The Host

Julie Rovner KFF Health News @jrovner Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

Based on the results of the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire, it appears more likely than ever before that the 2024 presidential election will be a rerun of 2020: Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. And health is shaping up to be a key issue.

Trump is vowing — again — to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is even more popular than it was when Republicans failed to muster the congressional votes to kill it in 2017. Biden is doubling down on support for contraception and abortion rights.

And both are expected to highlight efforts to rein in the cost of prescription drugs.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, and Jessie Hellmann of CQ Roll Call.

Panelists

Alice Miranda Ollstein Politico @AliceOllstein Read Alice's stories. Anna Edney Bloomberg @annaedney Read Anna's stories. Jessie Hellmann CQ Roll Call @jessiehellmann Read Jessie's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Trump had a strong showing in the New Hampshire GOP primary. But Biden may be gathering momentum himself from an unexpected source: Drug industry lawsuits challenging his administration’s Medicare price negotiation plan could draw attention to Biden’s efforts to combat rising prescription drug prices, a major pocketbook issue for many voters.
• Biden’s drug pricing efforts also include using the government’s so-called march-in rights on pharmaceuticals, which could allow the government to lower prices on certain drugs — it’s unclear which ones. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is calling on his committee to subpoena the CEOS of two drugmakers in the latest example of lawmakers summoning Big Pharma executives to the Hill to answer for high prices.
• More than a year after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, abortion opponents gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life rally, looking now to continue to advance their priorities under a future conservative presidency.
• One avenue that abortion opponents are eying is the 19th-century Comstock Act, which could not only prohibit the mailing of abortion pills to patients, but also prevent them from being mailed to clinics and medical facilities. Considering the abortion pill is now used in more than half of abortions nationwide, it would amount to a fairly sweeping ban.
• And state legislators continue to push more restrictive abortion laws, targeting care for minors and rape exceptions in particular. The ongoing quest to winnow access to the procedure amid public reservations reflected in polling and ballot initiatives highlights that, for at least some abortion opponents, fetuses are framed as an oppressed minority whose rights should not be subject to a majority vote.

Also this week, Rovner interviews Sarah Somers, legal director of the National Health Law Program, about the potential effects on federal health programs if the Supreme Court overturns a 40-year-old precedent established in the case Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: Health Affairs’ “‘Housing First’ Increased Psychiatric Care Office Visits and Prescriptions While Reducing Emergency Visits,” by Devlin Hanson and Sarah Gillespie.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Stat’s “The White House Has a Pharmacy — And It Was a Mess, a New Investigation Found,” by Brittany Trang.

Anna Edney: The New Yorker’s “What Would It Mean for Scientists to Listen to Patients?” by Rachael Bedard.

Jessie Hellmann: North Carolina Health News’ “Congenital Syphilis — An Ancient Scourge — Claimed the Lives of Eight NC Babies Last Year,” by Jennifer Fernandez.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

Stat’s “Pharma’s Attack on Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Might Benefit Biden,” by John Wilkerson.

click to open the transcript Transcript: Health Enters the Presidential Race

KFF Health News’ ‘What the Health?’Episode Title: Health Enters the Presidential RaceEpisode Number: 331Published: Jan. 25, 2024

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.]

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, Jan. 25, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast, and things might’ve changed by the time you hear this. So here we go. We are joined today via video conference by Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Good morning.

Rovner: Jessie Hellmann of CQ Roll Call.

Jessie Hellmann: Hi there.

Rovner: And Anna Edney of Bloomberg News.

Anna Edney: Hello.

Rovner: Later in this episode we’ll have my interview with Sarah Somers of the National Health Law Program. She’s going to explain what’s at risk for health care if the Supreme Court overturns the Chevron doctrine, and if you don’t know what that is, you will. But first, this week’s news. We’re going to start this week with politics. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Donald Trump won the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, and even though he wasn’t even on the ballot, because Democrats no longer count New Hampshire as first, President [Joe] Biden handily won a write-in campaign.

