Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Trump Makes Valid Points About Wait Times Increasing Under 'Medicare For All'; Failed Regulation Delays New Treatments For Cancer Patients
Bloomberg: Sanders-Warren Medicare For All? Be Ready To Wait In Line
“Medicare for All” continues to be a top issue in the Democratic presidential campaign, and President Donald Trump isn’t waiting to see who wins to start attacking it. So far, the Democratic debate has centered on how a huge expansion of Medicare would affect private health insurance and middle-class taxes. But Trump is raising another big issue: wait times. “Medicare-for-All would force patients to face massive wait times for treatments and destroy access to quality care,” declares the White House website.Like everything else in the health-care debate, this is a disputed point. Thomas Waldrop, a health-care analyst with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group, has responded to Trump: “Wait time concerns amount to little more than fearmongering by those who oppose expansion of coverage.” (Ramesh Ponnuru, 10/30)
The Wall Street Journal: Regulators Wonder If Cancer Patients ‘Need’ New Treatments
Breakthroughs against cancer are devilishly hard to come by, as millions of Americans learn firsthand each year. Yet regulators in one state want to use an outdated law to bar desperate cancer patients from the latest hard-won treatment. The new therapy is called CAR-T, short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cells. A doctor removes the patient’s own T-cells—a type of immune-system cell—sends them off to a laboratory to be converted into cancer-fighting cells, and reinjects them into the patient. (Matthew Mitchell and Anna Parsons, 10/30)
Stat: The Cancer In Cancer Medicine: Pharma Money Paid To Doctors
Americans are rightly furious about the high and unsustainable price of cancer drugs, which now routinely cost more than $100,000 per year of therapy. Those prices are made worse by the fact that most cancer drugs offer only modest benefits — one study put the median benefit at 2.1 extra months of life — along with the fact that expert physicians frequently recommend these drugs for off-label uses, meaning using a drug for a purpose it was not initially approved for. The House of Representatives, the Senate, presidential candidates, and even the president have floated proposals to tackle drug prices. While all contain good ideas, none address one of the elephants in the room: the experts who tell doctors how to use these medications. (Vinay Prasad, 10/30)
St. Louis Post Dispatch: Tracking Menstrual Cycles To Attack Abortion Rights Merits Investigation
In their relentless quest to build a case against Planned Parenthood and deny Missouri women the right to control their own bodies, state officials have gone full “Handmaid’s Tale,” literally tracking women’s menstrual cycles on a spreadsheet without their knowledge. News of this outrage, casually revealed during a hearing Tuesday, should put to rest any notion that this persecution of the state’s only abortion clinic is actually about concern for women’s health. It’s about using the power of the state to violate women’s medical privacy while promoting the extremist ideological agenda of ruling Republicans. (10/30)
Los Angeles Times: Should A Right To An Abortion Be A Federal Law? Of Course It Should
In the 46 years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, opponents of the ruling have steadfastly refused to accept it, fighting a never-ending battle to chip away at its protections or to overturn it altogether. State legislatures, defiantly and recklessly, have passed hundreds of bills in the last decade alone to limit the access to abortion that the Supreme Court has granted and reaffirmed over the course of three landmark decisions on abortion beginning with Roe in 1973. The latest was the high court’s 2016 decision overturning a Texas law that set unnecessary and unduly burdensome requirements for abortion clinics and for doctors working in them. (10/31)
The Washington Post: The Treatment Of Women In Childbirth Is A Scandal. We Must Change It Together.
Issues such as abortion and the battle over the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh have left American women bitterly divided. But liberal feminists and their potential conservative allies can, and should, unite around a common cause: that of women who are being abused and unnecessarily scarred in childbirth, both emotionally and physically. The fight to overhaul how health-care systems and providers treat women as they become mothers should be the unifying feminist battle of our time. A dramatic illustration of just how bad it can be for laboring women in some countries came last week when the Lancet, a leading medical journal, released a report documenting cruel treatment women experience during childbirth in Asia and Africa. (Bethany Mandel, 10/29)
Stat: Health Information Exchanges Have Evolved. They Now Cultivate Data.
"Data is the new oil,” British data scientist Clive Humby once said. “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.”I thought about that line recently when I met with the chief medical officer of a large health system. “I don’t want more data,” she told me, “we are already drowning in it.” Across the nation, we are making progress in exchanging health data. But if it isn’t refined and turned into insight, it does no one any good. That’s why health information exchanges (HIEs) — platforms that help coordinate care by allowing data sharing among various provider organizations and health plans — are stepping into a new, important role focused on bridging the gap between data overload and a data-driven, learning health care system. (Claudia Williams, 10/31)
Stat: The EMR Has Changed The Doctor-Patient Duet Into A MÉNage-à-Trois
You would have thought that my hospital was preparing for the imminent coming of the messiah. Digital countdown clocks posted around the hospital ticked down the weeks, days, minutes, and seconds till the vaunted day. For months, every medical, logistical, academic, and intrapersonal transaction was beholden to April 1. That the hospital had chosen April Fools’ Day to transition hundreds of thousands of patients and their clinicians to a new electronic medical record (EMR) was either a cosmic oversight or some techie’s idea of wit. (Danielle Ofri, 10/31)
Des Moines Register: Iowa Should Learn From Arkansas; Say No To Medicaid Work Requirements
Every once in a while you get to see what happens when a bad policy idea becomes reality. Look no further than Arkansas, which enacted work requirements for Medicaid recipients. Iowa’s Republican lawmakers and governor should take an especially close look. In 2018, Arkansas embarked on an experiment to become the only state to fully implement Medicaid work requirements. Medicaid, funded by federal and state governments, provides health insurance for low-income Americans and ensures health providers who treat poor patients are compensated. (10/30)
