blitz, including a vigorous letter-writing campaign in support of the popular Medicare Advantage program. On Capitol Hill, though, party leaders have not stepped up to defend private insurers as aggressively as they have in the past. But the 2024 campaign season could hear the parties trading accusations over whether Biden cut Medicare or, conversely, protected it.
  • The latest maternal mortality rates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the problem continued to worsen during the pandemic. Many states have extended Medicaid coverage for a full year after women give birth, in an effort to improve care during that higher-risk period. But other problems limit access to postpartum care. During the pandemic, some women did not get prenatal care. And after the fall of Roe v. Wade, some states are having trouble securing providers — including one rural Idaho hospital, which announced it will stop delivering babies.
  • The federal government will soon declassify intelligence related to the origins of the covid pandemic. In the United States, the fight over what started the pandemic has largely morphed into an issue of political identity, with Republicans favoring the notion that a Chinese lab leak started the global health crisis that killed millions, while Democrats are more likely to believe it was animal transmission tied to a wet market.
  • And in drug price news, Sanofi has become the third major insulin maker (of three) to announce it will reduce the price on some of its insulin products ahead of a U.S. government policy change next year that could have cost the company.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: Vice News’ “Inside the Private Group Where Parents Give Ivermectin to Kids With Autism,” by David Gilbert

Jessie Hellmann: The Washington Post’s “Senior Care Is Crushingly Expensive. Boomers Aren’t Ready,” by Christopher Rowland

Joanne Kenen: The New Yorker’s “Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin?” by Jia Tolentino

Margot Sanger-Katz: Slate’s “You Know What? I’m Not Doing This Anymore,” by Sophie Novack

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KHN’s What the Health? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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End of Covid Emergency Will Usher in Changes Across the US Health System

The Biden administration’s decision to end the covid-19 public health emergency in May will institute sweeping changes across the health care system that go far beyond many people having to pay more for covid tests.

In response to the pandemic, the federal government in 2020 suspended many of its rules on how care is delivered. That transformed essentially every corner of American health care — from hospitals and nursing homes to public health and treatment for people recovering from addiction.

Now, as the government prepares to reverse some of those steps, here’s a glimpse at ways patients will be affected:

Training Rules for Nursing Home Staff Get Stricter

The end of the emergency means nursing homes will have to meet higher standards for training workers.

Advocates for nursing home residents are eager to see the old, tougher training requirements reinstated, but the industry says that move could worsen staffing shortages plaguing facilities nationwide.

In the early days of the pandemic, to help nursing homes function under the virus’s onslaught, the federal government relaxed training requirements. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services instituted a national policy saying nursing homes needn’t follow regulations requiring nurse aides to undergo at least 75 hours of state-approved training. Normally, a nursing home couldn’t employ aides for more than four months unless they met those requirements.

Last year, CMS decided the relaxed training rules would no longer apply nationwide, but states and facilities could ask for permission to be held to the lower standards. As of March, 17 states had such exemptions, according to CMS — Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Washington — as did 356 individual nursing homes in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.

Nurse aides often provide the most direct and labor-intensive care for residents, including bathing and other hygiene-related tasks, feeding, monitoring vital signs, and keeping rooms clean. Research has shown that nursing homes with staffing instability maintain a lower quality of care.

Advocates for nursing home residents are pleased the training exceptions will end but fear that the quality of care could nevertheless deteriorate. That’s because CMS has signaled that, after the looser standards expire, some of the hours that nurse aides logged during the pandemic could count toward their 75 hours of required training. On-the-job experience, however, is not necessarily a sound substitute for the training workers missed, advocates argue.

Adequate training of aides is crucial so “they know what they’re doing before they provide care, for their own good as well as for the residents,” said Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney for the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

The American Health Care Association, the largest nursing home lobbying group, released a December survey finding that roughly 4 in 5 facilities were dealing with moderate to high levels of staff shortages.

Treatment Threatened for People Recovering From Addiction

A looming rollback of broader access to buprenorphine, an important medication for people in recovery from opioid addiction, is alarming patients and doctors.

During the public health emergency, the Drug Enforcement Administration said providers could prescribe certain controlled substances virtually or over the phone without first conducting an in-person medical evaluation. One of those drugs, buprenorphine, is an opioid that can prevent debilitating withdrawal symptoms for people trying to recover from addiction to other opioids. Research has shown using it more than halves the risk of overdose.

Amid a national epidemic of opioid addiction, if the expanded policy for buprenorphine ends, “thousands of people are going to die,” said Ryan Hampton, an activist who is in recovery.

The DEA in late February proposed regulations that would partly roll back the prescribing of controlled substances through telemedicine. A clinician could use telemedicine to order an initial 30-day supply of medications such as buprenorphine, Ambien, Valium, and Xanax, but patients would need an in-person evaluation to get a refill.

For another group of drugs, including Adderall, Ritalin, and oxycodone, the DEA proposal would institute tighter controls. Patients seeking those medications would need to see a doctor in person for an initial prescription.

David Herzberg, a historian of drugs at the University at Buffalo, said the DEA’s approach reflects a fundamental challenge in developing drug policy: meeting the needs of people who rely on a drug that can be abused without making that drug too readily available to others.

The DEA, he added, is “clearly seriously wrestling with this problem.”

Hospitals Return to Normal, Somewhat

During the pandemic, CMS has tried to limit problems that could arise if there weren’t enough health care workers to treat patients — especially before there were covid vaccines when workers were at greater risk of getting sick.

