First Edition: January 10, 2020

Kaiser Health News: Family Doctors In Rural America Tackle Crisis Of Addiction And Pain
Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t fully grasp her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016. “He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalled Gatzke-Plamann. The patient had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann called “a very painful condition.” But a urine screening one week earlier had revealed heroin and morphine in his system as well. He denied any misuse that day. Now he was not only admitting it, but asking for help. (Sable-Smith, 1/10)

Kaiser Health News: High-Deductible Plans Jeopardize Financial Health Of Patients And Rural Hospitals
Kristie Flowers had been sick with the flu for four or five days in July before the 52-year-old registered nurse from Genoa, Colo., acknowledged she needed to go to the ER. At Lincoln Community Hospital, about 10 miles from her home on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, doctors quickly diagnosed her with pneumonia and sepsis. Her right lung had completely filled with fluid, and Flowers needed much more intensive care than the 15-bed hospital could provide. (Hawryluk, 1/10)

Kaiser Health News: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: Democrats Roll Dice On SCOTUS And The ACA
Democratic state attorneys general are asking the Supreme Court to intervene this term in a case that could invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act. In December, a federal appeals court panel ruled that the “individual mandate” provision of the health law is unconstitutional now that Congress has reduced the penalty for not having insurance to zero. But it sent the case back to the lower-court judge to determine how much else of the law can remain in light of that finding. (1/9)

The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren Opens A New Front In Disability Policy
Christine Motokane could get long-term care to help her with daily tasks like cooking. Matthew Cortland could marry his longtime partner. Christin Lucas could stop worrying that her son’s school might put him back in the isolated classrooms that made him suicidal. This is some of what is at stake in a newly prominent debate over disability policy. For months, Democratic presidential candidates have built on one another in this arena, culminating last week with a plan from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts whose scope shocked many advocates. (Astor, 1/10)

The New York Times: After Years Of Wrangling, Kansas Leaders Reach Deal To Expand Medicaid
Kansas’ Democratic governor said on Thursday that she had reached a deal with Republicans who control the Legislature to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. If lawmakers approve the plan in the coming weeks, it would end years of wrangling over the issue in a state that has endured a series of rural hospital closures. “It’s a lot easier to get to no than it is to get to yes, but this is what governing looks like,” said Jim Denning, the Republican leader in the Kansas Senate, who negotiated the agreement with Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat who took office last year after eight years of Republicans controlling state government. (Smith and Goodnough, 1/9)

The Associated Press: New Kansas Proposal Breaks Impasse On Expanding Medicaid
The plan from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning would give Kelly the straightforward expansion of state health coverage that she has advocated, covering as many as 150,000 additional people. But Denning would get a version of a program that he has proposed for driving down private health insurance premiums to make it less likely people would drop existing private plans for Medicaid. Denning had proposed financing his new program by increasing tobacco taxes, including a $1-per-pack increase in the state's cigarette tax, to $2.29. His compromise with Kelly gives the state a year to develop the premium-reduction program and drops the tax increase, which Kelly and many lawmakers thought wasn't likely to pass anyway. (1/9)

Politico: Trump Makes Misleading Brag About Lower Cancer Deaths
President Donald Trump appeared to claim credit today for a record drop in cancer death rates that occurred the year he took office. Scientists say lower smoking rates, earlier detection and better drugs are responsible for a steady decline in cancer deaths since 1991. The president, who unsuccessfully advocated cutting $4.5 billion from the NIH budget last year, tweeted that U.S. cancer death rates are the lowest in recorded history, adding there is “a lot of good news coming out of this Administration.” (Owermohle, 1/9)

CNN: Trump Takes Credit For Decline In Cancer Deaths. The American Cancer Society Says He's Wrong
Gary M. Reedy, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society and American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, told CNN that the 2017 findings are not connected to the actions of the Trump administration. "The mortality trends reflected in our current report, including the largest drop in overall cancer mortality ever recorded from 2016 to 2017, reflect prevention, early detection, and treatment advances that occurred in prior years," Reedy said in a written statement on Thursday. (Howard and Dale, 1/9)

The New York Times: Vaping Illness Tracker: 2,602 Cases And 57 Deaths
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state agencies have reported 2,602 lung injury cases that required hospitalization and 57 deaths linked to vaping. (Corum, 1/9)

The New York Times: Vaping Kills A 15-Year-Old In Texas
Cases of lung illness and deaths from vaping have tapered off since peaking in September, health officials said on Thursday, but the outbreak also reached a grim new milestone: The youngest death, of a 15-year-old, was reported by Dallas County Health and Human Services. The teenager had “a chronic underlying medical condition,” Texas officials said in a statement on Dec. 31, but they did not identify the condition, the patient’s gender or what products the patient had been vaping. (Grady, 1/9)

