Category: Administrative Actions

FGA asked whether voters support allowing short term health plans to be sold for up to one year, increasing them from the current 3-month maximum.

Voters overwhelmingly support this reform – by a 42-point margin. While Democrats are more skeptical, a solid majority (52 percent) support the idea. Independents strongly support it as well.

We next asked whether voters support allowing consumers to renew these short term plans for up to three years.Support remained strong—and similar to—the first question across party ID.

The Trump administration said late Monday that it will require drugmakers to reveal the list prices of their medicines in television ads. The move sets the stage for months or possibly years of battle with the powerful industry.

The proposed rule would require pharmaceutical companies to include the price in a TV ad for any drug that costs more than $35 a month. The price should be listed at the end of the advertisement in “a legible manner,” the rule states, and should be presented against a contrasting background in a way that is easy to read.

A long-shot bid to derail the Trump administration’s expansion of short-term health plans died in the Senate on Wednesday, even with Sen. Susan Collins providing the lone Republican vote for the resolution.

The Senate vote ended in a 50-50 tie, falling short of the majority needed to pass the measure reversing new regulations allowing insurers to sell skimpy health plans outside the Obamacare markets for up to a year, rather than the previous limit of three months.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma on Wednesday cited reduced Obamacare premiums and expanded choices as evidence that the Trump administration has not “sabotaged” the healthcare law, as charged by Democrats.

“For the very first time, rates have [been] going down… I think we have been successful in that area,” Verma said at an event hosted by the Economist Group in D.C.

The CMS has tweaked one of its coverage processes to ease access to medical devices. There are two Medicare coverage types, one that allows national coverage and one that allows Medicare contractors to pay for services or items on a local or regional basis. The agency has modified the latter.

A top health official in the Trump administration defended Medicaid work requirements Thursday, arguing that its intent isn’t to expel people from the program.

“Community engagement requirements are not some subversive attempt to just kick people off of Medicaid,” Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a speech in Washington, D.C. “Instead, their aim is to put beneficiaries in control with the right incentives to live healthier, independent lives.”

HHS wants insight from private companies like venture capital firms and startup incubators on strategies to accelerate investment, innovation and research in healthcare.

The agency on Wednesday announced the formation of the Deputy Secretary’s Innovation and Investment Summit, a yearlong collaboration with HHS officials and various private healthcare companies and investors. The creation of the summit is in response to a request for information HHS posted in June on ways it can work with “those focused on innovating and investing in the healthcare industry.”

With Americans increasingly concerned about drug prices and the Trump administration’s drug-pricing blueprintsupporting free-market pathways, the overriding question is: How do we inject more competition into the system by which drugs are purchased and dispensed?  Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has already moved to accelerate generic drug approvals, and now he wants to repeat that success by galvanizing the market for biosimilars, where products could be priced between 20-30 percent lower than their innovator brand cousins.

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.