For example, CMS allowed hospitals to make broader use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants when caring for Medicare patients. And new physicians not yet credentialed to work at a particular hospital — for example, because governing bodies lacked time to conduct their reviews — could nonetheless practice there.

Other changes during the public health emergency were meant to shore up hospital capacity. Critical access hospitals, small hospitals located in rural areas, didn’t have to comply with federal rules for Medicare stating they were limited to 25 inpatient beds and patients’ stays could not exceed 96 hours, on average.

Once the emergency ends, those exceptions will disappear.

Hospitals are trying to persuade federal officials to maintain multiple covid-era policies beyond the emergency or work with Congress to change the law.

Surveillance of Infectious Diseases Splinters

The way state and local public health departments monitor the spread of disease will change after the emergency ends, because the Department of Health and Human Services won’t be able to require labs to report covid testing data.

Without a uniform, federal requirement, how states and counties track the spread of the coronavirus will vary. In addition, though hospitals will still provide covid data to the federal government, they may do so less frequently.

Public health departments are still getting their arms around the scope of the changes, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.

In some ways, the end of the emergency provides public health officials an opportunity to rethink covid surveillance. Compared with the pandemic’s early days, when at-home tests were unavailable and people relied heavily on labs to determine whether they were infected, testing data from labs now reveals less about how the virus is spreading.

Public health officials don’t think “getting all test results from all lab tests is potentially the right strategy anymore,” Hamilton said. Flu surveillance provides a potential alternative model: For influenza, public health departments seek test results from a sampling of labs.

“We’re still trying to work out what’s the best, consistent strategy. And I don’t think we have that yet,” Hamilton said.

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Temp Nurses Cost Hospitals Big During Pandemic. Lawmakers Are Now Mulling Limits.

To crack down on price gouging, proposed legislation in Missouri calls for allowing felony charges against health care staffing agencies that substantially raise their prices during a declared emergency.

A New York bill includes a cap on the amount staffing agencies can charge health care facilities. And a Texas measure would allow civil penalties against such agencies.

These proposed regulations — and others in at least 11 more states, according to the American Staffing Association industry trade group — come after demand for travel nurses, who work temporary assignments at different facilities, surged to unprecedented levels during the worst of the covid-19 pandemic.

Hospitals have long used temporary workers, who are often employed by third-party agencies, to help fill their staffing needs. But by December 2021, the average weekly travel nurse pay in the country had soared to $3,782, up from $1,896 in January 2020, according to a Becker’s Hospital Review analysis of data from hiring platform Vivian Health. That platform alone listed over 645,000 active travel nurse jobs in the final three months of 2022.

Some traveling intensive care unit nurses commanded $10,000 a week during the worst of the pandemic, prompting burned-out nurses across the country to leave their hospital staff jobs for more lucrative temporary assignments. Desperate hospitals that could afford it offered signing bonuses as high as $40,000 for nurses willing to make multiyear commitments to join their staff instead.

The escalating costs led hospitals and their allies around the country to rally against what they saw as price gouging by staffing agencies. In February 2021, the American Hospital Association urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “anticompetitive pricing” by agencies, and, a year later, hundreds of lawmakers urged the White House to do the same.

No substantial federal action has occurred, so states are trying to take the next step. But the resulting regulatory patchwork could pose a different challenge to hospitals in states with rate caps or other restrictive measures, according to Hannah Neprash, a University of Minnesota health care economics professor. Such facilities could find it difficult to hire travel nurses or could face a lower-quality hiring pool during a national crisis than those in neighboring states without such measures, she said.

For example, Massachusetts and Minnesota already had rate caps for temporary nurses before the pandemic but raised and even waived their caps for some staffing agencies during the crisis.

And any new restrictions may meet stiff resistance, as proposed rate caps did in Missouri last year.

As the covid omicron variant wave began to subside, Missouri legislators considered a proposal that would have set the maximum rate staffing agencies could charge at 150% of the average wage rate of the prior three years plus necessary taxes.

The Missouri Hospital Association, a trade group that represents 140 hospitals across the state, supported the bill as a crackdown on underhanded staffing firms, not on nurses being able to command higher wages, spokesperson Dave Dillon said.

“During the pandemic there were staffing companies who were making a lot of promises and not necessarily delivering,” Dillon said. “It created an opportunity for both profiteering and for bad actors to be able to play in that space.”

Nurses, though, decried what they called government overreach and argued the bill could make the state’s existing nursing shortage worse.

Theresa Newbanks, a nurse practitioner, asked legislators to imagine the government attempting to dictate how much a lawyer, electrician, or plumber could make in Missouri. “This would never be allowed,” she testified to the committee considering the bill. “Yet, this is exactly what is happening, right now, to nurses.”

Another of the nearly 30 people who testified against the bill was Michelle Hall, a longtime nurse and hospital nursing leader who started her own staffing agency in 2021, in part, she said, because she was tired of seeing her peers leave the industry over concerns about unsafe staffing ratios and low pay.

“I felt like I had to defend my nurses,” Hall later told KHN. Her nurses usually receive about 80% of the amount she charges, she said.

Typically about 75% of the price charged by a staffing agency to a health care facility goes to costs such as salary, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation programs, unemployment insurance, recruiting, training, certification, and credential verification, said Toby Malara, a vice president at the American Staffing Association trade group.

