Category: Medicare/Medicaid

LIVE ONLINE TODAY @ NOON: President-Elect Trump’s Health Policy Agenda: Priorities, Strategies, and Predictions

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Webinar: President-Elect Trump’s Health Policy Agenda: Priorities, Strategies, and Predictions

Monday, December 19, 2016, 12:00 – 1:00pm

WATCH LIVE ONLINE!: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/events/details/president-elect-trumps-health-policy-agenda

Submit your questions to the panelists via Twitter @PetrieFlom.

Please join the Petrie-Flom Center for a live webinar to address what health care reform may look like under the new administration. Expert panelists will address the future of the Affordable Care Act under a “repeal and replace” strategy, alternative approaches to insurance coverage and access to care, the problem of high drug prices, innovation policy, support for scientific research, and other topics. The panel will discuss opportunities and obstacles relevant to President-elect Trump’s proposals, as well as hopes and concerns for health policy over the next four years. Webinar participants will have the opportunity to submit questions to the panelists for discussion.

Panelists

  • Joseph R. Antos, Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy, American Enterprise Institute
  • Lanhee J. Chen, David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer, Public Policy Program; affiliate, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
  • Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President, American Action Forum
  • Moderator:Gregory Curfman, Editor-in-Chief, Harvard Health Publications

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Will Medicare Reform be a Republican Obamacare?

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By Shailin Thomas

As the health care community waits with bated breath to see what will become of the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress have set their sites on another health-related initiative that has been on their wish list for years: reforming Medicare. While Trump promised throughout his campaign not to change the fundamental ways in which Medicare works — in part to appeal to older voters, who overwhelming would like the program to stay as it is — shortly after the election, “modernizing Medicare” appeared as a priority on the transition website for the new administration.

The reform many Republicans are pushing for — championed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) — is privatization along the lines of Medicare Advantage. Instead of providing for full insurance coverage through the government, as traditional Medicare currently does, Ryan’s proposal would have eligible patients purchase insurance from private companies with financial assistance from the government. The theory is that by having private insurers provide coverage, Medicare will capture efficiencies of the private market, while simultaneously offering consumers more choice in the coverage they receive.

After Paul Ryan first unveiled this plan in 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report detailing the significant fiscal problems with this “modernized” vision of Medicare. According to the Foundation’s analysis, the average out-of-pocket expense for beneficiaries increase from $5,630 under the current system to $12,500. The reason for this increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that providing coverage is actually more expensive for a private insurer than it is for the government.  The proposal faces other economic challenges as well, and ironically, some of them stem from its close resemblance to Obamacare.

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REGISTER NOW (1/23/17)! PFC’s 5th Annual Health Law Year in P/Review

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p-review-logoHealth Law Year in P/Review
Featured Panel: The End of ObamaCare? Health Care Reform Under A New Administration
January 23, 2017 
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West AB
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Register for this event

The Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium will feature leading experts discussing major developments during 2016 and what to watch out for in 2017. The discussion at this day-long event will cover hot topics in such areas as health policy under the new administration, regulatory issues in clinical research, law at the end-of-life, patient rights and advocacy, pharmaceutical policy, reproductive health, and public health law.

This year’s Health Law Year in P/Review is sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Harvard Health Publications at Harvard Medical School, Health Affairs, the Hastings Center, the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund. 

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Your Weekly Reminder That FDA Approval and Insurance Coverage Are Often Linked

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By Rachel Sachs

In recent days, it seems like the din of voices arguing that the FDA should approve pharmaceuticals more speedily and on less evidence has grown louder.  It is a central theme of the 21st Century Cures Act, which the House may vote on today and which I seemingly will never finish blogging about (most recent post here, with links to previous ones).  It is the premise that underlies other legislation recently introduced into Congress.  And it was the topic of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece just last week.  In the view of these critics, sure, the FDA has some role to play in ensuring safety and some basic level of effectiveness.  But the current standard for demonstrating effectiveness is, in their view, much too strict.  Instead, we ought to approve drugs more quickly and allow insurance companies and physicians to decide which products have enough supporting evidence to merit reimbursement.

