States serve as “laboratories of democracy,” as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said. And states are also labs for health policy, launching all kinds of experiments lately to temper spending on pharmaceuticals.
No wonder. Drugs are among the fastest-rising health care costs for many consumers and are a key reason health care spending dominates many state budgets — crowding out roads, schools and other priorities.
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No one wants to sit in an exam room while the doctor spends precious minutes entering billing information into an electronic health record. But frustrations like this don’t mean we should give up on technology’s potential to improve health outcomes. The data collected by a new generation of digital health products—including smart watches, smartphones and fitness trackers—could help the medical community learn about treatments that might work for a patient like you, and which ones to avoid. The first step is enabling them to stream data wirelessly to your doctor’s EHR.
The pre-existing-conditions offensive against the GOP is based on its votes to repeal ObamaCare. But the truth is that every Republican in Congress who voted for repeal also voted to require states to provide protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The GOP approach was to let each state figure out how best to accomplish this under a federal system that worked better than the Affordable Care Act. Republicans trusted leaders in state capitals to do better than Washington for the people of their states.
Each life saved from addiction is an important victory. And while the epidemic still rages, we are now seeing signs of national progress.
Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released its annual survey of Americans’ drug use and mental health. For the second year in a row, the number of Americans misusing legal or illegal opioids dropped. Even more encouraging, the number of Americans initiating heroin use dropped by around half from 2016 to 2017.
The architects of Obamacare promised a U.S. health care revolution that would control costs, improve quality, and provide coverage for all. They guaranteed access to health care regardless of income or health status. They promised that coverage for all would reduce costs by preventing disease. After more than eight years, Obamacare has failed to make good on its promises. Thanks to its poor design, it continues to increase health care costs, degrade health care quality, and weaken the market for private coverage. This Brief Analysis identifies the Obamacare promises and describes how they have been broken.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Wednesday that it has awarded more than $1 billion in grants to states, communities and organizations fighting the opioid crisis.
The vast majority of that funding — $930 million — is intended to support states’ efforts to provide treatment and prevention services to combat opioid abuse.
A bipartisan group of senators is unveiling a draft measure to crack down on surprise medical bills, which they say have plagued patients with massive unexpected charges for care.
The measure would prevent a health care provider that is outside of a patient’s insurance network from charging additional costs for emergency services to patients beyond the amount usually allowed under their insurance plan.
The Trump administration is close to issuing a new rule that could effectively ban rebate payments from drug manufacturers to pharmaceutical benefit managers, or PBMs. The plan is misguided. A full ban would backfire and increase costs to consumers.
The regulation, now under review at the Office of Management and Budget, could remove the safe-harbor protection for rebate payments under an anti-kickback law. But rebates are price discounts, not kickbacks. They reduce prices based on sales volume: Drug companies charge less when more of their drugs are sold to patients.
Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday suggested that adopting universal Medicare would actually boost the economy and put more money in Americans’ pockets, despite studies putting the cost of such a venture at tens of trillions of dollars.
Her comments came days after far-left progressives suffered a series of losses in major races in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo soundly defeated upstart “resistance” candidate Cynthia Nixon. Despite having Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement, Nixon lost in Ocasio-Cortez’s district by thirty percentage points.
Maryland’s attorney general on Thursday filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration for recurring efforts he says are intended to dismantle the national health care law and chase people away from coverage.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court of Maryland comes as the latest push to scrap the Affordable Care Act has pressed ahead in Texas. Last week, 20 Republican-controlled states asked a federal judge to bring the law to a halt, arguing that the entire health statute was rendered unconstitutional after Congress repealed the “individual mandate” that required most Americans to buy insurance or risk a tax penalty.