First Edition: February 9, 2018

Kaiser Health News: Upsurge Of Suburban Poor Discover Health Care’s Nowhere Land
The promise of cheaper housing brought Shari Castaneda to Palmdale, Calif., in northern Los Angeles County, about nine years ago. The single mom with five kids had been struggling to pay the bills. “I kept hearing that the rent was a lot cheaper out here, so I moved,” she said. But when she developed health problems — losing her balance and falling — Castaneda found fewer care options in her new town. Unable to find local specialty care, she traveled nearly 65 miles to a public hospital in Los Angeles, where doctors discovered a tumor on her spine. (Korry, 2/9)

The New York Times: House Passes Budget Deal To Raise Spending And Reopen Government
The House gave final approval early Friday to a far-reaching budget deal that will reopen the federal government and boost spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, hours after a one-man blockade by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky delayed the votes and forced the government to close. With the House’s approval, before dawn and Friday’s workday, the government will reopen before most Americans knew it closed, with a deal to provide $300 billion in additional funds for this fiscal year and next to military and non-military programs, disaster relief for the victims of last year’s hurricanes and wildfires, and a higher statutory debt ceiling. (Kaplan, 2/8)

The Washington Post: Government Shutdown Set To End As House Passes Sweeping Budget Bill
The 240-to-186 House vote came just after 5 a.m., about three hours after the Senate cleared the legislation on a vote of 71 to 28, with wide bipartisan support. (DeBonis and Werner, 2/9)

The New York Times: From Clinics To Child Insurance, Budget Deal Affects Health Care
The budget deal in Congress is billed as a measure to grant stability to a government funding process that has lurched from crisis to crisis — but it is also stuffed with provisions that will broadly affect the nation’s health care system, like repealing an advisory board to curb Medicare spending and funding community health centers. Many of the provisions have been in gestation for months, even years in some cases. Some will save money. Many will cost money — potentially a lot of money. ... The bill [also] increases discounts that pharmaceutical companies must give seniors enrolled in the Medicare Part D drug plans, by making the so-called “doughnut hole” smaller. This was a policy that was part of the Affordable Care Act, but the new legislation would speed up implementation by one year. (Pear, 2/8)

The New York Times: What’s Hidden In The Senate Spending Bill?
The bill would kill an unpopular provision of the Affordable Care Act, its Independent Payment Advisory Board, which was devised to help keep Medicare spending growth from rising above a set level. No one has ever been appointed to the board, and its services have not yet been needed — Medicare spending has experienced unusually slow growth rates in recent years — but the board was long denounced by Republicans as a rationing board, and disliked by some Democrats for taking payment policy authority away from Congress. (Sanger-Katz, Plumer, Green and Tankersley, 2/8)

The Washington Post: 12 Of The Most Important Things In Congress’s Massive Spending Deal
Some Democrats are calling this deal a win because it gives a “historic” boost to nondefense spending. Overall, domestic spending would rise by $60 billion this fiscal year and $78 billion the following year. (Long and Stein, 2/8)

Politico: Congress Votes To End Government Shutdown
“What makes Democrats proudest of this bill is that after a decade of cuts to programs that help the middle class, we have a dramatic reversal," added Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who helped craft the deal along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) and House leaders. "Funding for education, infrastructure, fighting drug abuse, and medical research will all, for the first time in years, get very significant increases, and we have placed Washington on a path to deliver more help to the middle class in the future.” (Bresnahan, Scholtes and Caygle, 2/8)

The Hill: Popular Bill To Fight Drug Prices Left Out Of Budget Deal
Drug pricing advocates are decrying the budget deal announced Wednesday for leaving out a bipartisan drug pricing measure that they had pushed for. The measure would prevent branded drug companies from using delay tactics to prevent cheaper generic competitors from coming onto the market. (Sullivan, 2/8)

The New York Times: Budget Deficits Would Balloon Under The Bipartisan Spending Deal
According to a preliminary analysis of the deal, federal deficits would surpass $1 trillion by 2019, a level not seen since the recession and its aftermath. (Parlapiano, 2/8)

The Hill: ObamaCare Enrollment Tells Tale Of Two Systems 
Most states that operate their own ObamaCare exchanges saw more people sign up in 2018 than last year, while 29 of the 34 states that rely on the federal government to promote enrollment saw their sign-ups fall. Of the 17 state-based marketplaces, 11 saw enrollment increases: Colorado, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Kentucky and Oregon while California, Idaho, Maryland, Vermont, Arkansas and New Mexico saw decreases. (Hellmann, 2/8)