He said hospital executives have, “without understanding how a staffing firm works,” wrongly assumed price gouging has been occurring. In fact, he said many of his trade group’s members reported decreased profits during the pandemic because of the high compensation nurses were able to command.

While Missouri lawmakers did not pass the rate cap, they did make changes to the regulations governing staffing agencies, including requiring them to report the average amounts charged per health care worker for each personnel category and the average amount paid to those workers. Those reports will not be public, although the state will use them to prepare its own aggregate reports that don’t identify individual agencies. The public comment period on the proposed regulations was scheduled to begin March 15.

Hall was not concerned about the reporting requirements but said another of the changes might prompt her to close shop or move her business out of state: Agencies will be barred from collecting compensation when their employees get recruited to work for the facility where they temp.

“It doesn’t matter all the money that I have put out prior, to onboard and train that person,” Hall said.

Dillon called that complaint “pretty rich,” noting that agencies routinely recruit hospital staff members by offering higher pay. “Considering the premium agencies charge for staff, I find it hard to believe that this risk isn’t built into their business model,” he said.

Of course, as the pandemic has waned, the demand for travel nursing has subsided. But pay has yet to drop back to pre-pandemic levels. Average weekly travel nurse pay was $3,077 in January, down 20% year over year but still 62% higher in January 2020, according to reporting on Vivian Health data by Becker’s.

With the acute challenges of the pandemic behind hospitals, Dillon said, health system leaders are eyeing proactive solutions to meet their ongoing workforce challenges, such as raising pay and investing in the nursing workforce pipeline.

A hospital in South Carolina, for example, is offering day care for staffers’ children to help retain them. California lawmakers are considering a $25-per-hour minimum wage for health care workers. And some hospitals have even created their own staffing agencies to reduce their reliance on third-party agencies.

But the momentum to directly address high travel nurse rates hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by the legislative push in Missouri this year.

The latest proposal would apply to certain agencies if a “gross disparity” exists between the prices they charge during an emergency and what they charged prior to it or what other agencies are currently charging for similar services and if their earnings are at least 15% higher than before the emergency.

Malara said he doesn’t have much of a problem with this year’s bill because it gives agencies the ability to defend their practices and pricing.

Kentucky last year applied its existing price gouging rules to health care staffing agencies. The rules, which set criteria for acceptable prices, allow increases driven by higher labor costs. Malara said if the Missouri bill gains momentum he will point its sponsor to that language and ask her to clarify what constitutes a “gross disparity” in prices.

The sponsor of the bill, Missouri state Sen. Karla Eslinger, a Republican, did not respond to requests for comment on the legislation.

Hall said she is opposed to any rate caps but is ambivalent about Missouri’s new proposal. She said she saw agencies raising their prices from $70 an hour to over $300 while she worked as a hospital nursing leader at the height of the pandemic.

“All these agencies that were price gouging,” Hall said, “all they were doing was putting that money in their own pockets. They weren’t doing anything different or special for their nurses.”

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Judging the Abortion Pill

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This week, the eyes of the nation are on Texas, where a federal judge who formerly worked for a conservative Christian advocacy group is set to decide whether the abortion pill mifepristone can stay on the market. Mifepristone is half of a two-pill regimen that now accounts for more than half of the abortions in the United States.

Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk, another of the three large drug companies that dominate the market for diabetes treatments, has announced it will cut the price of many of its insulin products. Eli Lilly announced its cuts early this month. But the push for more affordable insulin from activists and members of Congress is not the only reason for the change: Because of quirks in the way the drug market works, cutting prices could actually save the companies money in the long run.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KHN, Jessie Hellmann of CQ Roll Call, Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet, and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • The federal judge examining the decades-old approval of mifepristone could issue a decision at any time after a hearing largely behind closed doors, during which he appeared open to restricting access to the drug.
  • Democratic governors seek to counter the chill of Republican states’ warnings to pharmacies about distributing mifepristone, and a separate lawsuit in Texas seeks to set a precedent for punishing people who aren’t medical providers for assisting someone in obtaining an abortion.
  • In pandemic news, Congress is moving forward with legislation that would force the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to the origins of covid-19, while the editor of Cochrane Reviews posted a clarification of its recently published masking study, noting it is “inaccurate” to say it found that masks are not effective.
  • Top federal health officials sent an unusual letter to Florida’s surgeon general, warning that his embrace of vaccination misinformation is harmful, even deadly, to Americans. While covid vaccines come with some risk of negative health effects, contracting covid carries a higher risk of poor outcomes.
  • Novo Nordisk’s announcement that it will cut insulin prices puts pressure on Sanofi, the remaining insulin maker that has yet to adjust its prices.
  • The Veterans Health Administration will cover Leqembi, a new Alzheimer’s drug. The decision comes as Medicare considers whether it will also cover the drug. Experts caution that new drugs shaking up the weight-loss market could prove costly for Medicare.
  • Washington is eyeing changes to federal rules that would affect the practice of medicine. One change would force health plans to speed up “prior authorization” decisions by health insurers and increase transparency around denials, which supporters say would help patients better access needed care. Another proposal would ban noncompete clauses in contracts, including in health care. Arguments for and against the change both cite the issue of physician burnout — though they disagree on whether the ban would make the problem better or worse.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: “Tradeoffs” podcast’s “The Conservative Clash Over Abortion Bans,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Dan Gorenstein

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Politico’s “Sharpton Dodges the Spotlight on Latest Push to Ban Menthol Cigarettes,” by Julia Marsh

Sarah Karlin-Smith: Allure’s “With New Legislation, You Can Expect More Recalls to Hit the Beauty Industry,” by Elizabeth Siegel and Deanna Pai

Jessie Hellmann: The New York Times’ “Opioid Settlement Hinders Patients’ Access to a Wide Array of Drugs,” by Christina Jewett and Ellen Gabler

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KHN’s What the Health? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Journalists Discuss Insulin Prices, Gun Violence, Distracted Driving, and More

Midwest KHN correspondent Bram Sable-Smith discussed the Eli Lilly news on insulin prices on “PBS NewsHour” and insulin prices on Slate’s “What Next” on March 1.

