With Alice Miranda Ollstein
NEW MOMENTUM FOR MEDICAID EXPANSION? Democratic governors in North Carolina and Kansas are set to take one other run at expanding Medicaid next 12 months, POLITICO’s Megan Messerly reports.
It won’t be easy in either state, but proponents of the Obama-era medical health insurance program imagine a growing body of information on this system’s success in other red states has persuaded an increasing variety of holdouts — and the extra federal money that comes with expansion could tip the scales with lawmakers staring down a possible recession.
The backstory: The most recent round of Medicaid expansion negotiations comes as states prepare for the eventual end of the Covid-19 public health emergency, which helped thousands and thousands of individuals stay on Medicaid through the pandemic, and as nearly a 3rd of rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure, two aspects Medicaid experts imagine could persuade conservative lawmakers.
Citizen-led ballot initiatives have up to now forced red states, including Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota, to expand Medicaid, leaving 11 states without an expansion program.
The prospects: Policy experts who follow Medicaid expansion efforts imagine North Carolina has the perfect likelihood now that the state’s Republican legislative leadership is on board with the proposal after years of opposition. But laws in North Carolina that will have expanded coverage to 600,000 people didn’t pass this 12 months.
In Kansas, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, fresh off of winning a second term, is taking one other swing at expansion, which she pushed in each of her first 4 years. The state appeared on the cusp of a deal in 2020, but talks broke down when the difficulty became entangled in a separate debate over abortion restrictions. The next 12 months, Kelly proposed legalizing medical marijuana and using the tax revenue to pay for Medicaid expansion, a move that also failed. And in 2022, efforts similarly fell flat.
WELCOME TO WEDNESDAY PULSE — Lower than half of men are glad with their friendships, a recent survey shows. Send us your best guess as to why, together with news and suggestions, to [email protected] and [email protected].
TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, Daniel talks with Lauren Gardner concerning the lobbying from health care providers attempting to persuade lawmakers to extend the telehealth rules that were passed through the pandemic — and that will expire after the lifting of the Covid-19 public health emergency.
SENATORS TO USE MENTAL HEALTH HEARING TO STUMP FOR PRIOR AUTHORIZATION BILL — The Senate HELP Committee is holding a hearing this morning on the mental health crisis facing teens that the pandemic’s exacerbated, but lawmakers on the panel also plan to make use of the event to push for broader health care reforms, Alice reports.
Specifically, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) will use the hearing to focus on his bill that will overhaul the prior authorization process inside Medicare Advantage.
Though the bill would apply only to older adults and wouldn’t help the adolescents who’re the main focus of the hearing, Marshall will argue that the cumbersome process doctors currently use to get insurers’ approval before rendering treatment is “a barrier to care” across the board and is especially damaging within the mental health space.
The bipartisan bill was passed out of the House on a voice vote and is backed by a few of the health care industry’s strongest players, including the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association.
The present holdup? Cost. The Congressional Budget Office reported in September that the bill would cost about $16 billion over 10 years. It’s a high price tag when leaders are already attempting to push through other expensive health care measures like delaying cuts to providers’ reimbursement rates.
TELEHEALTH PUSH CONTINUES — The Connected Health Initiative is lobbying congressional leaders to increase a provision that permits high-deductible medical health insurance plans to cover telehealth before patients hit their deductibles, POLITICO’s Ben Leonard reports.
The initiative, whose steering committee includes Apple, Microsoft, the American Medical Association and UnitedHealth Group, wrote to House and Senate leaders on Monday, asking them to increase the supply before it expires at 12 months’s end. The group called for “a minimum of” a two-year extension to avoid the difficulty resurfacing next 12 months.
TOBACCO COMPANIES ASK SCOTUS FOR INJUNCTION ON CA LAW — R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco and vape corporations on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court for an emergency injunction that will stop a flavored-tobacco ban set to enter effect in California later this month, POLITICO’s Katherine Ellen Foley reports.
The high court filing comes after two lower courts, including the ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, denied stay requests from the industry. The group first requested a preliminary injunction within the District Court of the Southern District of California the day after 62 percent of Californians voted to uphold a statewide ban on flavored-tobacco products in stores and vending machines.