The Associated Press: Trump Proposes Reduction Of Drug Costs Under Medicare
President Donald Trump will propose lowering prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries by allowing them to share in rebates that drug companies pay to insurers and middlemen, an administration official said. A senior administration official outlined the plan Thursday on condition of anonymity ahead of the release of Trump's 2019 budget plan next week. (Alonso-Zaldivar and Perrone, 2/9)

The Wall Street Journal: Teva Pharmaceutical Shares Plunge After Quarterly Loss And 2018 Outlook Warning
Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. on Thursday said it took a $17 billion charge against the value of its U.S. generics business and posted a $11.6 billion fourth-quarter loss, capping a tumultuous 2017 that saw a management and boardroom shake-up. While the world’s biggest generic drugmaker has struggled for months, the magnitude of the loss and a warning from Chief Executive Kare Schultz that 2018 could prove just as difficult sent the firm’s shares reeling. (Jones, 2/8)

The Associated Press: CVS Health Eyes Data, Wage Boosts With $1.5B Tax Benefit
CVS Health's fourth-quarter earnings nearly doubled, fueled by a $1.5 billion tax benefit that will help the drugstore chain expand its growing role in customer care. The company said Thursday that it will use the break it gets from the recently completed federal tax overhaul to raise starting pay for its hourly workers and pare debt ahead of its planned, $69 billion acquisition of the insurer Aetna. (Murphy, 2/8)

The Wall Street Journal: CVS To Raise Starting Pay To $11 An Hour
CVS Health Corp. said it will use some of the extra cash from the U.S. tax overhaul to raise its starting hourly pay to $11 for U.S. workers, the latest company to announce employee perks in the wake of the legislation. The company, with 240,000 U.S. workers, currently pays a starting wage of $9 an hour, though many employees make more. It said that in addition to raising the minimum, it will increase pay for lower-wage retail workers at its nearly 10,000 U.S. stores. CVS didn’t provide an average increase. (Terlep, 2/8)

Reuters: CVS Says Aetna Acquisition Still Expected In 2018
CVS Health Corp on Thursday said that a request for more information from U.S. antitrust regulators reviewing its proposed $69 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna Inc does not impact its expectation that the deal will close in the second half of 2018. (2/8)

The New York Times: Drug Industry Wages Opioid Fight Using An Anti-Addiction Ally
As Minnesota lawmakers prepared to push a proposed tax on opioid sales in November, the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists who opposed the bill set up a meeting with its sponsors, and they brought an unusual guest: Jessica Hulsey Nickel, a prominent anti-addiction advocate in Washington. Ms. Nickel told the lawmakers that she took no position on the tax and was simply offering her group’s resources to help fight the state’s drug epidemic. But her presence along with five representatives from the industry’s trade group raised eyebrows among the Minnesota lawmakers, who believed that drug companies needed to be held accountable for the prescription opioid crisis — not embraced as an ally. (Corkery and Thomas, 2/8)

Stat: Investors Want Shareholders To Urge AmerisourceBergen To Mitigate Opioid Crisis
Agroup of institutional investors has launched a campaign to convince shareholders in AmerisourceBergen (ABC), one of the nation’s largest wholesalers, to support a proposal that would require the company to provide more information on steps taken to manage financial and reputational risks associated with the opioid crisis. The move was expected after the Securities and Exchange Commission last month rejected efforts by the company to omit the proposals from its upcoming annual shareholder meeting on March 1. Another proposal would require the wholesaler to disclose if its board clawed back compensation from senior executives due to misconduct. (Silverman, 2/8)

Los Angeles Times: Trifecta Of Opioids, Alcohol And Suicide Are Blamed For The Drop In U.S. Life Expectancy
An epidemic of despair is disproportionately claiming the lives of rural white Americans in the prime of adulthood. And for a second year in a row, their deaths by drugs, drink and self-destruction have caused life expectancy in the United States to fall. That milestone, suggests an editorial in a respected medical journal, marks a sustained reversal of close to a century of improving health for Americans. And it raises a puzzling mystery: What is causing the despair, and what will restore hope and health to these battered Americans? (Healy, 2/8)

The Associated Press: ‘Kryptonite’ Guitarist’s Family Says Doctor Fed Opioid Habit
The family of a longtime guitarist for 3 Doors Down is accusing an Alabama doctor of fueling the rocker’s opioid addiction before he died of a drug overdose. Matthew Roberts, 38, was found dead in August 2016 in the hallway of a hotel outside Milwaukee, where he was to perform in a charity concert. (Martin, 2/8)

