First Edition: June 9, 2015

Kaiser Health News: Study: Highest-Charging U.S. Hospitals Are For-Profits, Concentrated In Florida
That doesn’t mean all or even most patients end up paying those charges. Private insurers are able to negotiate the sticker price down significantly. Patients paying out of pocket can often negotiate discounts or get charity care if they are low-income. (Gold, 6/8)

Kaiser Health News: What Health Law? Many Poor People Still Unaware Of Obamacare Options
Even in Kentucky, which championed the 2010 health care law by expanding Medicaid and running its own insurance marketplace, about half of poor people say they have heard little about the Affordable Care Act, according to a Harvard University study published Monday in Health Affairs. (Galewitz, 6/8)

Kaiser Health News: Insurer Uses Patients’ Personal Data To Predict Who Will Get Sick
And this point in patients’ recovery — when they’ve been discharged and have to sink or swim on their own — is the stage that everyone in the health system is paying special attention to right now. For too long, too many people like John Iovine would take a dive at this stage and end up back in the hospital again. The industry calls these returns to the hospital preventable readmissions, and they are a huge drain on finances, costing Medicare alone $15 billion annually. That’s why Medicare launched an initiative a few years ago that penalizes hospitals that see too many patients readmitted too soon. And in turn, that spurred many hospitals to pay more attention to the problem. (Bookman, 6/8)

Kaiser Health News: Pa., Del. Move To Maintain Health Insurance Subsidy Access
The online marketplace is a central part of the Affordable Care Act. It’s where 27-year-old Kathryn Ryan, a restaurant server in Philadelphia, immediately turned for health insurance coverage. "I was excited because if it weren’t for Obamacare, I wouldn’t be insured at all. I wouldn’t have the ability to go to the doctor," she says. (Gordon, 6/9)

The New York Times: Obama Is Optimistic Justices Will Let Health Care Law Stand
A decision by the Supreme Court to strike down health care subsidies in federally run marketplaces would be a “contorted reading” of the Affordable Care Act that would disrupt coverage for millions of people, President Obama said on Monday. But at a news conference at the end of a two-day trip to Germany, he expressed optimism that the justices, who are set to announce a decision on a challenge to the subsidies this month, will let his signature domestic achievement stand. (Shear, 6/8)

The New York Times: Obama To State His Case For Health Law Before Justices Weigh In
President Obama will deliver a speech on Tuesday extolling his health care law as a moral and practical victory that was decades in the making. White House officials said that the speech’s timing was unrelated to the ruling, and that Mr. Obama was not seeking to sway the justices in a case that they probably decided shortly after it was argued in March. But the White House is clearly stating its case for the law before what could be a challenging period if the court invalidates subsidies for millions of people who signed up for coverage through HealthCare.gov. The justices will issue a ruling by the end of the month. If they strike down the subsidies, millions of people could lose their health insurance, and rates for millions more could rise if the insurance markets collapse in the more than 30 states that use the federal insurance exchange. (Shear, 6/9)

The Wall Street Journal: Obama Confident Supreme Court Will Uphold Health-Insurance Subsidies
Speaking Monday at a news conference in Germany, at the Group of Seven summit, Mr. Obama said the case, which the Supreme Court is expected to decide near the end of the month “should be an easy case. Frankly, it probably shouldn’t even have been taken up.” Plaintiffs in the case, King v. Burwell, argue that four words in the health law mean subsidies under the 2010 Affordable Care Act can go only to residents of the dozen states that established their own health-insurance exchanges, rather than the rest of the country, which relies on the federal government HealthCare.gov website. (Tau, 6/8)

Los Angeles Times: If Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare, Few States Are Ready For The Fallout
Millions of Americans could soon lose health insurance when the Supreme Court decides the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act this month, but states have made few concrete plans to deal with the potential fallout, and they may get little help from Washington, President Obama warned Monday. “If somebody does something that doesn’t make any sense, then, it's hard … to fix,” the president said, suggesting his administration can’t do much if the justices side with the health law’s Republican critics. (Levey, 6/8)