Since it seems very likely at this point that the November ballot will pit Trump versus Biden once again, I thought we’d look, briefly at least, at both of their health agendas for now. Trump has once again vowed to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act, which not only didn’t go well in 2017, we learned this week that the federal marketplace enrolled a record 21.3 million people for this year. In 2017, that number was 12.2 million. Not to mention there are now a half a dozen more states that have expanded Medicaid to low-income childless adults.

So with so many more millions of Americans getting coverage via Obamacare, even if Trump wants to repeal and replace it, is there any chance Republicans would go along, even if he wins back majorities in the House and the Senate? They have seemed rather unwilling to reopen this box of worms.

Edney: I mean, certainly, I think that currently they’re unwilling. I don’t want to pretend that I know what the next several months will hold until November, but even before they’re willing or not, what would the plan be? We never saw one, and I don’t anticipate there would be any sort of real plan, particularly if it’s the Trump White House itself having to put the plan together to repeal Obamacare.

Rovner: Yes. How many times did he promise that “we’ll have a plan in two weeks” throughout most of his administration? Alice, you were saying?

Ollstein: Yes. I think what we should be thinking about, too, is this can happen not through Congress. There’s a lot of President Trump could do theoretically through the executive branch, not to repeal Obamacare, but to undermine it and make it work worse. They could slash outreach funding, they could let the enhanced tax credit subsidies expire — they’re set to expire next year. That would also be on Congress. But a president who is opposed to it could have a role in that; they could slash call center assistance. They could do a lot. So I think we should be thinking not only about could a bill get through Congress, but also what could happen at all of the federal agencies.

Rovner: And we should point out that we know that he could do some of these things because he did them in his first term.

Ollstein: He did them the first time, and they had an impact. The uninsured rate went up for the first time under Trump’s first term, for the first time since Obamacare went into effect. So it can really make a difference.

Rovner: And then it obviously went down again. But that was partly because Congress added these extra subsidies and even the Republican Congress required people to stay on Medicaid during the pandemic. Well, I know elsewhere, like on abortion, Trump has been all over the place, both since he was in office and then since he left office. And then now, Alice, do we have any idea where he is on this whole very sensitive abortion issue?

Ollstein: He has been doing something very interesting recently, which is he’s sort of running the primary message and the general message at the same time. So we’re used to politicians saying one thing to a primary audience. These are the hard-core conservatives who turn out in primaries and they want to hear abortion is going to be restricted. And then the general audience — look at how all of these states have been voting — they don’t want to hear that. They want to hear a more moderate message and so Trump has been sort of giving both at once. He’s both taking credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices, who overturned Roe v. Wade. He has said that he is pro-life, blah, blah, blah. But he has also criticized the anti-abortion movement for going too far in his view. He criticized Ron DeSantis’ six-week ban for going too far. He has said that any restrictions need to have exemptions for rape and incest, which not everyone in the movement agrees with. A lot of people disagree with that in the anti-abortion movement. And so it has been all over the place.

But his campaign is in close contact with a lot of these groups and the groups are confident that he would do what they want. So I think that you have this interesting tension right now where he is saying multiple mixed messages.

Rovner: Which he always does, and which he seems to somehow get away with. And again, just like with the ACA, we know that all of these things that he could do just from the executive branch about reproductive health, because he did them when he was president the first time. Meanwhile, President Biden, in addition to taking a victory lap on the Affordable Care Act enrollment, is doubling down on abortion and contraception, which is pretty hard because, first, as executive, he doesn’t have a ton of power to expand abortion rights the way Trump would actually have a lot of power to contract them.

And, also, because as we know, Biden is personally uncomfortable with this issue. So Alice, how well is this going to work for the Biden administration?

Ollstein: So what was announced is mostly sort of reiterating what is already the law, saying we’re going to do more to educate people about it and crack down on people who are not following it. So this falls into a few different buckets. Part of it is Obamacare’s contraception mandate. There have been lots of investigations showing that a lot of insurers are denying coverage for contraceptives they should be covering or making patients jump through hoops. And so it’s not reaching the people it should be reaching. And so they’re trying to do more on that front.