The ban would prohibit the sale of Newport menthol cigarettes, which R.J. Reynolds manufactures, and the most recent filing claims that the businesses would lose thousands and thousands of dollars in revenue while any litigation winds its way through the courts.
HIV IN NYC ON THE RISE — Nearly 1,600 Latest York City residents were newly diagnosed with HIV in 2021 — a 14 percent increase over 2021, POLITICO’s Shannon Young reports.
The City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s 2021 HIV Surveillance Annual Report released Tuesday noted the “atypical” yearly increase in recent diagnoses in Latest York City.
It attributed the 14-percent rise to “a rebounding from the unexpectedly steeper drop through the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic,” which affected access to HIV testing services.
NEW ALZHEIMER’S THERAPY IN SPOTLIGHT — A recent therapy for Alzheimer’s disease under FDA review modestly slowed the progression of cognitive decline, while doubts concerning the drug’s safety persist, Katherine reports.
The drug: Lecanemab is the second monoclonal antibody from Biogen and Eisai that targets amyloid — malformed proteins within the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The drug binds to the proteins another way than Aduhelm, the businesses’ first Alzheimer’s antibody treatment, which was granted accelerated approval in 2021 amid controversy after contradictory study results raised questions on its safety and efficacy.
Biogen and Eisai had asked the FDA to grant lecanemab accelerated approval based on data from a Phase IIb trial.
What’s recent: Latest trial data published in The Latest England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday showed that in a Phase III clinical trial, lecanemab modestly reduced amounts of amyloid and slowed the onset of cognitive decline in comparison with a placebo.
But adversarial events potentially brought on by the drug were reported, leading the study’s authors to call for further investigation. The trial results showed that of the nearly 1,500 individuals with mild Alzheimer’s disease who accomplished the 18-month trial, 14 percent of patients who took the drug developed unwanted effects — which included brain swelling and bleeding — in comparison with 11.3 percent who took the placebo.
The FDA is slated to make a choice on lecanemab’s accelerated approval by Jan. 6.
MISINFORMATION AND THE RANDOM DUDES OF TWITTER— In line with an update on its content-moderation policies, Twitter will not stop users from spreading false information concerning the Covid-19 virus or vaccines, POLITICO’s Rebecca Kern reports.
Twitter’s Covid misinformation page has been updated with a note saying that as of Nov. 23, the platform would not implement its policies against spreading misleading virus and vaccine information — which had led to greater than 11,000 account suspensions since 2020.
Why, exactly? The move, first reported by CNN, appears to be part of latest owner Elon Musk’s plans to grant “general amnesty” to previously banned accounts — like that of former President Donald Trump. It could mean the 11,230 accounts suspended since Twitter’s Covid misinformation policy went into effect in early 2020 may soon be or are within the means of being reinstated.
Making the administration’s job harder: At a White House briefing last week, Ashish Jha, White House Covid-19 response coordinator, commented on the increasing spread of Covid misinformation on Twitter under Musk’s leadership. Americans, he said, could decide to “trust America’s physicians or you’ll be able to trust some random dude on Twitter.”
Kripa Sreepada is now a health policy adviser with the Senate Finance Committee under Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). She was previously a health policy adviser for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.).
ATI Advisory announced that Anna Kaltenboeck will lead its recent drug reimbursement group. She most recently served as a senior health adviser for the Senate Committee on Finance.
Dwayne Carson is joining the lobbying team at Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America. He most recently lobbied on behalf of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
The PhRMA Foundation has announced 4 recent members to its board: Aida Habtezion, chief medical officer at Pfizer; Maha Radhakrishnan, chief medical officer at Biogen; George Addona, senior vp and head of discovery, preclinical and translational medicine at Merck Research Laboratories; and Lori Reilly, chief operating officer at PhRMA.
Insider reports on the pharmacy startup Medly, certainly one of the numerous healthcare startups fueled by enterprise dollars that grew fast through the last two years only to return crashing down.
The Latest York Times explores how a compulsive liar is being treated for his disease.
STAT reports on whether PhRMA has lost its edge in Washington, D.C.