Here’s the problem: that is not the way we’ve set up the system.  FDA approval is often linked to insurance coverage.  Medicaid must cover essentially all FDA-approved drugs, and Medicare similarly has limited ability to decline to cover FDA-approved drugs.  Even private insurers are generally required to cover at least some prescription drugs, although in some cases this may be on a more limited basis.  Take Exondys, a drug that recently won accelerated approval from the FDA for the treatment of a small number of patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (I’ve blogged about Exondys here).  Because Exondys was approved based on a surrogate endpoint and not actual evidence of clinical improvement (Exondys’ label actually says that “[a] clinical benefit of Exondys 51 has not been established”), it would seem to be a poster child for these arguments about the FDA.  Allow insurers to cover it or not as they choose, since we don’t yet know if it works.  Yet many insurers are legally required to pay the $300,000 a year on average the company is charging for the drug.

I’ll put it another way.  If we lower the FDA’s approval standards and do nothing to coverage requirements, we will all almost certainly end up paying more money for drugs that don’t work.  The pronoun “we” here is important: because an enormous amount of these expenditures will come through Medicare and Medicaid, which are funded by all of us as taxpayers, it costs all of us financially when ineffective or unsafe drugs are approved by the FDA.  Many people who argue for a decrease in FDA standards also believe that we spend too much through Medicare and Medicaid, yet they don’t seem to put these two pieces of the argument together.

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Code Red

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By Gregory M. Lipper

“Not Just Obamacare: Medicaid, Medicare Also On GOP’s Chopping Block,” write Jonathan Cohn and Jeffrey Young in The Huffington Post:

Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress have made clear they are serious about repealing Obamacare, and doing so quickly. But don’t assume their dismantling of government health insurance programs will stop there.

For about two decades now, Republicans have been talking about radically changing the government’s two largest health insurance programs, Medicaid and Medicare.

Check out the full, detailed article here.

Greg Lipper (@theglipper) is a partner at Clinton Brook & Peed and the former Senior Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

CMS Prohibits Arbitration Clauses in Long-Term Care Facility Contracts

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By Wendy S. Salkin

On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS)—an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—released a final rule that “will revise the requirements that Long-Term Care facilities [LTCs] must meet to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs” (1). (Almost all LTCs receive funds from Medicare or Medicaid.) This is the first time that these requirements have been “comprehensively reviewed and updated since 1991” (6)—that is, in the past 25 years. One of the most striking changes to the regulation is found in §483.65, where CMS “require[es] that facilities must not enter into an agreement for binding arbitration with a resident or their representative until after a dispute arises between the parties” (12) which means that CMS is “prohibiting the use of pre-dispute binding arbitration agreements” (12). Among the reasons provided by CMS for this change is a recognition of the notable power differential between LTCs and their residents:

There is a significant differential in bargaining power between LTC facility residents and LTC facilities. LTC agreements are often made when the would-be resident is physically and possibly mentally impaired, and is encountering such a facility for the first time. In many cases, geographic and financial restrictions severely limit the choices available to a LTC resident and his/her family. LTC facilities are also, in many cases, the resident’s residence. These facilities not only provide skilled nursing care, but also everything else a resident needs. Many of these residents may reside there for a prolonged period of time, some for the rest of their lives. Because of the wide array of services provided and the length of time the resident and his/her family may have interactions with the LTC facility, disputes over medical treatment, personal safety, treatment of residents, and quality of services provided are likely to occur. Given the unique circumstances of LTC facilities, we have concluded that it is unconscionable for LTC facilities to demand, as a condition of admission, that residents or their representatives sign a pre-dispute agreement for binding arbitration that covers any type of disputes between the parties for the duration of the resident’s entire stay, which could be for many years. (402-403)

As The New York Times reported, when the rule was first proposed in July 2015, it was “aimed at improving disclosure.” But, this final version of the rule “went a step further than the draft, cutting off funding to facilities that require arbitration clauses as a condition of admission.”