And then, on the abortion front, this is mostly in this realm of abortions in medical emergencies. They’re trying to educate patients on “you can file this complaint if you are turned away.” Of course, I’m thinking of somebody experiencing a medical emergency and needing abortion and being turned away, and I don’t think “I’m going to file an EMTALA [Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act] complaint with the federal government and hope that they do something” is maybe the first thing on their mind. But the new executive order also includes education for providers and hospitals on their obligations.

This is also something a Trump administration could completely change. They could come in and say, “Forget that guidance. Here’s our guidance, which is no abortions in these circumstances.” So this is a really sensitive issue, but I think that the Biden campaign has seen how people have been voting over the last two years and feels that this is a really good message for them to do something on.

Rovner: Meanwhile, one issue both Republicans and Democrats are trying to campaign on is bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. Stat News has a story this week suggesting that all the lawsuits against the Medicare drug negotiation program could actually help Biden with voters because it shows he’s going after Big Pharma. Frankly, it could also tell voters that the Biden administration actually did something to challenge Big Pharma. Polls show most people have no idea, but Trump can point to lots of lawsuits over things he tried to do to Big Pharma.

Does one or the other of them have an advantage here, Anna? I mean, I know they’re going in different directions, but when you sort of boil it into campaign-speak, it’s going to sound pretty similar, right?

Edney: I think that that’s true, but one of the differences is, at least currently, what Biden’s done and doing some price negotiation through Medicare so far for 10 drugs under his administration is going forward. And you can name the drugs, name the prices, talk about it a little bit more specifically. What Trump ran up against was the lawsuits not falling in his favor. So he wanted more transparency as far as the drug companies having to say the price of their drugs in TV ads, and that wasn’t able to happen. And also reference pricing, so that the prices would be benchmarked to other countries. And certainly that never went forward either. And Trump really used the going after pharma hard in the last campaign, I would say, in 2016. And it worked in the beginning, and you would see the stock of these companies start going down the second he said pharmaceutical companies are getting away with murder or whatever big comment he was making. But it eventually lost any real effect because there didn’t seem to be plans to do anything drastic.

He talked about potentially doing negotiation, like is happening currently, but then that never came to fruition once he was in office. So I don’t know if that will come across to voters, but certainly the pharma industry doesn’t seem to be as afraid of Trump as what Biden’s doing right now.

Rovner: Jessie, I know Congress is still working on this PBM [pharmacy benefit managers] transparency, big bill. Are we getting any closer to anything? I think members of Congress would also like to run on being able to say they’ve done something about prescription drug prices.

Hellmann: I was just talking to [Sen.] Chuck Grassley [R-Iowa] about this because he is the “OG PBM hater.” And he was like, “Why is nothing happening?” He was just very frustrated. There are several bills that have passed House and Senate committees, and so I think, at this point, it’s just a matter of cobbling them all together, finding ways to pay for things. And since there’s also so many other health care things that people want to get done, it’s a matter of “Do we have enough money to pay for everything? What’s going to save money? What’s going to cost money?”

There’s also these health care transparency measures that Congress is looking at. There’s this site-neutral hospital payments thing that could be a money saver. So I think there’s just a lot going on in trying to figure out how it all fits together. But PBMs, I could definitely see them doing something this year.

Rovner: Sometimes, I mean, often it’s like you can’t get things onto the agenda. In this case, it sounds like there’s lots of things on the agenda, but they’re going to need to pay for all of them and they’re going to fight over the few places where they could presumably get some savings.

Edney: I was going to say, I saw that Grassley and some other senators wrote the Federal Trade Commission because they are due for a report on PBMs they’ve been working on for about a year and a half. And I think that the senators who want to go after PBMs are kind of looking for that sort of backup and that deep dive into the industry to make those statements about cost savings and what this would do for pharmaceutical prices.

Rovner: Well, to ratchet this up one more step, the Biden administration has proposed a framework for when march-in rights might be used. Is this the real deal or a threat to get pharma to back down on complaints about the Medicare price negotiations? Anna, why don’t you explain what march-in rights are?

