With David Lim and Carmen Paun
CH-CH-CHANGES — More big leadership changes are underway on the CDC, Krista and Ben Leonard report, as Director Rochelle Walensky continues to overhaul the general public health agency, a process she began last spring.
Running the show: Leandris Liburd will probably be acting director of the brand new Office of Health Equity, and Jennifer Layden will probably be the acting director for the brand new Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, Krista and Ben learned.
Liburd has served because the director of the CDC’s Office of Minority Health and Health Equity since 2011. Layden is the CDC’s associate deputy director of Public Health Science and Surveillance, a job she took over in April. She’s helped oversee the agency’s Data Modernization Initiative.
Their appointments come amid other recent, high-level leadership changes: Earlier this month, Maine CDC director Nirav Shah was named because the agency’s recent principal deputy director, and Debra Houry, who will stay on as acting principal deputy director until Shah starts, was named because the CDC’s chief medical officer and deputy director for science and programs.
The massive picture: Walenksy sent an email, obtained by POLITICO, to staff on Tuesday that featured a revamped organizational chart by which several offices, including the brand new data and equity offices, will report on to the Office of the Director.
It also included the creation of a recent Global Health Center and an enormous recent position — the director for external affairs throughout the CDC chief of staff’s office to “strengthen our relationships across government, academia, non-profits, and the business community, helping outside organizations navigate and partner with CDC,” Walensky wrote.
The plan is to have the brand new structure in place by the top of February, said an individual aware of the matter.
The larger picture: It’s no mistake that data, equity and external partnerships are getting some special attention on this restructuring. They’re all areas Walensky has said she desires to strengthen as a part of her “Moving Forward” initiative.
Walensky announced the agency’s restructuring in August 2022, following two reviews conducted by Health Resources and Services Administration official Jim Macrae into the CDC’s pandemic response and one other by CDC Chief of Staff Sherri Berger into agency operations.
The reviews concluded that the agency’s traditional structure and work culture weren’t fast or transparent enough to satisfy the demands of a public health crisis as sweeping as Covid-19.
WELCOME TO WEDNESDAY PULSE — Your early fact for the week is that several mushrooms — including the common oyster mushroom present in your local vegetable aisle — are carnivorous, eating worms that wander across their fleshy lobes. Now . Send your news and tricks to [email protected] and [email protected].
TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, Lauren Gardner talks with Alice Miranda Ollstein about anti-abortion groups which are pushing back against Republican lawmakers in some conservative states because they fear GOP-controlled legislatures will water down their near-total abortion bans and fire up politically contentious debates over already-vetted laws.
MCCARTHY NAMES COVID PANEL — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy named on Tuesday the members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic formed earlier this month.
The members, whose names were revealed on McCarthy’s Twitter account, are Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Debbie Lesko (R. Ariz.), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), John Joyce (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and Wealthy McCormick (R-Ga.).
The panel, established within the House rules package adopted in January, will operate under the newly renamed Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
ALL EYES ON THE GOLDEN STATE — California’s first-in-the-nation mandate for student health centers to hold abortion pills is just one among greater than a dozen recent California policies that aim to make the state the nation’s leading haven for abortion rights, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, GOP-controlled states raced to outlaw abortion, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democratic legislature sped in the wrong way.
They enacted recent legal protections and tech privacy measures for patients and providers, allocated a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of dollars to assist low-income people afford the procedure and created programs to grow the medical workforce needed to handle the out-of-state influx.
The brand new laws were crafted to serve two purposes: Shore up protections for people looking for and providing abortions and expand access to the procedure.
However the state’s aggressive stance has also made it a goal of the anti-abortion movement, including on university campuses.
On the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, as an example, that meant closing all entrances to its health complex except one tucked away near the constructing’s loading dock to make it harder for anti-abortion protesters to storm the constructing.
HOW (UN)HEALTHY IS MY DISTRICT? Now you’ll find out, in a recent dashboard released today by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The dashboard offers a glimpse into 36 health metrics for all 435 congressional districts across the country, in addition to the District of Columbia.
Some takeaways from the researchers’ data evaluation:
— Residents in congressional districts within the 11 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid coverage under the Inexpensive Care Act are twice as prone to be uninsured compared with those in states with expanded Medicaid coverage.
— Hispanic residents have the best rates of uninsurance in most congressional districts.
— Deaths from heart problems are lower in suburban districts, at 194 deaths per 100,000, compared with urban and rural districts, at 215 and 225 deaths per 100,000, respectively.
— In greater than three-quarters of the districts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, Black newborns are roughly twice as prone to be underweight at birth than white babies.
CMS TOUTS MEDICARE INSULIN OUT-OF-POCKET CAP — President Joe Biden is touting a recent evaluation published by his health department on Tuesday that found 1.5 million Medicare Part D beneficiaries would have saved $734 million if the Inflation Reduction Act’s insulin provision limiting monthly cost sharing to $35 had been in effect in 2020, David reports.
The supply kicked into effect on Jan. 1; nevertheless, Part D plans have until March 31 to implement the cap. The law requires beneficiaries to be reimbursed for excess cost sharing inside 30 days.
“There are some people who find themselves already seeing it once they go to the pharmacy now,” CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure told POLITICO. “After which there are others that will probably be reimbursed by their plan.”
In July, the monthly cap on insulin cost sharing will take effect for Medicare Part B, an IRA provision that can profit those that require insulin administered through nondisposable insulin pumps. The HHS evaluation found that the availability would have saved about $27 million for about 31,000 Part B beneficiaries if it had been in effect in 2020.
TELEHEALTH: MAYBE NOT A MIRACLE CURE — Despite widespread belief that telehealth would make it easier for people to access treatment for opioid use disorder, a recent study has found no evidence to back up that view, Ben writes.
The study’s findings, published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, undermine a key argument for permanently continuing virtual prescribing of the drugs used to treat the disorder, a practice permitted under a pandemic emergency waiver.
While virtual care usage significantly spiked throughout the pandemic, researchers found no difference in treatment initiation or clinical outcomes amongst patients within the low- and high-use telemedicine groups. Nevertheless, that finding is likely to be explained by a dearth of broadband web service in lower-income and rural areas.
GATES FOUNDATION BOSS SLAMS LACK OF PANDEMIC PREP MONEY — Mark Suzman, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said on Tuesday he was amazed at the shortage of cash from governments for future pandemic preparedness given the massive economic losses the world experienced due to current pandemic, Carmen writes.
A World Bank–hosted Pandemic Fund, which is predicted to issue its first call for proposals next week, has received only about $1.6billion in commitments to this point — a fraction of the $10 billion it seeks yearly.
“What you get is loads of grand statements and commitments,” Suzman said in a briefing to reporters Monday. “The profound lesson is: it’s very difficult when governments and other partners and personal sector are specializing in short-term issues from inflation to energy [and] just not rising to the challenge.”
For its part, the Gates Foundation announced last week a 15 percent increase in its 2023 budget, set to achieve $8.3 billion, to be spent mainly on global health, women empowerment, agriculture and education. The inspiration goals to achieve a $9 billion budget by 2026.
AmerisourceBergen has said it should change its name and brand to Cencora to higher reflect “its global strategy and its daring vision and purpose-driven approach to creating healthier futures,” in keeping with an organization statement.
The Latest York Times reports that an increasing variety of hospitals and medical practices are charging for doctors’ written responses to patients.
The Associated Press reports on recent gene therapy that shows promise in treating several brain disorders.
Stat reports on how the increasing prevalence of chatbots raises recent questions in mental health care.