Bloomberg: New Drugs Are Coming To Fight Nasty Flu Seasons
Flu has been on a vicious march this winter, evading vaccines, overwhelming hospitals and prompting school closures from California to Hong Kong in its wake. But relief in the form of new drugs is on the way. Almost two decades after Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu first reached pharmacy shelves, researchers around the world are pushing ahead with a raft of new options. None will arrive in time to help sufferers this winter, but the most advanced -- developed by Roche and Shionogi & Co. -- could be on the market in Japan within months and available in the U.S. and Europe next winter. (Gale, 2/8)

The Washington Post: Five Major Psychiatric Diseases Have Overlapping Patterns Of Genetic Activity, New Study Shows
Certain patterns of genetic activity appear to be common among five distinct psychiatric disorders — autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and alcoholism — according to a new study. The paper, appearing in the journal Science, was released Thursday. Scientists analyzed data from 700 human brains, all donated either from patients who suffered one of these major psychiatric disorders or from people who had not been diagnosed with mental illness. The scientists found similar levels of particular molecules in the brains of people with autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; other commonalities between bipolar and major depression; and other matches between major depression and alcoholism. (Nutt, 2/8)

The Washington Post: Sex Harassment Can Make Victims Physically Sick, Studies Reveal
When Rebecca Thurston read the accounts of 150 women and girls sexually abused by a Michigan athletic doctor, one of the first things she worried about was their health — not the psychological effect of the abuse, but the long-term physical toll it could take on their bodies. An epidemiologist, Thurston has spent the past four years studying women who have suffered sexual abuse and harassment. Over time, she discovered, sexual harassment can work like a poison, stiffening women’s blood vessels, worsening blood flow and harming the inner lining of their hearts. (Wan, 2/8)

Stat: Mouse Footprints Could Help Scientists Develop New Pain Drugs. Here's How
Neurobiologist David Roberson fancies himself a palm reader. Or rather, a paw reader. Roberson, an investigator at Boston Children’s Hospital, is trying to create a sharper way to measure pain and test pain drugs by measuring the fancy footwork of rodents. The scientist says current methods to measure pain in rats aren’t all that great, because the animals are often in the middle of a panic attack when a predator — in this case, a scientist — is looming. (Thielking, 2/9)

The New York Times: Two Prostate Cancer Drugs Delay Spread Of The Disease By Two Years
They are among the most challenging prostate cancer patients to treat: about 150,000 men worldwide each year whose cancer is aggressive enough to defy standard hormonal therapy, but has not yet spread to the point where it can be seen on scans. These patients enter a tense limbo which often ends too quickly with the cancer metastasizing to their bones, lymph nodes or other organs — sometimes causing intense pain. (Belluck, 2/8)

The Associated Press: South Dakota Considers Ban On Teaching About Gender Identity
South Dakota lawmakers will consider banning public school teaching on gender identity in elementary and middle schools, a push that critics say targets transgender students in the same way some states limit the positive portrayal of homosexuality in the classroom. The state would be the first in the nation to block instruction on gender identity or gender expression, said Nathan Smith, public policy director at GLSEN, a national group focused on safe schools for LGBTQ students. (Nord, 2/8)

Los Angeles Times: California Would Bar Organized Tackle Football Before High School Under New Bill
California would become the first state to prohibit minors from playing organized tackle football before high school under a proposal made Thursday by lawmakers concerned about the health risks. Just days after the Super Bowl, Assembly members Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) and Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) said they are introducing the “Safe Youth Football Act,” legislation that will be considered this year by state lawmakers. (McGreevy, 2/9)

The Associated Press: Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes Might Be Good Thing For Miami
Mosquitoes are a year-round downside to living in subtropical Miami, but millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes flying in a suburban neighborhood are being hailed as an innovation that may kill off more bugs that spread Zika and other viruses. Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control and Habitat Management Division is releasing non-biting male mosquitoes infected with naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to mate with wild female mosquitoes. (2/8)

The Associated Press: Ex-Pharmaceutical Firm Worker Headed To Prison In $1M Scheme
A former pharmaceutical company worker is headed to prison for accepting thousands of dollars from a marketing firm in exchange for filling medically unnecessary prescriptions, causing her employer to lose nearly $1 million. Julie Andresen previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and received a 15-month sentence Wednesday. The 40-year-old Haddonfield, New Jersey, resident will forfeit $161,378 and must pay $956,885 in restitution. (2/8)

The Associated Press: Dairy Co-Op Sends Struggling Farmers Mental Health Info
A New England dairy cooperative sent its farmers information on mental health services in response to plummeting dairy prices. Valley News reports Agri-Mark vice president Bob Wellington sent a letter to the cooperative's farmers last week concerning falling milk prices. The letter included information about mental health support and suicide prevention hotlines. (2/8)