KHN contributor Andy Miller discussed Georgia’s legislative wrap-up including Medicaid work requirements on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Lawmakers” on Feb. 28. He also discussed health care for foster children on WUGA’s “The Georgia Health Report” on Feb. 3.

Senior KHN correspondent Julie Appleby discussed how the end of the public health emergency will affect costs for covid-19 vaccines, treatments, and masks on KMOX’s “Health Matters” on Feb. 25.

KHN correspondent Cara Anthony discussed the youngest victims of gun violence and those who dig their graves on America’s Heroes Group on Feb. 25.

KHN contributor Eric Berger discussed distracted driving laws and why Missouri still doesn’t have one on St. Louis Public Radio’s “St. Louis on the Air” on Feb 24.

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March Medicaid Madness

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With Medicare and Social Security apparently off the table for federal budget cuts, the focus has turned to Medicaid, the federal-state health program for those with low incomes. President Joe Biden has made it clear he wants to protect the program, along with the Affordable Care Act, but Republicans will likely propose cuts to both when they present a proposed budget in the next several weeks.

Meanwhile, confusion over abortion restrictions continues, particularly at the FDA. One lawsuit in Texas calls for a federal judge to temporarily halt distribution of the abortion pill mifepristone. A separate suit, though, asks a different federal judge to temporarily make the drug easier to get, by removing some of the FDA’s safety restrictions.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Rachel Cohrs of STAT News, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • States are working to review Medicaid eligibility for millions of people as pandemic-era coverage rules lapse at the end of March, amid fears that many Americans kicked off Medicaid who are eligible for free or near-free coverage under the ACA won’t know their options and will go uninsured.
  • Biden promised this week to stop Republicans from “gutting” Medicaid and the ACA. But not all Republicans are on board with cuts to Medicaid. Between the party’s narrow majority in the House and the fact that Medicaid pays for nursing homes for many seniors, cutting the program is a politically dicey move.
  • A national group that pushed the use of ivermectin to treat covid-19 is now hyping the drug as a treatment for flu and RSV — despite a lack of clinical evidence to support their claims that it is effective against any of those illnesses. Nonetheless, there is a movement of people, many of them doctors, who believe ivermectin works.
  • In reproductive health news, a federal judge recently ruled that a Texas law cannot be used to prosecute groups that help women travel out of state to obtain abortions. And the abortion issue has highlighted the role of attorneys general around the country — politicizing a formerly nonpartisan state post. –And Eli Lilly announced plans to cut the price of some insulin products and cap out-of-pocket costs, though their reasons may not be completely altruistic: An expert pointed out that a change to Medicaid rebates next year means drugmakers soon will have to pay the government every time a patient fills a prescription for insulin, meaning Eli Lilly’s plan could save the company money.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The New York Times’ “A Drug Company Exploited a Safety Requirement to Make Money,” by Rebecca Robbins.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: The New York Times’ “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” by Hannah Dreier.

Rachel Cohrs: STAT News’ “Nonprofit Hospitals Are Failing Americans. Their Boards May Be a Reason Why,” by Sanjay Kishore and Suhas Gondi.

Lauren Weber: KHN and CBS News’ “This Dental Device Was Sold to Fix Patients’ Jaws. Lawsuits Claim It Wrecked Their Teeth,” by Brett Kelman and Anna Werner.

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KHN’s What the Health? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Readers and Tweeters Urgently Plea for a Proper ‘Role’ Call in the ER

Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names.

How Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners Enhance Health Care

The story of one patient’s ER experience does not at all capture the complexities of an emergency department serving the needs of a stochastic patient population.

Given the reach of KHN, it is disappointing to read stories that inch closer to tabloid-level reporting (“Doctors Are Disappearing From Emergency Rooms as Hospitals Look to Cut Costs,” Feb. 13).

Having spent most of my career working in and operationalizing emergency departments, I can assure you that there are plenty of opportunities to optimize the delivery of care and reduce unnecessary waste and cost while maintaining excellent outcomes. The salient point that you make “it’s all about the money” is too simplistic given the complexities.

Advanced practice providers (APPs) collectively describe nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs), and certified nurse midwives (CNMs). The term “midlevel practitioner” is outdated.

The archaic paternalistic approach to health care has long been overdue for change. Post-pandemic, it is critical to pivot from “the way it has always been done,” and that includes embracing new models of care.

Physicians and APPs provide excellent care to their patients and operate with different scopes of practice, training, and licensure. Therefore, most of us find working together in team-based models to be highly effective in ensuring that patients see the right care provider for the right health problem.

I found this reporting to be superficial and even offensive to nurse practitioners, like myself, who provide just as high quality care to patients as our physician colleagues.