Los Angeles Times: Newsom: California Should Sell Its Own Generic Prescription Drugs
California would become the first state to sell its own brand of generic prescription drugs in an effort to drive down rising healthcare costs under a proposal Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to unveil in his new state budget Friday. A broad overview of the ambitious but still conceptual plan provided by Newsom’s office says the state could contract with one or more generic drugmakers to manufacture certain prescriptions under the state’s own label. (Gutierrez, 1/9)

Stat: California Plans To Sell Its Own Generic Drugs To Lower Costs 
Details were not disclosed, although the proposal is expected to be part of a budget proposal to be unveiled on Friday. In a statement, Newsom explained the move by saying “a trip to the doctor’s office, pharmacy or hospital shouldn’t cost a month’s pay. The cost of healthcare is just too damn high, and California is fighting back.” The plan was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.(Silverman, 1/9)

The Associated Press: California Could Be 1st State To Sell Own Prescription Drugs 
His proposal also would create a single market for drug pricing in California, with companies having to bid to sell their medicine at a uniform price. One expert said that piece would have the bigger impact. “Other countries control or negotiate the price of drugs, and if there is one state that could do it, it's California, which is the size of a country,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of health policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation. “A drug company could walk away from Rhode Island. It's much harder to walk away from California." (Beam, 1/9)

The Wall Street Journal: California Looks To Launch Its Own Prescription-Drug Label
Rising generic-drug prices and shortages of some products have driven many states to seek greater control, especially as congressional efforts to make prescription drugs more affordable have stalled. More than three dozen states enacted laws to address prescription-drug pricing in 2019, up from 28 the year before and just 14 in 2017, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy. “States are now leading the way in tackling healthcare costs,” Ronny Gal, a pharmaceutical analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said. Mai-Duc and Hopkins, 1/9)

Los Angeles Times: Q&A: What You Need To Know About Gov. Newsom's Drug Plan For California
In recent years, some generic drugs have experienced huge price increases, sometimes into the thousands of percent. For example, the price of a month’s supply of clomipramine, a common antidepressant, recently jumped from $16 to $348. Newsom’s plan would probably address those increases by introducing competition in drug markets where there are only a few manufacturers. But in general, it is uncommon drugs that have only a few manufacturers, said Joyce, who heads the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. More widely prescribed medicines, such as those that treat high cholesterol and high blood pressure, have multiple producers and already competitive pricing, he said. (Karlamangla, 1/9)

Stat: Bristol-Myers And Sanofi Accuse Hawaii Of Violating Free Speech Rights
In an unusual move, two of the world’s biggest drug makers — Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and Sanofi (SNY) — filed a lawsuit accusing the Hawaii attorney general of violating their free speech rights by insisting they include certain cautionary statements about the Plavix blood thinner in product labeling. At issue is language about the effectiveness of the medication in East Asian and Pacific Islanders, who constitute roughly half of Hawaii’s population. A lawsuit filed by the state in 2014 alleged the drug makers, which once jointly marketed the drug, failed to include data that indicated Plavix would not work for people in those groups. (Silverman, 1/9)

Bloomberg: These Big Drug Flops Show How Healthcare Economics Have Changed
For years, drug companies have enjoyed the freedom to charge high prices for their latest products. But when Sanofi and Amgen Inc. each marketed a powerful new cholesterol-lowering medicine, something surprising happened: High prices hurt sales. Sanofi’s experience has been especially painful. The French company spent more than five years developing Praluent with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. before its launch in 2015. But Praluent never caught on. Now Sanofi is cutting its losses, getting out of the U.S. market for the drug, and halting its heart disease research altogether in favor of more lucrative medicines for cancer and other diseases. (Griffin, 1/9)

The New York Times: Second U.S. Baby To Be Born From A Dead Donor’s Uterus Is Delivered
When Jennifer Gobrecht was 17, doctors told her that she would never carry her own child. But on Thursday, researchers at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia announced that Ms. Gobrecht had delivered a son by cesarean section in November, the second baby in the United States to be born using a transplanted uterus from a deceased donor. “We were beyond lucky,” Ms. Gobrecht said. (Rueb, 1/9)