Politico: Obama: Supreme Court Shouldn't Have Heard Obamacare Challenge
Obama repeated the administration’s contention that there’s no contingency plan or fix to keep insurance markets from going into a tailspin, predicting that the justices would decide in his favor. And in any case, he added, Congress could fix the ambiguous phrasing of the health law “with a one-sentence provision.” Senate Republicans quickly shot down that possibility. “Let’s be clear: if the Supreme Court rules against the administration, Congress will not pass a so-called ‘one-sentence’ fake fix,” said Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the Senate’s No. 3 Republican. (Wheaton, 6/8)

The Associated Press: Obama: Court Shouldn't Have Considered Health Law Challenge
With a crucial legal decision looming, President Barack Obama said Monday the Supreme Court should not even have considered the latest challenge to his signature health care law but he voiced confidence the justices "will play it straight" — and leave the law intact. ... Obama says it has been well-documented that Congress never intended to exclude people who went through the federal exchange. "You interpret a statute based on what the intent and meaning and the overall structure of the statute provides for," said Obama, a lawyer who once taught constitutional law. (Kuhnhenn and Pickler, 6/8)

The Associated Press: Obama: Congress Can Fix Health Law If Court Rules Against It
President Barack Obama says he has no alternate plan if the Supreme Court invalidates a key benefit of his health care law and he places the burden on the Republican-controlled Congress to fix the law if the high court wipes out insurance for millions of Americans. Voicing confidence he will prevail before the court. (Kuhnhenn, 6/9)

Los Angeles Times: Important Cases Pending Before The Supreme Court And The Decisions So Far
The Supreme Court is heading into the final month of its annual term. In a potentially historic ruling, the court will decide whether same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, culminating a two-decade legal and political fight for marriage equality. Another much-anticipated decision will be whether the Obama administration may continue to subsidize health insurance for low- and middle-income people who buy coverage in the 36 states that failed to establish an official insurance exchange of their own and instead use a federally run version. (Savage, 6/8)

USA Today: Obama's Day: Defending The Health Care Law
Obama will attend the Catholic Hospital Association Conference to "discuss what health care reform has meant to millions of Americans," says the White House schedule. That includes "improved and affordable coverage options for individuals," as well as "new rights and protections for all consumers, rising quality of care, and the transformative impact on the economy as a whole," the White House says. (Jackson, 6/9)

The Washington Post: 50 Hospitals Charge Uninsured More Than 10 Times Cost Of Care, Study Finds
Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday. All but one of the these facilities is owned by for-profit entities, and by far the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. (Sun, 6/8)

The Associated Press: Study: Some For-Profit Hospitals Charging 10x Medicare Rates
U.S. hospitals charged on average more than three times the Medicare-allowable costs, according to a study in the June issue of the journal Health Affairs. The study uses 2012 Medicare data to examine hospitals that charge on average more than 10 times their costs. The study comes amid a national push to increase transparency in hopes of curbing rising health costs. (Kennedy, 6/8)

The Wall Street Journal: Hospitals Discharge Patients To Maximize Medicare Payments, Study Finds
The new study, which focuses on patients who were on ventilators, echoes findings in an analysis by The Wall Street Journal that broadly examined long-term-care hospital claims paid by Medicare and found the same pattern across all types of patients. In the new study, the researchers said their findings “confirm that…payment policy created a strong financial incentive for long-term-care hospitals to time patient discharges to maximize Medicare reimbursement.” (Wilde Mathews and Weaver, 6/8)

The Wall Street Journal's CFO Journal: Going Public With A Quiet Period
Shares of Humana Inc. rallied on Monday, as the health insurer took the rare step of making a securities filing to announce it is entering a so-called “quiet period.” The Louisville, Ky. company, which WSJ reported last month is exploring a possible sale, said in an 8-K filing Monday that it would go dark for almost two months, until it reports earnings on July 29. (Chasan, 6/8)

