First Edition: October 27, 2014

Kaiser Health News: Family Doctors Push For A Bigger Piece Of The Health Care Pie
Family medicine doctors are joining forces to win a bigger role in health care – and be paid for it. Eight family-physician-related groups, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, have formed Family Medicine for America’s Health, a coalition to sweeten the public perception of what they do and advance their interests through state and federal policies. (Gillespie, 10/24)

The New York Times: Is The Affordable Care Act Working?
After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows. But it has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash. (10/26)

USA Today: Obama Getting Mixed News On Medicaid Expansions
President Obama is getting some good news and some not-so-good news as his administration tries to persuade Republican governors to sign off on Medicaid expansions. For example, in Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert says he has a deal on a Medicaid compromise. Meanwhile, reports indicate that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence -- a potential Republican presidential candidate -- may nix a Medicaid deal. (Jackson, 10/24)

Politico: Obamacare Foot Soldiers, Armed With Experience
The Obamacare sign-up team knows a lot more about how to actually enroll people in health insurance this time around. They know the uninsured hang out at public libraries in Tennessee but not in Georgia. That firehouses are community gathering places on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. ... The second season of Obamacare enrollment begins Nov. 15. Advocates expect a much smoother start than last year’s debacle. ... But challenges remain. (Villacorta, 10/24)

The New York Times: Insurers’ Consumer Data Isn’t Ready For Enrollees
With health insurance marketplaces about to open for 2015 enrollment, the Obama administration has told insurance companies that it will delay requirements for them to disclose data on the number of people enrolled, the number of claims denied and the costs to consumers for specific services. For months, insurers have been asking the administration if they had to comply with two sections of the Affordable Care Act that require “transparency in coverage.” (Pear, 10/25)

The New York Times: As Insurers Try to Limit Costs, Providers Hit Patients With More Separate Fees
Leo Boudreau of Massachusetts was thrilled to find a psychologist in his insurance network to treat his teenage daughter for emotional stress related to a medical condition. ... But he was surprised when the bill for each visit contained two charges: the approximately $100 he expected to see for the therapist — and a similar fee for the room, which was not covered. ... As insurers ratchet down payments to physicians and hospitals, these providers are pushing back with a host of new charges. ... as insurers and providers fight over revenue in an era of cost control, patients often find themselves caught in the middle, nickel-and-dimed. (Rosenthal, 10/25)

The Washington Post: Quality Of U.S. Hospices Varies, Patients Left In Dark
More than a million times a year, a terminally ill patient in the United States is enrolled in hospice care. Each time, the family confronts a decision that, while critical, often must be made almost blindly: Which hospice to hire? A boom in the industry allows patients to choose from an array of hospice outfits, some of them excellent. More than a thousand new hospices have opened in the United States in the past decade. But the absence of public information about their quality, a void that is unusual even within the health-care industry, leaves consumers at a loss to distinguish the good from the bad. (Whoriskey and Keating, 10/26)

Politico: Despite Hype, House Still Hasn't Sued Obama
House Speaker John Boehner came out swinging hard last June when he announced that his chamber would take President Barack Obama to court. The suit, charging that the president grossly exceeded his constitutional authority by failing to implement portions of the Obamacare law, was billed as an election-season rallying point for aggrieved Republicans. But days before the midterms the House’s legal guns seem to have fallen silent. Lawyers close to the process said they originally expected the legal challenge to be filed in September but now they don’t expect any action before the elections. (Gerstein, 10/24)

Politico: Found: The First Post-Obama Republican
Mitt Romney publicly hailed Susana Martinez as a “model” for the Republican Party. ... The [New Mexico] governor makes no apology for accepting federal health care support under the Affordable Care Act, calling Obamacare a fact of life, at least for now. “It’s the law. It’s the law,” Martinez, 55, says, repeating herself for emphasis. “There’s so many issues – and that may be one of them – but I hope we don’t get hung up on one and forget all of the important issues that impact families every day.” (Burns, 10/24)

The Wall Street Journal: SEC Says House Trading Probe Hindered By Court Delays
Prosecutors gathering evidence into whether congressional staff helped tip Wall Street traders to a change in health-care policy have hit a snag: a sluggish court system. A Securities and Exchange Commission attorney said Friday that delays by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York have “impeded” its investigation. (Ackerman, 10/24)

The Wall Street Journal: White House Pushes Back On State Ebola Quarantines
The White House pushed back against the governors of New York, New Jersey, Illinois and other states that instituted procedures to forcibly quarantine medical workers returning from West Africa, deepening an emotional debate brought on by recent Ebola cases in the U.S. A senior administration official said Sunday that new federal guidelines under development would protect Americans from imported cases of the disease but not interfere with the flow of U.S. health workers to and from West Africa to fight the epidemic there. (McCain Nelson, West and McKay, 10/27)