I welcome the opportunity for dialogue about the value of nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

— Cindi Warburton, Spokane, Washington

— Mark Williams, Sacramento, California

I heard your NPR-partnered story on emergency rooms being managed by private equity and using fewer doctors and more nurse practitioners and physician assistants as midlevel practitioners.

But I prefer midlevel practitioners and medical residents, if their skills are relevant to me. They tend to be more careful in telling me what I should know and in entering records.

The professionally senior doctors (by years of experience and specialty, but I don’t know about board certification) tend to use record-keeping to support higher insurance reimbursement and then they don’t seem to believe what anyone else writes in the records, or don’t bother looking. Furthermore, they’re less likely to tell me what circumstances should prompt me to seek out a doctor or an ER, but if anything goes so wrong or becomes so advanced that I need even more care, they’re happy to provide it.

Doctors often categorically object to nurse practitioners, and state regulations reflect that.

— Nick Levinson, Brooklyn, New York

The recent KHN article “Doctors Are Disappearing From Emergency Rooms as Hospitals Look to Cut Costs” failed to address a critical consideration in the complexities of health care delivery today: the challenge of providing care to patients when they need it at a time when demand for care is on the rise, and the health care workforce is experiencing staggering levels of decline.

Today, 99 million Americans lack adequate access to primary care. By 2026, there will be a shortage of up to 3.2 million health care workers. As a physician associate/physician assistant for more than 20 years, I am kept up at night because of this perfect storm on the horizon — worried for my patients and their ability to access the care they need. Timely access to a trusted and qualified health care provider is never more pressing than during an emergency, when patients are at their most vulnerable, and delay in care can be a matter of life or death.

There is no easy answer to this impending workforce crisis, but one thing is clear: We can meet patient needs only if every member of today’s health care team is respected for the contributions they bring and can practice to the fullest extent of their education and training.

The fact is, without PAs, patients’ access to care would suffer. PAs account for more than 500 million patient visits each year. For many patients, PAs serve as primary care providers. And in some communities, PAs are the only health care providers. Let’s not lose sight of the countless stories we have all read in the media about community hospitals and clinics closing.

This article failed to take into account any research that shows the value and quality of PA-delivered care. For example, a 2021 study published by PLOS ONE looked at 39 studies across North America, Europe, and Africa between 1977 and 2021. In 33 of the 39 studies, researchers found care provided by a PA was comparable or better than care delivered by a physician. In 74% of the studies, resource and labor costs were lower when care was delivered by a PA versus a physician.

The quality of PA-delivered care can also be seen when looking at the ratio of liability claims. The ratio of claims to PAs averaged one claim for every 550 PAs. Compare this to the physician ratio, which averaged 1 claim for every 80 physicians.

Hiring PAs to practice in emergency medicine is not about “replacing” physicians, nor does it diminish the quality of care. Utilizing PAs in emergency medicine is about equipping health care teams with a wide range of highly educated and trained clinicians who can work together to ensure patients get the safe, high-quality care they need.

Let us stay focused on the reason why PAs, nurse practitioners, and physicians went into medicine in the first place: to care for people! Patient-centered, team-based care is about every single one of us contributing our knowledge, experience, and expertise to ensure the best outcomes for patients.

— Jennifer M. Orozco, American Academy of Physician Associates president and board chair, Chicago

— Whitney Schmucker, New York City

KHN should not be using the term “midlevel providers.” It’s a derogatory term used by doctors to belittle advanced practice providers (nurse practitioners and physician associates).

— Danielle Franklin, Minneapolis

— Gregg Gonsalves, New Haven, Connecticut

Nurse practitioners are essential providers in our nation’s current and future health care system. In an effort to highlight concerns related to health facility ownership models, the recent article “Doctors Are Disappearing From Emergency Rooms as Hospitals Look to Cut Costs” incorrectly represents the care provided by NPs in emergency rooms.

In fact, a recent study examining advanced practice providers (APPs), including NPs, in the ER found increasing APP coverage had no impact on flow, safety, or patient experiences in the emergency department. Additional research concluded that after controlling for patient severity and complexity, APPs diagnostic testing and hospitalization rates did not differ from physicians in patients presenting to the emergency department with chest and abdominal pain.

Prepared at the master’s or doctoral level, NPs provide primary, acute, chronic, and specialty care to patients of all ages and backgrounds. NPs practice in nearly every health care setting including hospitals, clinics, Veterans Health Administration and Indian Health Service facilities, emergency rooms, urgent care sites, private physician or NP practices, skilled nursing facilities and nursing facilities, schools, colleges and universities, retail clinics, public health departments, nurse-managed clinics, homeless clinics, and home health care settings. Collectively, NPs deliver high-quality care in more than 1 billion patient visits each year.

Grounded in 50 years of research and evidence-based practice, NPs deliver high-quality care, consistent with their physician counterparts. Results from a study of over 800,000 patients at 530 Veterans Affairs facilities found that patients assigned to NP primary care providers were less likely to utilize additional services, had no difference in costs, and experienced similar chronic disease management compared with physician-assigned patients. Furthermore, a comprehensive summary of studies examining NP quality of care from the American Enterprise Institute underscores the benefits of NP-led care.

Today, NPs represent 355,000 solutions to our nation’s health care needs. Patients deserve access to these high-quality health care providers wherever they seek care.