Edney: March-in rights, which have never been used on a pharmaceutical company, were something that were put into law — I think it was around 1980 with the Bayh-Dole Act — and what it allows the government to do is say we invested a ton of money, either through giving money to university research or in the company itself, to do the very basic science that got us to this breakthrough that then the company took across the finish line to get a drug on the market. But usually, I think the main reason you might use it is because then the company does nothing with it.

Say they bought it up and it could be a competitor to one of their drugs, so they don’t use it. But it seems like it could also be used if the price is prohibitive, that it’s something that’s really needed, but Americans aren’t getting access to it. And so the government would be able to take that patent back and lower the price on the drug. But I haven’t heard a specific drug that they want to use this on. So I don’t know if they’re serious about using the march-in rights.

There is a request for information to find out how people feel about this, how it might affect the industry. The argument being that it could hamper the innovation, but we hear that a lot from the pharmaceutical industry as well. So unclear if that’s a true defense to not using march-in rights.

Rovner: Although march-in rights are a pretty big gun. There’s a reason they’ve never been used. I’ve seen them … lawmakers sometimes trot it out kind of as a cudgel, but I’ve never … the only time I think I saw them come close was after the anthrax scare, right after 9/11, when there was potentially a shortage of the important antibiotic needed for that. There was muttering about this, but then I think the drug company decided on its own to lower the price, which got us over that.

Well, yet another tack is being pursued by Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Health Committee. He’s going to make the committee vote next week on whether to subpoena the CEOs of Johnson &  Johnson and Merck to require them to “provide testimony about why their companies charge substantially higher prices for medicine in the U.S. compared to other countries.” Well, we all know the answer to that. Other countries have price controls and the U.S. does not. So is this a stunt or not? And is he even going to get the rest of the committee to go along with the subpoena?

Edney: This wouldn’t be the first hearing on high drug prices pulling in CEOs. And it’s so opaque that you never get an answer. You never get something … I mean, certainly, they’ll blame PBMs and talk about that, and the finger-pointing will go somewhere else, but you never have some aha insight moment. So when the CEOs are coming in, it does feel a bit more like a show. And Bernie Sanders, the ones he wants to subpoena are from companies that are suing the Biden administration.

So there’s talk about whether that’s sort of a bit of a revenge him for that as well. I don’t know what exactly he would expect to hear from them that would change policy or what legislation they’re trying to work out by having this hearing.

Rovner: For an issue that everybody cares about, high drug prices. It sure has been hard to figure out a way into it for politicians.

Ollstein: We have seen public shaming, even without legislation behind it, can have a difference. I think we’ve seen that on the insulin front. And so I think it’s not completely a fool’s errand here, what Bernie’s trying to do. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the committee goes along with it. There’s been some tensions on the committee. There’s been bipartisan support for some of his efforts, and then others — less on the health front, I think more on the labor front — you’ve had a lot of pushback from the Republican members, and so it’ll be very telling.

Rovner: I was actually in the room when the tobacco industry CEOs came to testify at the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and that was pretty dramatic, but I feel like that was a very different kind of atmosphere than this is. I know everybody’s been trying to repeat that moment for — what is it? — 25, 30 years now. It was in the early 1990s, and I don’t think anybody really successfully has, but they’re going to keep at it.

All right, well, let us turn to abortion. Last Saturday would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the day before was the annual March for Life, the giant annual anti-abortion demonstration that used to be a march to the Supreme Court to urge the justices to overrule Roe. Well, that mission has been accomplished. So now what are their priorities, Alice?

Ollstein: Lots of things. And a lot of the effort right now is going towards laying the groundwork, making plans for a potential second Trump administration or a future conservative president. They see not that much hope on the federal level for their efforts currently, with the current president and Congress, but they are trying to do the prep work for the future. They want a future president to roll back everything Biden has done to expand abortion access. That includes the policies for veterans and military service members. That includes wider access to abortion pills through the mail and dispensing at retail pharmacies, all of that.

