Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
In Face Of Drug Price Limits, Insulin Makers Step Up Lobbying Spends
Stat: Insulin Giants Boost Their Lobbying Spending Amid Drug Pricing Talks
As lawmakers took aim at high insulin costs, two major insulin manufacturers increased their lobbying spending last year, according to new federal disclosures. Insulin has become the poster child for dysfunction in the drug pricing debate, and lawmakers are considering enacting insulin-specific policies including allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for all insulin products and capping out-of-pocket monthly costs for patients in Medicare and the private insurance market. (Cohrs, 1/25)
KHN: I Write About America’s Absurd Health Care System. Then I Got Caught Up In It
I got a hurried voicemail from my pharmacist in Wisconsin the day before Thanksgiving letting me know my insurance was refusing to cover my insulin. I had enough of the hormone that keeps me alive to last 17 days. In my 10 years living with Type 1 diabetes, I’ve never really struggled to access insulin. But in my job reporting on the people left behind by our country’s absurdly complex health care system, I’ve written about how insulin’s steep cost leads to deadly rationing and about patients protesting to bring those prices down. (Sable-Smith, 1/25)
In other health care industry news —
Appleton Post-Crescent: ThedaCare, Ascension In Court Over Health Care Worker Employment
Seven health care workers will be able to start their new jobs at Ascension St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton after a judge dismissed a temporary restraining order Monday that was barring them from doing so at the request of their former employer, ThedaCare. Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis ruled that ThedaCare's arguments were not enough to uphold the injunction. McGinnis said he signed the initial restraining order Friday because of the gravity of the situation that ThedaCare laid out in their complaint. Wisconsin statute says the court should give "substantial weight" to any adverse impact on public safety when deciding what to require in the order. (Heim, 1/24)
Modern Healthcare: More States Target Hospitals' Anticompetitive Contracting Policies
More states are trying to limit hospitals' anticompetitive contracting policies through lawsuits or legislation while federal antitrust agencies revamp their regulations. One of the most recent examples is in Connecticut, where Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center sued Hartford HealthCare for allegedly protecting their acute-care monopoly by bullying physicians into anticompetitive contract terms, which inflated prices. It is the latest in a series of lawsuits that look to curb dominant health systems' market power. Saint Francis is seeking financial damages, a permanent injunction preventing Hartford's alleged anticompetitive conduct and a court order to divest physician practices that Hartford has purchased since 2020. (Kacik, 1/24)
Modern Healthcare: UnitedHealthcare, Kaiser Appeal ACA Risk-Corridor Settlement Deal
A group of insurers led by UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan subsidiaries asked a federal judge to slash the $184 million in lawyers fees owed after winning health plans $3.7 billion from two class-actions related to a now-expired Affordable Care Act program. More than 30 insurers wrote to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on January 20, saying that Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan's 10,000 hours on the case did not warrant the $184 million awarded to them, which the 34 health plans described as "the epitome of a windfall." The law firm's collection represents 5% of the total settlement awarded to the hundreds of insurers that sued through the class-actions, which is the maximum amount the law firm can receive from the deal. (Tepper, 1/24)
Stat: Can Open Datasets Help Machine Learning Solve Medical Mysteries?
The medical data housed in patient records are a clinical researcher’s dream: the key, potentially, to better tools to treat disease and screen with precision. They’re also a computer scientist’s nightmare: locked away in hospital systems, subject to restrictive data-sharing agreements, and often too messy to make use of. A new open science project wants to accelerate ethical AI in medicine by doing the hard work of collecting and cleaning that data. Nightingale Open Science launched in December with $6 million in funding, led by Schmidt Futures, the philanthropy of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (It has no affiliation with Google’s controversial health record-mining partnership with Ascension, which went by the code name Project Nightingale). It will freely share de-identified clinical datasets with researchers, linking medical images like X-rays, ECG results, and biopsy slides — 40 terabytes worth, to start — to outcomes from partnered health systems. Hundreds of researchers have signed up for access in its first month. (Palmer, 1/25)