— April N. Kapu, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, Austin, Texas

— Dr. Sarabeth Broder-Fingert, Boston

Ophthalmologists and Optometrists Aren’t Interchangeable

Increasing Americans’ access to care is critical. However, loosening the scope of practice for certain types of care can be counterproductive and potentially risky for patients (“Montana Considers Allowing Physician Assistants to Practice Independently,” Feb.10).

A small handful of states, for example, have loosened scope-of-practice laws for laser eye surgery, which, if done incorrectly, could lead to serious complications that can damage a person’s vision. Over the course of their medical school education, internships, and residencies, ophthalmologists must complete thousands of hours of training before being allowed to perform laser eye surgeries on their own.

Unfortunately, some states permit optometrists, who are not medical doctors, to perform laser eye surgeries as long as they complete a 16- to 32-hour course. As one might expect, the likelihood of a patient needing additional surgery is significantly higher — more than double — when initial surgeries are performed by an optometrist instead of an ophthalmologist. It is little wonder, then, why states like California have successfully blocked efforts to loosen the scope of practice for laser eye surgery.

Despite the potential risks, and no evidence of documented access issues, the Department of Veterans Affairs updated its community care guidelines last year to allow optometrists in this small number of states to perform laser eye surgery on veterans in community care settings. Worse still, the VA is developing its National Standards of Practice, which many fear would let optometrists in VA facilities nationwide perform laser eye surgery on America’s veterans. To defend our veterans and prevent them from suffering adverse outcomes, it is critical for the VA to maintain patient protections that ensure only medical doctors with the requisite education and training can perform invasive eye surgeries.

Ophthalmologists and optometrists both play important roles in a patient’s collaborative care team, but their duties and skill sets are not interchangeable. Loosening the scope of practice for laser eye surgeries will not serve patients well. Our veterans defended us; now the VA must protect them.

— Dr. Daniel J. Briceland, president of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Sun City West, Arizona

— David Johnson, Chicago

We were disappointed that the article by Keely Larson about Montana’s consideration of a change in physician assistant regulation failed to note that the vast majority of research on the quality of care provided by physician assistants and nurse practitioners demonstrates that they have similar quality of care to physicians when practicing in their area of expertise. There are numerous literature reviews published in peer-reviewed journals on this topic, which should have been noted in the story. The author selected a single working paper that focuses on quality of care in emergency departments in a single health system (the Department of Veterans Affairs) that is not representative of the settings in which most physician assistants and nurse practitioners work. The individual cited, Dr. Yiqun Chen, extrapolated her working paper to the entire profession of physician assistants (who were not included in her study), which is a significant overreach.

We are accustomed to KHN stories being well researched and balanced. This story missed the mark and does not reflect well on the quality KHN aims to achieve.

— Joanne Spetz, Janet Coffman, and Ulrike Muench, the University of California-San Francisco

— Dr. Mehmet Oz, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania

At the Crux of Nursing Home Staffing Crunch: Compensation

I doubt it is possible to staff nursing facilities with qualified and caring staff when the compensation is quite poor and the work environment is very challenging (“Wave of Rural Nursing Home Closures Grows Amid Staffing Crunch,” Jan. 25). It is more a system problem than a staffing problem and will not get “fixed” without some serious changes.

— Dr. Jack Page, Durham, North Carolina

— Benjy Renton, Washington, D.C.

Participating in the Mental Illness Stigma

I wonder what is behind the pressure to persuade us to say there is a stigma to mental health issues (“Public Health Agencies Turn to Locals to Extend Reach Into Immigrant Communities,” Feb. 10)? I wonder why we so easily comply?

— Harold A. Maio, retired mental health editor, Fort Myers, Florida

— Andrzej Klimczuk, Bialystok, Poland

Remote Fitness Must Not Replace the Value of Physical Therapy

If we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s how vital technology is in allowing us to stay connected virtually, especially when it comes to health care. However, the online world cannot safely and adequately replace everything.

The recent article “Rural Seniors Benefit From Pandemic-Driven Remote Fitness Boom” (Jan.17) details how many older Americans living in rural areas rely on virtual fitness classes to remain physically active. While this is an important and effective option for some seniors, remote fitness classes cannot and should not replace clinically directed physical therapy.

Physical therapy helps patients remain strong and independent by managing pain, preventing injury, and improving mobility, flexibility, and balance under the supervision of a professionally trained physical therapist. It’s especially important at a time when senior deaths from falls are on the rise. Evidence shows that when seniors underwent an exercise intervention from a trained health care professional, it lowered their risk of a fall by 31%.

Not only is it effective in rehabilitating patients, but it is also an affordable, lower-cost alternative to invasive surgeries and pharmacological treatments, saving our health care system millions. And now, with the emergence of remote therapeutic monitoring, physical therapists can more easily reach patients in rural communities to ensure they are reaching their clinical goals through safe, at-home therapy exercises.

Physical therapists undergo years of education and training to provide the best, safest care for their patients. And while I applaud seniors for embracing online fitness classes and staying active, I also encourage them to recognize when clinically supervised physical therapy is needed to protect their safety and health.

— Nikesh Patel, executive director of the Alliance for Physical Therapy Quality and Innovation (APTQI), Washington, D.C.

— Eric Weinhandl, Victoria, Minnesota

Tallying Bad Pennies

“Did Your Health Plan Rip Off Medicare?” (Jan. 27) was a highly misleading article. On a per-enrollee per-year basis, over- and under-payments amounted to literally pennies. If you must pile on, focus on the few bad apples.