So they want to scrap all of that, but they also want to go a lot further and are exploring ways to use a lot of different agencies and rules and bureaucratic methods and funding mechanisms to do this, because they’re not confident in passing a bill through Congress. We’ve seen Congress not able to do that even under one-party rule in either direction. And so they’re really looking at the courts, which are a lot more conservative than they were several years ago.

Rovner: Largely thanks to Trump.

Ollstein: Exactly, exactly. So the courts, the executive branch, and then, of course, more efforts at the state level, which I know we’re going to get into.

Rovner: We are. Before that, though, one of the things that keeps coming up in discussions about the anti-abortion agenda is something called the Comstock Act. We have talked about this before, although it’s been a while, but this is an 1873 law, which is still on the books, although largely unenforced, that banned the mailing of anything that could be used to aid in an abortion, among other things. Could an anti-abortion administration really use Comstock to basically outlaw abortion nationwide?

I mean, even things that are used for surgical abortion tend to come through … it’s not just the mail, it’s the mail or FedEx or UPS, common carrier.

Ollstein: Yes. So this is getting a lot more attention now and it is something anti-abortion groups are absolutely calling for, and people should know that this wouldn’t only prohibit the mailing of abortion pills to individual patients’ homes, which is increasingly happening now. This would prevent it from being mailed to clinics and medical facilities. The mail is the mail. And so because abortion medication is used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, it could be a fairly sweeping ban.

And so the Biden administration put out a memo from the Justice Department saying, “Our interpretation of the Comstock Act is that it does not prohibit the mailing of abortion pills.” The Trump administration or whoever could come in and say, “We disagree. Our interpretation is that it does.” Now, how they would actually enforce it is a big question. Are you going to search everyone’s mail in the country? Are you going to choose a couple of people and make an example out of them?

That’s what happened under the original Comstock Act. Back in the day, they went after a few high-profile abortion rights activists and made an example out of them. I think nailing them down on how it would be enforced is key here. And of course there would be tons of legal challenges and battles no matter what.

Rovner: Absolutely. Well, let us turn to the states. It’s January, which is kind of “unveil your bills” time in state legislatures, and they are piling up. In Tennessee, there’s a bill that would create a Class C felony, calling for up to 15 years in prison, for an adult who “recruits, harbors or transports a pregnant minor out of state for an abortion.” There’s a similar bill in Oklahoma, although violators there would only be subject to five years in prison.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Republican lawmakers who are writing guidelines for how to implement that state’s six-week ban, which is not currently in effect, pending a court ruling, said that the rape exception could only be used if the rape is “prosecutable,” without defining that word. Are these state lawmakers just failing to read the room or do they think they are representing what their voters want?

Edney: I don’t really know. I think clearly there are a lot of right-wing Republicans who are elected to office and feel that they have a higher calling that doesn’t necessarily reflect what their constituents may or may not want, but more is that they know better. And I think that that could be some of this, because certainly the anti-abortion bills or movements have been rejected by voters in places you might not exactly expect it.

Rovner: It feels like we’re getting more and more really “out there” ideas on the anti-abortion side at the same time that we’re getting more and more ballot measures of voters in both parties wanting to protect abortion rights, at least to some extent.

Ollstein: And I think going off what Anna said, I think that anti-abortion leaders, including lawmakers, are being more upfront now, saying that they don’t believe that this should be something that the democratic process has a voice in. The framing they use is that fetuses are an oppressed minority and their rights should not be subject to a majority vote. That’s their framing, and they’re being very upfront saying that these kinds of ballot referendums shouldn’t be allowed, and that states that do allow them should get rid of that. We’ll see if that happens. There are obviously lots of attempts to thwart specific state efforts to put abortion on the ballot. There are lawsuits pending in Nevada and Florida. There are attempts to raise the signature threshold, raise the vote threshold, just make it harder to do overall. But I found it very interesting and a pretty recent development that folks are coming out and saying the quiet part out loud. Saying, “We don’t believe The People should be able to decide this.”