The Washington Post: Workplace Suicides Have Risen To Record High, With More People Killing Themselves At Work Than Ever Before
America’s climbing suicide rate has become a problem for businesses, too. Buried in a report last month by the Bureau of Labor of Statistics on occupational fatalities was this tragic fact: More people are killing themselves in the workplace than ever before. The number of such suicides for 2018 was 304 — an 11 percent increase from the year before and the highest number since the bureau began tracking the data 26 years ago. (Wan, 1/9)

The New York Times: When The Cobra Bites, You’ll Be Glad Someone Sequenced Its Genome
Scientists have sequenced the genome of one of the deadliest snakes in the world, the Indian cobra, and have taken a big step toward developing new and better treatments for their bites. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that thousands of people are bitten by snakes in the United States every year, few die from snake venom. But worldwide, snakebites lead to more than 400,000 amputations and 100,000 deaths a year. (Bakalar, 1/9)

NPR: Too Many Teen Girls Are Given Pap Tests And Pelvic Exams, Research Finds
An estimated 1.4 million adolescent girls and young women in the U.S. might have received an unnecessary pelvic exam between 2011 and 2017, according to a new study. And an estimated 1.6 million might have received an unnecessary Pap test. The authors of the study, which was published this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, say the overuse of these procedures — which can cause false-positives and anxiety — led to an estimated $123 million annually in needless expenses in 2014 alone. (Vaughn, 1/9)

The New York Times: Body Temperature 2.0: Do We Need To Rethink What’s Normal?
We seem to be getting cooler. Since 1851, when the standard was set at 37 degrees centigrade, or 98.6 Fahrenheit, the average human body temperature has steadily declined. Researchers studied three databases: 23,710 readings obtained between 1862 and 1930 in veterans of the Civil War; 15,301 records in a national health survey from 1971 to 1975; and 150,280 entries in a Stanford University database from 2007 to 2017. The analysis is in eLife. (Bakalar, 1/9)

NPR: U-Haul's Nicotine-Free Hiring Rule Reflects A Trend That Troubles Workers' Advocates
When U-Haul recently announced it will no longer hire people who use nicotine in any form in the 21 states where such hiring policies are legal, the Phoenix-based moving company joined a cadre of companies with nicotine-free hiring policies. U-Haul's announcement is receiving outsize attention because nicotine-free hiring policies are more common at high-profile hospitals such as Cleveland Clinic that are especially protective of their healthy image. (Farmer, 1/9)

The Washington Post: Video Games For Doctors Are A Growing Medtech Trend That Helps Save Lives
Justin Barad never would have guessed that he’d help operate on a gorilla during his residency at the UCLA Medical Center, where he was training to be an orthopedic surgeon. Yet in August 2014, The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens needed specialists to help Jabari, a 400-pound gorilla who was limping and unable to put weight on his leg. The surgery was successful — but it was a challenging endeavor for a team that didn’t normally operate on animals. (Favis, 1/9)

Reuters: Feces-Smeared Fakes: Scientists Use Rubber Hands In OCD Therapy
A new type of therapy using feces and fake rubber hands may be able to help patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) overcome their fears of touching contaminated surfaces, according to new research. "OCD can be an extremely debilitating condition for many people, but the treatments are not always straightforward," said Baland Jalal, a Cambridge University neuroscientist who was part of a team assessing if rubber hands could be a potential new type of exposure therapy. (1/9)

The Associated Press: Health Care Group Pays $2.17M After Releasing Patients' Info
A health care group based in Virginia has agreed to a settlement of almost $2.2 million after hundreds of patients' health information was wrongfully released. Sentara's settlement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was one of the largest the agency sought to collect in 2019, The Virginian-Pilot reported Wednesday. (1/9)

The Associated Press: Judge Won't Compel Health System To Fund Doctor's Defense
A federal judge declined for now to compel a Michigan-based health system to advance legal costs for a doctor's defense against murder charges in the deaths of 25 Ohio hospital patients. U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh in Michigan concluded Wednesday it's in the public interest to deny the preliminary injunction sought by William Husel. (Franko, 1/9)

The Washington Post: This Teacher Was Worried Children Weren’t Getting Bedtime Stories. So She Began Reading Them — On Facebook.
Long after leaving the classroom and returning home, second-grade teacher Keisha Yearby of Chesapeake, Va., switches on a laptop in her spare bedroom to deliver to children a nighttime ritual she cherished as a little girl: a bedtime story. On Tuesdays, the B.M. Williams Primary schoolteacher logs on for a new episode of “Ms. Yearby’s Reading Adventures,” broadcast on Facebook Live, where viewers — often schoolchildren connecting through a parent’s account — can interact with her in real time by posting comments. (Balingit, 1/7)