Viewpoints: Health Insurers Find Ways To Limit Patient Choice; The VA Empowers Nurses

USA Today: Health Insurers Find Back Door To Limit Choice
Lost in the noise of political posturing over health care, there’s one widely accepted principle: the importance of the doctor-patient relationship in medical decision-making. Yet we’ve all heard stories where insurance companies won’t fully cover a drug that both the doctor and patient believe is the right medical choice. Why not? It’s pretty simple: the insurance companies don’t want to pay. As cutting edge drugs come to market, insurance companies are scrambling to find ways to justify not paying for them. (Stier, 5/26)

Bloomberg View: The VA Is Smart To Give Nurses More Power
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hasn’t exactly been a model of efficient health care in recent years. But its new proposal to expand the role of nurses is a good idea that should be widely copied. The VA wants to let its most highly educated nurses -- so-called advanced-practice registered nurses, who have master’s degrees or higher in medicine -- treat patients without a doctor’s supervision. That would authorize nurse practitioners, anesthetists, specialists and midwives to do the jobs they’re trained for: diagnosing problems, interpreting test results and prescribing treatments. (5/26)

Miami Herald: Medicare, Cover Seniors’ Stem-Cell Transplants
In the mid-1980s, Congress established a national marrow registry to help individuals with blood cancers — like leukemia, myelodysplastic syndromes, multiple myeloma and lymphoma — and other diseases find a matching bone marrow or umbilical-cord blood donor to help cure their disease. (Krishna Komanduri, 5/26)

The New York Times: Obama’s Pointless Cancer ‘Moonshot’
Oslo — EVER since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, American politicians have promised “moonshots” — huge programs, stocked with technology and experts, to solve presumably intractable problems. A common target is cancer: Earlier this year President Obama announced the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a $1 billion program led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Jarle Breivik, 5/27)

Huffington Post: Trump On Immigrants And Health Care Costs: Just Plain Wrong
Throughout the primary season, leading Republican presidential candidates vied over who could bash immigrants the hardest. And they were promising more than border walls. Donald Trump is the most extreme immigrant-blamer; according to his website, “Providing healthcare to illegal immigrants costs us some $11 billion annually. If we were to simply enforce the current immigration laws and restrict the unbridled granting of visas to this country, we could relieve healthcare cost pressures on state and local governments.” As with many of Trump’s claims, this one is wrong. But unlike some of his other falsehoods, the media has left this one unchallenged. Trump’s $11 billion figure comes from an obviously biased study that’s based on outlandish assumptions. (Leah Zallman and Steffie Woolhandler, 5/26)

The Wall Street Journal: Money Can’t Cure What Ails Veterans Affairs
"Total VA funding has grown by nearly 86 percent from 2009,” says the headline of a document put out by the Department of Veterans Affairs this year in support of the agency’s fiscal year 2017 budget request for $182.3 billion. Politicians and government officials argue that increases in VA funding demonstrate a willingness to support veterans and their legitimate needs. Many of the increases are justified because of the higher costs of providing health care and the growing numbers of veterans receiving compensation and pension benefits. Yet our concern should not be about the amount of money the VA spends. We should focus instead on the impact that money has on the lives of veterans. (Anthony Principi, 5/26)

Huffington Post: The Medical Community Must Come To The Defense Of Purvi Patel
When you come to the hospital for medical help, you don’t expect to leave in handcuffs. But that’s exactly what happened to Purvi Patel when she came to an Indiana emergency room seeking assistance in July 2013. Ms. Patel arrived at the emergency room with bleeding following a recent pregnancy, a situation many women may experience. She stated she had been pregnant, and had already disposed of the fetal remains. Ms. Patel’s medical providers contacted law enforcement officers. She was then arrested on the charge of “neglect of a dependent.” A month later, prosecution added the charge of feticide as well. (Pooja Mehta, 5/26)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The Push For Paid Family And Medical Leave In Missouri
Inherent in American culture is a prevalent competitive nature — the desire as citizens, and as a country, to be the best at everything. So when the United States sits alongside Oman and Papua New Guinea as one of the few countries in the world that do not offer paid maternity leave, it should raise concern. Countries such as the United Kingdom offer 40 weeks of paid maternity leave; and even Iran, widely criticized for its poor stance on human rights, provides 12 weeks’ paid leave. Despite this huge disparity in the treatment of American working families compared with nearly every other country in the world, the road to providing new parents in the United States the benefit of staying home after the addition of a child has remained stalled, until now. An increasing number of companies are seeing that the implementation of paid family leave benefits not only new parents and their children, but also the economy as a whole. (Allison Simmonds and Katherine Landfried, 5/27)

The Columbus Dispatch: Nationwide Children's Bolsters Cancer Fight
Nationwide Children’s Hospital has managed to land two top cancer researchers, a further indicator of its status as one of the nation’s leading pediatric centers. Richard Wilson and Elaine Mardis, director and co-director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, should arrive in September. Their recruitment was aided by a new $10 million gift from the Nationwide Foundation to advance the hospital’s research. (5/27)

The Oregonian: The Biased Call For A Cover Oregon Investigation
If anyone doubted that partisan politics gone wild douses even the faintest hope of fairness, not to mention competence in government, go no further than Wednesday's release of a congressional document calling for a top-level probe into the collapse of Cover Oregon. Few can doubt the insurance exchange disaster ranks as one of Oregon's worst moments: More than $300 million was spent on something that is, now, nothing. And blame for it apparently goes everywhere — from vendor Oracle to the governor's office to frenzied state bureaucrats acting above their pay grade. (5/26)

Modern Healthcare: The IT Holy Grail Remains Out Of Policymakers' Hands
In the last full year of the Obama administration, federal policymakers remain so focused on interoperability that sessions on the topic will dominate an annual gathering hosted by the nation's top information technology office. More than a quarter of the nearly 40 sessions at next week's seventh annual Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT conference will deal with interoperability. (Joseph Conn, 5/26)

The Dallas Morning News: Use Of Common Anti-Anxiety Medication Could Snowball Into An Epidemic
When patients come not with a list of symptoms, but a shopping list for pills, one may assume something is not right. Some of my patients lash out at me because of not getting BZDs, while a few get admitted to the inpatient psychiatry unit for a detox, ironically, with another BZD. Some get sober, while others find their way back to the unit. (Pravesh Sharma, 5/26)

The Columbus Dispatch: Vital Message Might Save Lives
It’s not possible to overstate just how courageous and important it was for University of Cincinnati president Santa Ono to reveal his past struggles at a fundraiser on Saturday aimed at helping teens who suffer from mental illness. Ono told a crowd of about 200 people that he had suffered with depression. At 14, he locked himself in his bedroom and tried to overdose on cold medicine and beer. In his late 20s, he again tried to commit suicide. (5/27)

The New York Times' Taking Note: A Welcome End to New York’s ‘Tampon Tax’
Opponents of the “tampon tax” just scored a win in New York. Thanks to a bill passed by the State Legislature on Wednesday, tampons and other menstrual hygiene products will soon be exempt from the state’s 4 percent sales tax, as well as local taxes. Supporters of the bill pointed out that tampons and pads are just as necessary as condoms and medical supplies like bandages, which were already tax exempt. “Women have been paying this sexist tax on their bodies for far too long,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, the bill’s sponsor, in a statement. (Anna North, 5/26)