— Jon M. Kingsdale, Boston

— Inger Burnett-Zeigler, Chicago

How Much Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

Great story by Harris Meyer about Prentice and Lurie hospitals (“A Baby Spent 36 Days in an In-Network NICU. Why Did the Hospital Next Door Send a Bill?” Jan. 30). I was practicing as an anesthesiologist in Illinois in 2011 when the bill became law banning out-of-network balance billing for hospital-based docs. Of course we knew about the advent of the law: We had to enter into contracts to be in network, contracts that materially reduced all our doctors’ incomes!

It is impossible for me to believe that a professional operating a billing service in 2020 for Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago didn’t know about this 2011 law. I don’t believe them for a moment.

Thanks for the great article.

— Ron Meyer, Wilmette, Illinois

— Regina Phelps, San Francisco

Leaving a Bad Taste in My Mouth

In every article I’ve read about Paxlovid, including yours (“What Older Americans Need to Know About Taking Paxlovid,” Dec. 18), not one mentions the horrible metallic taste these pills have. I was prescribed Paxlovid after contracting covid-19. I’m 71 years old. It’s beyond my reasoning that in this day and age a pharmaceutical manufacturer can’t put a neutral coating on the pills. This awful taste stays with you day and night for the five days of use. I even had a friend who had to stop taking them as she was losing sleep over the horrible taste. My reference to friends is: “It’s like sucking on a wrench.” I’m sure this issue isn’t confined to us seniors, but it would be nice to read some recognition of a problem with this medication.

By the way, my workaround, which definitely helps but is hardly a solution, is to swallow the pills down with a swig of cranberry juice.

— Don Dugan, Brookfield, Wisconsin

— Olav Mitchell Underdal, Irvine, California

Admiration for Abortion Doulas

I admire and respect individuals willing to provide aid and comfort to others who are going through either the traditional birth process or a hard decision to end a pregnancy (“In North Carolina, More People Are Training to Support Patients Through an Abortion,” Jan. 5). Kudos to news groups for increasing awareness of individuals and organizations providing valuable services for their fellow citizens.

— Michael Walker, Black Mountain, North Carolina

— Dr. Darrell Gray II, Owings Mills, Maryland

Thinking Outside the Traditional Medicine Box

Katheryn Houghton missed out on sharing info on traditional methods, especially acupuncture (“Why People Who Experience Severe Nausea During Pregnancy Often Go Untreated,” Jan. 13). Also ginger, as in ginger tea, and peppermint. Peppermint oil (sniffed) or tea. I am an advocate for people with cancer.

— Ann Fonfa, founder of the Annie Appleseed Project, Delray Beach, Florida

— Catherine Arnst, New York City

A Cartoon Blooper?

The “Gender reveal?” political cartoon (Feb. 14) was confusing, unfunny, and inaccurate. How is this “political”? (It isn’t.) What makes gender reveals funny? (They’re not.) Most importantly, such reveals — an anachronistic cultural tradition that should be done away with anyway — are “sex reveals,” not “gender reveals.” (Biology is based on anatomy at birth, while gender is self-determined later in life and is fluid over time.) Even sex reveals are problematic, as they assume two biological sexes. (Some estimates indicate nearly 2% of individuals are born intersex, with their sexual anatomy not fitting into categories of either female or male.)

With anti-trans and anti-drag queen legislation being proposed and codified seemingly daily, now is not the time to poke fun at, nor inaccurately represent, the construct of gender. (It’s never the time.)

— Steff Du Bois, licensed clinical psychologist, Chicago

Keeping Marijuana Candy Away From Children

As an emergency room doctor, I was disappointed by the recent “KHN Health Minute” story trivializing a growing public health risk by suggesting parents “lock up their marijuana gummies” to avoid poisoning their children (“Listen to the Latest ‘KHN Health Minute,’” Feb. 16).

For background on why I, and other doctors, are concerned, I encourage you to read “Marijuana Candy: Poisoning and Lack of Protection for Children.”

— Dr. Roneet Lev, San Diego

— Halee Fischer-Wright, Denver

A Suggestion for Extra-Credit Reading

In response to the recent “What the Health?” podcast episode “As US Bumps Against Debt Ceiling, Medicare Becomes a Bargaining Chip” (Jan. 19), please have Julie Rovner read Stephanie Kelton’s book “The Deficit Myth.” She needs to understand why taxes pay for nothing. I consider Kelton’s book the most important on economics and how government budgets and financing work in the modern world.

— Mark Schaffer, Las Vegas

— Iqbal Atcha, Hanover Park, Illinois

Investing in ‘Practice-Ready’ Nurses to Bolster Workforce

The Connecticut Center for Nursing Workforce Inc. has created a best-practice plan to address these issues (“Senators Say Health Worker Shortages Ripe for Bipartisan Compromise,” Feb. 17). As nursing is the largest health care workforce role and a critical infrastructure within the state, nurses are a significant contributor to the fiscal, physical, and mental health of Connecticut, and a profession that can provide economic stability to its workers and families. Over 10,000 qualified nursing students were denied admission to registered nursing programs in 2021 due to full-time and part-time faculty shortages, lack of student clinical placements, and capacity of capstone experiences in specialty areas.

To produce “practice-ready” nurses, investment needs to be made in increasing the number of nursing faculty lines, both full-time (classroom) and part-time (clinical) experiences, simulation capacity and expertise, operations staff, and transition to practice resources.

