Today’s update touches on a number of healthcare news stories we are seeing at the federal level.
Taking lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden Administration unveiled the strategy the U.S. has planned to prevent (and, if necessary, respond) to global biological threats over the next five years.
The strategy sets out three goals to guide the United States affirmative agenda to advance global health security:
In other news, a recent blog post from the American Hospital Association (AHA) critiqued the national discussion on healthcare price transparency. The post argues that although hospitals report more transparency data than other healthcare entities, calling upon hospitals to release even more data will not “solve the pressing issues” that face the healthcare industry. The blog post argued that existing hospital reporting is extremely costly, time-consuming, and ever-changing and that commercial insurers and drug companies are not held to the same data reporting standards.
In other news, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra spoke at a Senate hearing and urged states to expand Medicaid to improve rural health outcomes. Becerra stated that HHS is doing what it can, so women get good care before delivery, during delivery, and after delivery. Becerra also emphasized the need to ensure the agency’s COVID-19 telehealth flexibilities continue.
Relatedly, Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith also expressed concerns about maternal care deserts caused by hospital closures in her state at the same Senate hearing last week. Senator Smith noted that Mississippi experiences some of the worst maternal health outcomes in the country and often leads the country in infant mortality.
Finally, a recently published study in Health Affairs Scholar reports that telehealth remains underused, and remote patient care is either rarely billed to Medicare or rarely occurs. For example, in 2020, e-visits accounted for just under 1 percent of all managed service codes submitted to Medicare at the height of the pandemic, which later fell to half a percent in 2021 and 2022. The study reports that overall, telehealth remains underutilized, and claims its findings can help alleviate concerns regarding the potential overuse of portal messages and e-visit billing.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has recently taken significant steps to enhance the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan by issuing final guidance and
At this point we probably shouldn’t be surprised by the Roberts Supreme Court’s willingness to eviscerate precedent in the name of strict textualism. On the
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