Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: When It Comes To Mental Health Coverage, Insurers Count On The Fact Most People Won't Challenge Denials Of Care
USA Today: Insurers Discriminate Against Mental Illness Though Parity Is The Law
You see, no one expects to develop a mental illness or substance use disorder. And no one plans for the fact that one of these conditions — which, by law, are supposed to be covered by insurance to the same extent as physical conditions — could leave their family financially crippled due to lack of insurance coverage, requiring savings accounts to be drained, college funds to be depleted, second mortgages to be taken out, and retirement plans to be sapped, all after paying into an insurance plan diligently for years. This happens to other people, right? (Patrick J. Kennedy, 10/3)
The Hill: US Insurance Regulation Is Unconstitutional
Insurance regulation in the United States differs markedly from other types of financial services regulation. While banks and securities firms must comply with extensive federal regulations, insurers are regulated primarily by the states. In practice, however, the most important and powerful entity in insurance regulation is not a state at all. In fact, it isn't even a government entity. It is, instead, a private, nonprofit corporation known as the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). (Daniel Schwarcz and R.J. Lehmann, 10/2)
Los Angeles Times: Pragmatic And Focused On Consumers, Steve Poizner Is The Right Choice For Insurance Commissioner
Lots of state elected officials run for higher office, and most of them lose. Steve Poizner is one example; he served one term as the state insurance commissioner before running for governor in 2010, getting trounced by Meg Whitman in the Republican primary. But now Poizner is back, looking for another shot — not at the governor’s office, but at his old job, insurance commissioner. And in a twist, Poizner has severed his ties with the GOP and is running as an independent. Poizner says his motive isn’t to create a new party in the gaps between the Republican and Democratic machines; it’s to show would-be public servants who are turned off by the political climate in this state that there is a nonpartisan path to office. (10/3)
Stat: Precision Medicine Needs A Business Mindset In Order To Flourish
Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, has the potential to transform how we treat — or even cure — cancer and a host of other diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. The precision approach to patient care takes into account an individual’s genes, environments, and lifestyle to deliver the right treatment at the right time. Once seen as a futuristic approach, creating personalized, FDA-approved therapies is now a reality. (Richard G. Hamermesh and Kathy E. Giusti, 10/4)
The Washington Post: Industry Has Too Much Influence In Medicine. It’s Time To End That.
José Baselga, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s chief medical officer, resigned a few weeks ago following his failure to disclose his financial connections with pharmaceutical and device companies. An exposé a week later revealed that the hospital itself may have a conflict of interest in its relations with a new start-up company. These episodes reveal how common alliances with industry are in academic medicine and how they can distort clinical decision-making. But disclosures alone cannot cure the most fundamental disorder created by these relationships. Medical-industrial bonds distort medical care itself. Such bonds have created many useful products, including diagnostic X-ray. But they have defined the choice of interventions used by entire specialties, devaluing more scientifically informed measures of clinical effectiveness and patient harm. (Barbara Bridgman Perkins, 10/4)
Stat: More Research On ‘Dying Healthy’ Will Also Help Us Live Healthier
Helping people live longer has been a central goal of medicine for decades. The quest to extend life raises an interesting question: Should we keep investing in research aimed at adding even more years to the already impressive gains in the average life expectancy that occurred during the 20th century? We can only go so far. There’s likely an unalterable biological limit to the human life span, somewhere around 115 years (though there are, of course, occasional outliers). Virtually all humans die before reaching that age, most of them before they turn 90. (George J. Annas and Sandro Galea, 10/3)
The Washington Post: Doctors Are Surprisingly Bad At Reading Lab Results. It’s Putting Us All At Risk.
The man was 66 when he came to the hospital with a serious skin infection. He had a fever and low blood pressure, as well as a headache. His doctors gave him a brain scan just to be safe. They found a very small bulge in one of his cranial arteries, which probably had nothing to do with his headache or the infection. Nevertheless, doctors ordered an angiogram to get images of brain blood vessels. This test, in which doctors insert a plastic tube into a patient’s arteries and inject dye, found no evidence of any blood vessel problems. But the dye injection caused multiple strokes, leading to permanent issues with the man’s speech and memory. (Daniel Morgan, 10/5)
Sacramento Bee: CA Election: Prop. 4 Is An Unnecessary Windfall For Hospitals
I know from personal experience the importance of children’s hospitals. Six decades ago, I had heart surgery at the best one in Illinois. It saved me from an early death. Yet I’m voting “no” on Proposition 4, the Nov. 6 measure to authorize $1.5 billion in bonds to support construction at the 11 officially designated children’s hospitals ion California – eight non-profit private hospitals and five University of California medical centers. (Elizabeth Wall Ralston, 10/3)
The Hill: Ricin Attacks Will Continue
The news that three envelopes intended for President Trump, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson triggered alarms in Washington yesterday. The envelopes — apparently sent by a former Navy sailor — contained the toxic substance ricin, understandably causing concern. This is especially true as this is the 17-year anniversary of the anthrax attacks, which also exploited the postal system to cause harm. Though extreme concern is justified, it is important to remember that ricin — despite its lethality — is more of an assassin’s weapon than a weapon of mass destruction. (Dr. Amesh Adalja, 10/3)
Bloomberg: 2018 Chemistry Nobel: Evolution Beats Design
In the early 1990s, while creationists started touting “intelligent design theory” under the premise that evolution alone couldn’t produce the complexity of living things, a few chemists were moving in the opposite direction. They realized that designers, no matter how intelligent, were limited in producing new molecules, and thus proposed that harnessing the power of evolution might unleash vast innovation. Wonder which group was headed in the right direction? Hint: Their work led to the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry. (Faye Flam, 10/4)
Los Angeles Times: Mentally Ill Homeless People Won't Get Well On The Sidewalks. They Need Housing. Yes On Prop 2
Of the roughly 134,000 homeless people on the streets of California, about a third are seriously mentally ill. Their illnesses cannot be successfully treated on sidewalks. They must get housing first. That’s why the state of California wisely enacted Assembly Bill 1816 two years ago to raise $2 billion to build or preserve permanent supportive housing for homeless people suffering from mental illness. (10/2)
The New York Times: Are You A Visual Or An Auditory Learner? It Doesn’t Matter
You must read this article to understand it, but many people feel reading is not how they learn best. They would rather listen to an explanation or view a diagram. Researchers have formalized those intuitions into theories of learning styles. These theories are influential enough that many states (including New York) require future teachers to know them and to know how they might be used in the classroom. But there’s no good scientific evidence that learning styles actually exist. (Daniel T. Willingham, 10/4)