USA Today: White House Working On New Ebola Guidelines
The White House stopped short of calling on the governors to reverse their quarantine rules, but administration officials have made clear to the governors that they have concerns with unintended consequences of polices not grounded in science, said a senior administration official, who asked not to be identified to discuss the private communications. The new guidelines are expected to be unveiled in the coming days, the official said.The official added that the administration is consulting with the states as they develop the new rules. (Madhani and Jackson, 10/27)

The New York Times: White House Presses States To Reverse Mandatory Ebola Quarantine Orders
The Obama administration has been pushing the governors of New York and New Jersey to reverse their decision ordering all medical workers returning from West Africa who had contact with Ebola patients to be quarantined, an administration official said. But on Sunday both governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, stood by their decision, saying that the federal guidelines did not go far enough. ... Ever since Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, and Mr. Christie, a Republican, announced the plan at a hastily called news conference on Friday evening, top administration officials have been speaking with Mr. Cuomo daily and have also been in touch with Mr. Christie, trying to get them to rescind the order. But in that time, two more states – Illinois and Florida – announced that they were instituting similar policies. (Santora and Shear, 10/26)

Los Angeles Times: Quarantining Health Workers Could Worsen Ebola Epidemic, Officials Say
Top Obama administration officials publicly warned Sunday that mandatory quarantines in the U.S. of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who have traveled to Africa to help Ebola patients risked worsening the epidemic. Mandatory 21-day quarantines, now in place in New York, New Jersey and Illinois, are “a little bit draconian” and could discourage people from helping to fight the disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top Ebola expert at the National Institutes of Health, said in several television interviews Sunday. (Serrano, 10/26)

The Washington Post: New York Revises Controversial Policy On Ebola Quarantines Amid Pressure
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Sunday revised a controversial policy to quarantine returning health-care workers from Ebola-stricken nations, under pressure from the Obama administration and medical experts over the aggressive measures. (Kang, 10/26)

NPR: Controversy Brews Over States' Moves To Quarantine Health Workers
The face of Ebola in the United States may now be Kaci Hickox. After treating Ebola patients in West Africa ... she was detained at the airport and transferred to an isolation tent next to a hospital, where she remains. New York and New Jersey are ordering that all medical workers returning from Ebola-hit nations to be quarantined at home upon their return. But federal officials say the mandate will likely have a chilling effect on the already troubled effort to recruit U.S. health care workers to fight the epidemic. (Aizenman, 10/27)

The New York Times: As Ebola Spread In Dallas, New York Honed Protocol
When Craig Spencer, a young doctor just back from treating patients with Ebola in Guinea, fell ill with the virus in New York on Thursday, the paramedics who went to get him were dressed in protective suits. The carefully planned response was a world apart from the scene that unfolded in a Dallas hospital last month when a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, became the first person to test positive for Ebola in the United States. ... The response also prompted a national reckoning, both by the C.D.C., the federal agency that contributed to the wobbly response in Dallas, and among hospitals nationwide that are now scrambling to prepare, having learned from mistakes in Texas that many say could have happened to any of them. (Tavernise, Hartocollis, LaFraniere and Goodnough, 10/25)

NPR: For Hospitals, Doing More On Ebola May Mean Less Elsewhere
Eighty-one percent of hospitals have started training their staff in caring for an Ebola patient, according to a survey of 1,039 members of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. They're the folks who manage infection control in hospitals. ... But more time spent on Ebola can mean less time to handle day-to-day demands, particularly the Enterovirus D-68 outbreak and the approaching flu season. "We have to drop so many other things to take this on," says Jennie Mayfield, president of APIC. (Bruzek, 10/24)

The New York Times: Abortion Capital Of Bible Belt? Tennessee Vote Tests That Idea
The online video features idyllic snatches of Tennessee daily life: guitar players, old barns, church socials. ... But then there is a strategically placed, and purely fictional, detail: The welcome sign announces Tennessee as “Your Abortion Destination.” The video was designed by abortion opponents here who believe that Tennessee has for too long been a Bible Belt outlier due to a State Supreme Court decision in 2000 that ruled that the state’s constitutional guarantee of a right to privacy includes the right to an abortion. ... Now, anti-abortion forces are trying to change that at the ballot box by passing Amendment 1, which states that nothing in the Tennessee Constitution “secures or protects” a right to abortion. (Fausset, 10/24)

Los Angeles Times: Yes On Proposition 45 Ads Are Going To The Airwaves
With just over a week until election day, backers of Proposition 45, the health insurance rate regulation initiative, are putting their ads on television. Though corporate opponents have used a $55-million campaign war chest to flood the airwaves, Consumer Watchdog, the Santa Monica activist group that put the measure on the ballot, has only $1 million to spend on TV and radio spots. (Lifscher, 10/24)