Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: At HHS, 'Waste Scores A Victory'; Home Care Costs; Misreading The Opioid Crisis
The Washington Post: Tom Price Decides He Doesn’t Want Medicare To Save Money
The coming crisis is as predictable as it is worrying. Nearly a fifth of every dollar spent in this country is spent on health care. Without reform, that number will only rise as the baby boomers retire. Younger generations will suffer, as money is taken from building roads and educating children to paying for Medicare to cover boomers’ health costs. ... Yet waste scored a victory when Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price decided to stop or scale back “bundled payment” experiments the Obama administration had begun. (9/12)
The Wall Street Journal: Why Home Care Costs Too Much
As baby boomers age into long-term care facilities, Medicaid costs will go through the roof. Americans already spend—counting both public and private money—more than $310 billion a year on long-term support services, excluding medical care, for the elderly and the disabled. Medicaid accounts for about 50% of that, according to a 2015 report from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Other public programs cover an additional 20%. ... There’s an urgent need to find ways of providing good long-term care at a lower cost. One fix would be to deregulate important aspects of home care. (Paul Osterman, 9/12)
The Wall Street Journal: The Way We Pay Doctors Is Hurting Health Care
For several decades, specialists in the U.S. have been paid considerably more than primary-care physicians. On average, orthopedic surgeons, cardiologists, radiologists and plastic surgeons make about twice as much as internists, pediatricians and family medicine doctors. True, most specialists train for a longer period of time than primary-care providers, but the degree of divergence in compensation has little to do with market forces or input costs. The difference has consistently been tied to how we pay for care with our emphasis on volume, procedures and technology, rather than prevention, care coordination, evaluation expertise and outcomes. (Howard Forman, 9/12)
Los Angeles Times: The Great Medi-Cal Paper Waste
Remember the telephone book? That giant, multi-thousand-page behemoth that used to land on your doorstep once a year? Well, neither do we, barely. The heyday of the phone book is long gone, and yet communications with friends and businesses is easier than it’s ever been before. Can it be that California officials haven’t noticed that? A new federal rule that took effect in July allows health insurance plans to stop automatically printing and mailing lengthy Medi-Cal provider directories, some of which are the size of phone books, to all new enrollees and make the information available digitally. Anyone without online access or who preferred having a hard copy could still request one. (9/12)
The Washington Post: Poor, Middle Class Saw Solid Gains Last Year, But We’ll Need Better Policy To Keep It Going
Poverty fell, middle-class incomes rose, and the share of Americans without health coverage ticked down to a historical low last year, according to data released Tuesday morning by the Census Bureau. This trifecta of gains for poor and middle-income households, as well as the uninsured, shows that the seven-year expansion, along with the Affordable Care Act, has continued to lift the living standards of many American households. However, last year’s gains were even stronger for those at the top of the income scale, suggesting that the inequality of economic outcomes continues to grow in America. (Jared Bernstein, 9/12)
The Washington Post: The Media Gets The Opioid Crisis Wrong. Here Is The Truth.
Lawmakers and the media have devoted much of their attention recently to deaths from opioid overdoses, as well as to the broader “deaths of despair” that include suicides and deaths from alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis. But despite the intense focus on the topic, misinformation about the epidemic runs rampant. By conventional wisdom, tackling this crisis would require extending Medicaid and improving how it functions, cracking down on prescription painkillers and getting more health-care resources into rural communities. (Anne Case and Angus Deaton, 9/12)
San Antonio Press-Express: ‘Bad Paper’ Denying Vets Needed Services
Like [Mike] Gerardo, thousands are discharged from the military though the behaviors that got them this attention are service connected. Suffering from PTSD, for instance, often means self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. These service members are deemed problems and are discharged without being provided the services other “wounded” vets are accorded. (9/12)
WBUR: How To Talk To Your College-Age Kids About Depression And Suicide
School’s back in session, and parents ushering kids to college for the first time will undoubtedly deliver some emotional nuggets of advice. But they should also have a potentially life-saving talk with their kids in the first semester of college to avert a possible tragedy — suicide. (Nancy Rappaport, 9/13)
The New York Times: The Nazis’ First Victims Were The Disabled
I sit facing the young German neurologist, across a small table in a theater in Hamburg, Germany. I’m here giving one-on-one talks called “The Unenhanced: What Has Happened to Those Deemed ‘Unfit’,” about my research on Aktion T4, the Nazi “euthanasia” program to exterminate the disabled. “I’m afraid of what you’re going to tell me,” the neurologist says. (Kenny Fries, 9/13)