Rovner: Well, obviously not an issue that is going away anytime soon. All right, well that is this week’s news. Now we will play my interview with Sarah Somers, and then we will come back and do our extra credits.

I am pleased to welcome to the podcast Sarah Somers, legal director of the National Health Law Program. She’s going to explain, in English hopefully, what’s at stake in the big case the Supreme Court heard earlier this month about herring fishing. Sarah, welcome to “What the Health?”

Sarah Somers: Thank you for having me, Julie. I’m glad to be here.

Rovner: So this case, and I know it’s actually two cases together, is really about much more than herring fishing, right? It seems to be about government regulation writ large.

Somers: That’s right. The particular issue in the case is about a national marine fisheries regulation that requires herring fishing companies to pay for observers who are on board — not exactly an issue that’s keeping everyone but herring fishermen up at night. And the fishing company challenged the rule, saying that it wasn’t a reasonable interpretation of the statute. But what they also asked the court to do was to overrule a Supreme Court case that requires courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of federal statutes. That’s what’s known as “Chevron deference.”

Rovner: And what is Chevron deference and why is it named after an oil company?

Somers: Why aren’t we talking about oil now? Yes, Chevron deference is the rule that says that courts have to defer to a reasonable agency interpretation of a federal statute. So, under Chevron, there’s supposed to be a two-step process when considering whether, say, a regulation is a reasonable interpretation. They say, “Does the statute speak directly to it?” So in this case, did the statute talk about whether you have to pay for observers on herring boats? It didn’t.

So the next question was, if it doesn’t speak directly to it or if it’s ambiguous or unclear, then the court should defer to a reasonable interpretation of that statute. And what’s reasonable depends on what the court determines are sort of the bounds of the statute, whether the agency had evidence before it that supported it, whether it showed the proper deliberation and expertise.

Rovner: One of the reasons that regulations are sometimes 200 pages long, right?

Somers: Exactly. And sometimes courts do say, “You know what? The statute spoke right to this. We don’t have to go any further. We know what Congress wanted.” Other times they take a step further. And the reason it’s called Chevron is it’s named after a case that was decided 40 years ago in 1984 during the Reagan administration, and it was Chevron Inc. USA v. the Natural Resources Defense Council. That case was about a regulation interpreting the Clean Air Act and about regulating air pollution.

Rovner: So, as you point out, you helped write one of the amicus briefs in the case about what overturning Chevron would mean for health care. It’s not just about herring fishing and Clean Air Act. Can you give us the CliffsNotes version of what it would mean for health care?

Somers: One of the purposes of our amicus brief was just to give another angle on this, because we were talking a lot about regulations in the context of air pollution, clean water, and the environment, but it touches so many other things, and this is just one aspect of it. So this brief, which we authored along with the American Cancer Society Action Network, and a Boston law firm called Anderson Kreiger, was signed by other health-oriented groups: the American Lung Association, American Heart Association, Campaign for Tobacco-Free [Kids], and then the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Public Health.

You get the picture. These are all groups that have a vested interest in programs of the Department and Health and Human Services. The brief talks about regulations promulgated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. I’m going to call them CMS for short when we’re talking. And CMS is responsible for regulating the vast and complex Medicare and Medicaid programs. And, as you know, Medicare and Medicaid cover more than half of the population and touch the lives of almost everyone, regulating hospitals, some aspects of insurance, some aspects of practice of medicine.

You can’t escape the consequences of problems with these programs. And so that’s why the agency … Congress specifically gave HHS and CMS the power to regulate all of the issues in its purview. So that already have the power, and so the question is whether they use it wisely. We are arguing in this brief that for 40 years it’s worked just fine. That Congress has set the outer limits and been content to let the agency determine the specifics of these programs to fill in the gaps, as one Supreme Court case said. And this has implications for how hospitals operate, how insurance programs operate, and whether they operate smoothly.