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UPDATED – Dental Hygiene Practitioners: Why they’re needed in Massachusetts, and why the amendment failed

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Special guest post from Kelly Vitzthum, oral health policy analyst at Health Care For All, a Massachusetts health policy and consumer advocacy organization. This post has been updated to reflect the non-inclusion of the Dental Hygiene Practitioner amendment in the final version of Massachusetts’ FY 2017 budget.

Former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher described poor oral health as “a Silent Epidemic.” Oral health diseases are by and large preventable, and yet they are incredibly widespread. Disadvantaged and marginalized populations suffer disproportionately from poor oral health, and children are especially vulnerable. Many low-income individuals and families are priced out of needed care and struggle to find providers who accept Medicaid.

Though Massachusetts is a leader in health care and health reform, oral health is still often overlooked in state health policy discussions. Though MassHealth – Massachusetts’ Medicaid program – covers 40% of the state’s children, most dentists do not accept it. A shocking proportion of children have untreated oral decay, which affects their ability to eat, learn, and play. A full tenth of the population currently lives in a federally-designated Dental Health Professional Shortage Area (DHPSA), and emergency department visits for preventable dental conditions cost the state millions annually. Read More

Zika May Place Burden On Medicaid

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Emma Sandoe, 2015-2016 Petrie-Flom Student Fellow

Full post at Health Affairs Blog.

Aedes_Mosquito_300x300Congress is currently debating the level of federal funding that should be made available to fight to reduce the spread of Zika. Administration officials working with local public health agencies on the ground have recently expressed fear that the funding levels are insufficient to prevent the disease from spreading. What is one overlooked concern? State budgets.

Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government and serves as a key financer of health care services if Zika spreads across the country this summer. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently released a bulletin to state Medicaid Directors outlining how Medicaid funds can be used to both prevent the spread of Zika and treat people infected by the disease and infants born with microcephaly. With Medicaid covering roughly half of the births in America today, the program will finance many pregnancies potentially affected by Zika. […]

Read the full post at the Health Affairs Blog!

How Not to Debate Health Care Reform

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on May 12 with portions of the essay missing. The corrected text is below.

By Ted Marmor

Presidential campaigns in the United States are not typically fought over competing manifestos, with policy details set out in reasonably clear language. Rather they are disputes among candidates about the state of the country and what values—or aspirational visions—they endorse.  And, for at least a century, most American debates about health care reform have been dominated by ideological slogans, misleading claims about financing, and mystifying labels. Republicans have exemplified the mystification this year, repeatedly mislabeling Obamacare as socialized medicine and falsely claiming it a “takeover of American medicine.”

In fairness, the Democratic primaries have generated their own version of mystification. The two candidates do agree on the goals of universal health insurance. But clarity ends there. The Clinton campaign has emphasized incremental reform possibilities and criticized Senator Sanders’ proposal of Medicare for All as unrealistic. Sanders, by contrast, has offered a compelling conception of a fairer and less expensive version of what Americans want, but no incremental steps to get to it.

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When Global Health Norms Meet Medicaid

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Special guest post by Nicholas J. Diamond

Medicaid is currently facing a timely, although largely underappreciated, challenge: rebalancing Medicaid long-term services and supports (LTSS). For context, LTSS refer to a broad range of paid and unpaid medical and personal care assistance for individuals who experience difficulty completing self-care tasks due to aging, chronic illness, or disability. According to 2013 estimates, there are approximately 12 million individuals in the U.S. who rely on LTSS, mostly paid for through Medicaid, with a projected increase to approximately 27 million individuals by 2050.

Medicaid has a historical structural bias toward institutional care, such as nursing homes, as opposed to home and community-based services (HCBS), such as home health aides, personal care, chore services, supported employment, rent and food for live-in caregiver, and nonmedical transportation, among many others. Medicaid LTSS rebalancing, therefore, shifts spending away from institutional settings and toward HCBS, which is less expensive and generally preferred by beneficiaries. States may provide HCBS through a complex panoply of federal statutory authorities, including waiver authorities, which afford states wide latitude in designing programs. As you might imagine, with flexibility comes significant variations in how states provide HCBS, which specific types of HCBS they provide, and whether, for instance, cost containment strategies available under certain authorities negatively impact access to needed services. Read More