Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Evangelicals Inside HHS Have Critics Worrying About Blurred Lines Between Church And State
Politico: The Religious Activists On The Rise Inside Trump's Health Department
A small cadre of politically prominent evangelicals inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that's taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise. Those officials include Roger Severino, an anti-abortion lawyer who now runs the Office of Civil Rights and last week laid out new protections allowing health care workers with religious or moral objections to abortion and other procedures to opt out. Shannon Royce, the agency's key liaison with religious and grass-roots organizations, has also emerged as a pivotal player. (Diamond, 1/22)
In other news from the administration —
The Hill: Top Dem Presses Trump Health Official On Potential Ethics Violation
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says it appears a senior Trump administration health official has violated her ethics agreement by reviewing applications from states that employed her consulting firm. Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services general counsel on Friday pressing for answers about the ethics agreement of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). (Sullivan, 1/19)
The Wall Street Journal: CDC To Scale Back Work In Dozens Of Foreign Countries Amid Funding Worries
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to scale back or discontinue its work to prevent infectious-disease epidemics and other health threats in 39 foreign countries because it expects funding for the work to end, the agency told employees. The CDC currently works in 49 countries as part of an initiative called the global health security agenda, to prevent, detect and respond to dangerous infectious disease threats. It helps expand surveillance for new viruses and drug-resistant bacteria, modernize laboratories to detect dangerous pathogensand train workers who respond to epidemics. (McKay, 1/19)
Modern Healthcare: CMS' Focus On 'Meaningful Measures' Faces Hurdles
A CMS effort to turn the corner on achieving widespread use of outcomes-based quality measures is getting mixed reviews from providers and payers. Industry stakeholders support recent efforts by the CMS to focus on quality measures that are "meaningful" to clinicians and their patients. But questions remain about how effective the agency's work will be as uncertainty persists around which measures are actually the most valuable. The CMS' Meaningful Measures initiative, launched a few months ago, was a response to widespread concern across the industry that there are too many quality measures, most of which have little value to clinicians or patients. (Castellucci, 1/20)