And in our brief, we’re not really arguing for or against a particular interpretation or either for or against what the agency says. It’s just a matter of stability and certainty. The agency has the expertise, has the time, has the resources, and has the duty to figure out what these particular terms and statutes mean and how the programs should work. Just two examples we gave in the brief of the kind of issues that the agency should be determining are: What’s the definition of geographic area in the Medicaid Act for the purpose of setting hospital wages?

If your listeners are still listening, I hope, because that is boring, arcane, hyper-technical, and courts don’t have the expertise, much less the time, to do that. And CMS does. Or another question in a different area, whether feeding activities in a nursing home regulated by Medicaid: Are those nursing or nursing related services? The court’s not going to know. The courts doesn’t have expertise or time. And again, that’s what CMS is for.

So not only is this something that you need these interpretations in these rules to have the programs operate smoothly and consistently, and that’s the first part that’s important. But the second part is that you need consistency across the country. As you know well, there are hospital systems that operate across multi-states. There are Medicaid managed-care plans operating across multi-states. All aspects of health care is nationalized. If you have hundreds of district courts and courts of appeals coming up with different interpretations of these terms, you’re going to have a lot of problems. It’s not going to operate smoothly. So I heard some of the justices arguing, “Well, Congress just needs to do its job.”

Congress has obstacles to doing even the big, mega issues that are before them, these kinds of arcane specific issues. They don’t have the time or again, the expertise. That’s why they said, “CMS, you go do this.”

Rovner: When they were writing the Affordable Care Act, there were so many times in that legislation where it says, “The secretary shall” or “The secretary may.” It’s like, we’re going to punt all this technical stuff to HHS and let them do what they will.

Somers: Exactly. You figure out what the definition of a preventive service is, that’s not something that we are going to do. And there are also questions raised about is this … these unelected agency personnel, well, agencies — they are political appointees, and they also serve at the pleasure of the head of the agency. So they’re accountable to the executive branch and indirectly to the voters. The courts, at this point, once they’re on the court and the federal courts, they’re not accountable to the voters anymore. And so this would be a big shift of power towards the courts, and that is what we argued would be antithetical to the system working well.

Rovner: What would be an example of something that could get hung up in the absence of Chevron?

Somers: I thought that Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson, during the argument, gave a really good example. Under the Food and Drug Administration’s power to regulate new drugs and determining what is an adequate and well-controlled investigation. The idea of courts, every single drug that’s challenged in every single forum, having to delve into what that means without deference to the agency would be just a recipe for chaos, really.

Rovner: So some people have argued that Chevron is already basically gone, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, that it’s been replaced by the major questions doctrine, which is kind of what it sounds like. If a judge thinks a question is major, and they will assume that the Congress has not delegated it to the agency to interpret. So what difference would it make if the court formally overturned Chevron or not here? I guess what you’re getting at is that we’re more worried about the lower courts at this point than the Supreme Court, right?

Somers: That’s right. The Supreme Court has not cited Chevron in something like 15 years. And they talked about that in the argument, but it’s for the lower courts. The lower courts still follow it. It is still very commonly cited and gives them a lot of guidance not to have to decide these issues in the first instance. It’s true that the major questions doctrine — and there are other threats to the power of the administrative agencies, and we should all be concerned about them. But this one is really the grease that keeps the machine going and keeps these systems going. And throwing all that up in the air would make a big difference. If only because the question in all of these Chevron cases, and so many of them was not the ultimate issue — about whether the regulation was a good policy — but the question was, was the statute ambiguous or not? And so that’s the part that would be up in the air and everyone can go back and re-litigate these, including the big interests that have a lot of time and resources to devote to litigation. And that would cause a great deal of uncertainty, a lot of disruption, and a lot of problem for the courts and for all the entities that function under these systems.

Rovner: And that’s a really important point. It’s not just going forward. People who are unhappy with what a regulation said could go back, right?

Somers: Oh yeah. They could go back. They could go to different courts. We’ve seen how litigants can forum-shop. They can find a judge that they think is going to be sympathetic to their argument and make a determination that affects the whole country.

Rovner: Well, we will be watching. Sarah Somers, thanks so much for joining us.