Today, this is more challenging than ever, due to the impact of covid-19 on our nursing workforce, the natural attrition of our older nurses, early departure of new nurses causing a severe nursing shortage in the state, and the cost of “travel” nurses that is crippling the budgets of our health care facilities and not sustainable over the long term.

Nursing schools are competing for the same nursing human capital as our practice settings yet offer 30% less compensation for faculty roles as compared to clinical practice roles.

As a solution, it is critical to:

  1. Engage nursing schools to identify the demand for full-time and part-time faculty lines and staff.
  2. Develop a nurse faculty marketing campaign for associate, baccalaureate, accelerated registered nurse programs, and master’s degree in nursing programs for both full-time and part-time roles.
  3. Capitalize on the expertise of clinical nurses for the role of part-time clinical nurse faculty.
  4. Engage health care facilities to determine current nurse vacancies, future staffing needs, and onboarding/“transition to practice” gaps to best inform educational institutions as to the programs needed to be continued, expanded, or dissolved; thereby, maximizing education capacity, resources, faculty, and staff.

— Marcia Proto, executive director for the Connecticut Center for Nursing Workforce Inc., North Haven, Connecticut

— RJ Connelly III, Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Missing Pieces in the Covid Data Puzzle

It is misinformation to state that covid-19 deaths were counted when the opposite was true, and deaths were underreported due to political reasons, and reasons of expediency (“FDA Experts Are Still Puzzled Over Who Should Get Which Covid Shots and When,”) Jan. 27. For example, my father-in-law tested positive for covid before entering the hospital, and then repeatedly tested positive for covid while in the hospital so that he could not be released, and he died in the hospital, and covid was not listed as a cause of death on his death certificate. I have reason to believe that my own father died of covid in May 2020, during an election year, and covid was not listed as a cause of death on his death certificate. These men were not merely statistics, but left behind families who are still in turmoil and grief.

In public, people should wear masks all the time regardless of vaccination status, but, at the same time, be updated on vaccinations and boosters, and, at the same time, socially distance, and, at the same time, wash hands frequently and thoroughly. While all these measures should be taken simultaneously, everyone wearing masks is the easiest way to monitor compliance, and eliminates problems in determining someone else’s vaccination status, or determining whether the efficacy of their vaccines may have waned, or in determining whether they tested positive for covid, and failed to quarantine.

When, previously, the science was that vaccines and booster efficacy waned after three to six months, it should not be touted now to get the vaccine or booster only once a year.

The goal post should never have been moved to merely keeping people out of the hospital, but the goal should be to prevent people contracting covid, and to eradicate this scourge once and for all.

— Edward H. Bonacci Jr., Apex, North Carolina

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Au Revoir, Public Health Emergency

The Host

The public health emergency in effect since the start of the covid-19 pandemic will end on May 11, the Biden administration announced this week. The end of the so-called PHE will bring about a raft of policy changes affecting patients, health care providers, and states. But Republicans in Congress, along with some Democrats, have been agitating for an end to the “emergency” designation for months.

Meanwhile, despite Republicans’ less-than-stellar showing in the 2022 midterm elections and broad public support for preserving abortion access, anti-abortion groups are pushing for even stronger restrictions on the procedure, arguing that Republicans did poorly because they were not strident enough on abortion issues.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KHN, Victoria Knight of Axios, Rachel Roubein of The Washington Post, and Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • This week the Biden administration announced the covid public health emergency will end in May, terminating many flexibilities the government afforded health care providers during the pandemic to ease the challenges of caring for patients.
  • Some of the biggest covid-era changes, like the expansion of telehealth and Medicare coverage for the antiviral medication Paxlovid, have already been extended by Congress. Lawmakers have also set a separate timetable for the end of the Medicaid coverage requirement. Meanwhile, the White House is pushing back on reports that the end of the public health emergency will also mean the end of free vaccines, testing, and treatments.
  • A new KFF poll shows widespread public confusion over medication abortion, with many respondents saying they are unsure whether the abortion pill is legal in their state and how to access it. Advocates say medication abortion, which accounts for about half of abortions nationwide, is the procedure’s future, and state laws regarding its use are changing often.
  • On abortion politics, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution urging candidates to “go on the offense” in 2024 and push stricter abortion laws. Abortion opponents were unhappy that Republican congressional leaders did not push through a federal gestational limit on abortion last year, and the party is signaling a desire to appeal to its conservative base in the presidential election year.
  • This week, the federal government announced it will audit Medicare Advantage plans for overbilling. But according to a KHN scoop, the government will limit its clawbacks to recent years, allowing many plans to keep the money it overpaid them. Medicare Advantage is poised to enroll the majority of seniors this year.

Also this week, Rovner interviews Hannah Wesolowski of the National Alliance on Mental Illness about how the rollout of the new 988 suicide prevention hotline is going.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: Axios’ “Republicans Break With Another Historical Ally: Doctors,” by Caitlin Owens and Victoria Knight

Margot Sanger-Katz: The New York Times’ “Most Abortion Bans Include Exceptions. In Practice, Few Are Granted,” by Amy Schoenfeld Walker

Rachel Roubein: The Washington Post’s “I Wrote About High-Priced Drugs for Years. Then My Toddler Needed One,” by Carolyn Y. Johnson

Victoria Knight: The New York Times’ “Emailing Your Doctor May Carry a Fee,” by Benjamin Ryan

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to KHN’s What the Health? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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