The Associated Press: Shares Of Humana Rally On Silence And A Withdrawal
Humana has pulled out of a major health care conference and said it will not comment on rumors of a merger, actions that will likely fuel Wall Street speculation that the insurer is part of a developing deal. Shares of the Medicare Advantage coverage provider, which hit an all-time high late last month, rose Monday while broader indexes slipped. (Murphy, 6/8)

The Wall Street Journal: Health Diagnostic Laboratory Files For Bankruptcy
A cardiac biomarker laboratory that went from startup to industry giant in a few short years by paying doctors for blood samples has filed for bankruptcy protection. The filing by Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc. comes two months after the company reached an agreement with the Justice Department to settle a civil investigation into whether its payments to doctors amounted to kickbacks to induce them to order its tests. Under the pact, HDL agreed to pay nearly $50 million but denied wrongdoing. (Carreyrou and Stech, 6/8)

The Wall Street Journal's Pharmalot: New Breakthrough Drugs Will Cost The U.S. Government How Much Money?
As debate intensifies over the prices for prescription medicines, a new study suggests that 10 so-called breakthrough drugs – including some that have not yet been approved by the FDA – will cost the U.S. government nearly $50 billion over the next decade. Specifically, Medicare would absorb the largest expense at $31.3 billion, followed by an estimated $15.8 billion in Medicaid spending and another $2.1 billion in spending as a result of subsidies provided through health exchange plans created under the Affordable Care Act. (Silverman, 6/8)

The Washington Post: Could These New Cholesterol Drugs Save Many Americans From Heart Attacks?
A federal advisory committee this week will decide whether to recommend approval of the first in a new class of drugs many experts believe could significantly cut the risk of strokes and heart attacks, a leading cause of death for Americans. The highly-anticipated new drugs have been shown in clinical trials to sharply reduce levels of bad, or LDL cholesterol, representing the first major advance in the area since widely used statin drugs hit the market in the late 1980s. (Dennis and Bernstein, 6/8)

NPR: Online Health Searches Aren't Always Confidential
In the privacy of a doctor's office, a patient can ask any question and have it be covered under doctor-patient confidentiality. But what happens when patients want to search possible symptoms of a disease or ailment online? It's common to search for treatments for a migraine or stomach pain on WebMD, or a flu strain on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. But there's no way to know who else may be privy to that search information. So where does that data go when a patient presses enter? (6/8)

The Associated Press: State Budget Gaps Force Longer Sessions In Some Legislatures
With budget deadlines looming for nearly all states, disagreements over closing deficits or expanding Medicaid are forcing several legislatures to extend their sessions. The number of states in which lawmakers and governors are at odds over budget problems pales in comparison to those dealing with red ink during the Great Recession. But it serves as a cautionary note during a year in which the national economy is at its healthiest since the recovery began. (Cassidy, 6/8)

Los Angeles Times: Blue Shield's Proposed Acquisition Of Care1st Faces Tough Scrutiny
A top California regulator vowed a "deep dive" into a $1.2-billion acquisition proposed by Blue Shield of California amid criticism that the nonprofit insurer is shortchanging the public. Shelley Rouillard, director of the state Department of Managed Health Care, signaled tough scrutiny ahead for Blue Shield's proposed purchase of Medicaid insurer Care1st Health Plan at a hearing she held Monday at the request of several consumer groups. (Terhune, 6/8)

The Associated Press: Kaiser Permanente, Workers Reach Tentative Contract Plan
Kaiser Permanente and unions representing 105,000 health care workers across the United States have reached a tentative labor agreement. A joint statement released Monday by Kaiser Permanente and the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions praised the three-year contract, which would cover registered nurses, pharmacists, and maintenance and service workers. They say the pact includes 2 percent to 4 percent wage increases each year depending on the region. (6/8)