Somers: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Rovner: We are back, and it’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Jessie, you were the first to join in this week. Why don’t you tell us about your extra credit?

Hellmann: Yeah. Mine is from North Carolina Health News. They wrote about how congenital syphilis is killing babies in the state. They had eight cases of deaths last year — compared to a decade ago, they had one. So it’s something that’s been on the rise in North Carolina, but also nationwide, and it’s caused a lot of alarm among public health officials because it’s pretty preventable. It’s something that doesn’t need to happen, but the story is about what the state is doing to improve their outreach to pregnant people. They’re doing media campaigns, they’re trying to make sure that people are doing their prenatal care and just trying to stop this from happening. So I thought that was a good story. It’s definitely kind of an under-reported issue. It’s something that public health officials have been raising an alarm about for a while now, but there’s just not enough funding or attention on the issue.

Rovner: For all the arguing about abortion, there’s not been a lot of discussion about maternal and child health, which obviously appears to be the one place that both sides agree on. Anna.

Edney: Mine’s in The New Yorker by Rachael Bedard. It’s “What Would It Mean for Scientists to Listen to Patients?” And it’s interesting, it’s about two Yale researchers who are doing a long-covid study, but it’s unique in the sense that when the CDC or anyone else does a long-covid study, they typically are trying to say, “Here are the exact symptoms. We’re going to work with 12 of them.” Whereas we know long covid, it’s seemingly a much more expansive symptom list than that, but researchers really like to have kind of metrics to go by.

But what these Yale researchers are doing is letting all of that go and just letting anybody in this and talking to them. They’re holding monthly town halls with people who are in this, whoever wants to show up and come and just talk to them about what’s going on with them and trying to find out, obviously, what could help them. But they’re not giving medical advice during these, but just listening. And it just was so novel, and maybe it shouldn’t be, but I found it fascinating to read about and to get their reactions. And it’s not always easy for them. I mean, the patients get upset and want something to happen faster, but just that somebody is out there doing this research and including anybody who feels like they have long covid. It was really well-written too.

Rovner: It’s a really good story. Alice.

Ollstein: So I’m breaking my streak of extremely depressing, grim stories and sharing kind of a funny one, although it could have some serious implications. This is from Stat, and it’s from an inspector general report about how the White House pharmacy, which is run by basically the military, functioned under President Trump. And it functioned like sort of a frat house. There was no official medical personnel in charge of handing out the medications, and they were sort of handed out to whoever wanted them, including people who shouldn’t have been getting them. People were just rifling through bins of medications and taking what they wanted. These included pills like Ambien and Provigil, sort of uppers and downers in the common parlance. And so I think this kind of scrutiny on something that I didn’t even know existed. The White House pharmacy is pretty fascinating.

Rovner: It was a really, really interesting story. Well, I also have something relatively hopeful. My extra credit this week is a journal article from Health Affairs with the not-so-catchy headline “‘Housing First’ Increased Psychiatric Care Office Visits and Prescriptions While Reducing Emergency Visits,” by Devlin Hanson and Sarah Gillespie. And if they will forgive me, I would rename it, calling it maybe “Prioritizing Permanent Housing for Homeless People Provides Them a Better Quality of Life at Potentially Less Cost to the Public.”

It’s about a “Housing First” experiment in Denver, which found that the group that was given supportive housing was more likely to receive outpatient care and medications and less likely to end up in the emergency room. The results weren’t perfect. There was no difference in mortality between the groups that got supportive housing and the groups that didn’t. But it does add to the body of evidence about the use of so-called social determinants of health, and how medicine alone isn’t the answer to a lot of our social and public health ills.

OK. That is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks as always to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our editor, Emmarie Huetteman. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me at X, @jrovner, or @julierovner at Bluesky or @julie.rovner at Threads. Anna, where are you these days?

Edney: Mostly just on Threads, so @anna_edneyreports.

Rovner: Alice?

Ollstein: @AliceOllstein.

Rovner: Jessie.

Hellmann: @jessiehellmann on Twitter.

Rovner: We will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.

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