Tag: Medicaid

Image of a gavel and stethoscope on top of each other

Reflections on Recent Medicaid Reform Efforts

Abe Sutton Leave a comment

By Abe Sutton

In the context of limited regulatory resources, Trump’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) prioritized allowing states to impose work requirements over Medicaid fiscal reform.

Now that the Trump Administration’s term in office has ended, it is worth exploring, with the benefit of hindsight, the value of this decision. Setting aside moral arguments used to criticize Medicaid work requirements, administering the requirements proved to be challenging, as did justifying them in court. Additionally, amid indications Medicaid work requirements will not be politically sustainable, it is worth considering whether Medicaid fiscal reform would have led to more significant taxpayer savings.

In this post, I provide an overview of Medicaid work requirements and explore some of the reforms included in the Medicaid fiscal reform proposal CMS ultimately chose not to implement.

Read More

U.S. Capitol Building at Night

Advantages of Using the Congressional Review Act to Revoke Health Care Waivers

mlawrence Leave a comment

By Matthew B. Lawrence

The Trump Administration has granted health care waivers that the Biden Administration will surely look to end, including work requirement waivers that the Supreme Court is going to consider in Azar v. Gresham. How the Biden Administration approaches this task may set precedents that last far into the future, which is one argument in favor of considering the Congressional Review Act as a potential path forward.

Waivers are a huge part of health policy. They entail a state seeking approval from the federal government to make various changes to ACA or Medicaid programs. Waivers are normally approved for several years at a time, and routinely renewed. They foster experimentation, and are also (or especially) a tool the federal government uses to steer national health policy by pushing states to adopt some reforms and not others, as I explain in a forthcoming article.

Over at the Yale Journal of Regulation blog, I describe how the Congressional Review Act (CRA) could potentially be used to revoke health care waivers (like community engagement, aka work requirement, waivers).

In brief, the CRA is a way Congress can change the law to revoke agency actions without the votes necessary to override a filibuster. The CRA might be a cleaner alternative for revoking health care waivers than administrative revocation by the Biden Administration. One big policy advantage of this route is that it wouldn’t come back to haunt health policy. Revocations through the administrative process would set a precedent that could undermine the stability of all waivers, but revocations through the CRA would not.

Read More

Stacks of books against a burgundy wall

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Beatrice Brown, Neeraj Patel, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of November. The selections feature topics ranging from an analysis of Medicare Part D spending on inhalers from 2012 to 2018, to an overview of vaccine development and regulations to better understand how COVID-19 vaccines will be evaluated, to an analysis of the ethical implications of emergency authorization of COVID-19 drugs for patient care. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

Read More

doctor holding clipboard.

A Critical Race Perspective on Social Risk Targeting in the Health Care Sector

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Brietta R. Clark

Health care programs, such as Medicaid, are increasingly using social risk assessments to target certain patients or communities for interventions intended to promote health. This includes partnering with other service sectors to provide nutrition, housing or employment assistance, transportation, parenting education, care coordination, and other behavioral supports.

These social interventions are touted as a way to improve health equity, yet they do not address structural racism, a powerful determinant of health. These interventions tend not to measure racial impact, or account for how racial inequity shapes the very structures and systems upon which social interventions depend. Indeed, this inattention means that such well-meaning interventions may inadvertently reinforce racial inequity, subordination, and stigma in marginalized communities.

Read More

Photograph of a doctor holding a headset sitting in front of a laptop

How Telehealth Can Reduce Disparities

Jenna Becker Leave a comment

By Jenna Becker

Telehealth can and should be used in an intentional effort to reduce health disparities.

Increased COVID-19 mortality rates in communities of color have been a constant, tragic reminder of the ways in which systemic racism causes poor health outcomes in the United States. Immigrants are facing an increased risk of illness and limited access to care. Rural Americans may face an increased risk of serious illness.

Telehealth can reduce barriers to care that these groups face, such as lack of access to transportation, culturally-competent providers, and childcare.

The last six months have seen rapid growth in the use of telemedicine in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to urgent need, regulatory agencies and private insurance companies have loosened requirements that previously inhibited the use of telehealth.

The expansion of telehealth and removal of traditional barriers to care may lead to more equitable health outcomes.

Read More

books

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Charlie Lee, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on pharmaceutical law and policy.

Below are the abstracts/summaries for papers identified from the month of June. The selections feature topics ranging from the cost of delayed generic entry in Medicaid, to challenges with false negative tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection, to difficulties in implementing and enforcing state opioid prescribing laws. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

Read More

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, USA - JUNE 8, 2019: First ever Medicare for All rally led by Bernie Sanders held in The Loop of Chicago. Crowd holds up a sign that says "Medicare for All Saves Lives".

Medicare for the Poor

dorentlicher Leave a comment

By David Orentlicher

While Medicare-for-All has proved controversial, every Democratic presidential candidate should embrace one of its key elements—folding the Medicaid program into the Medicare program. That would be much better for patients, doctors, and hospitals. It also would be much better for public school children.

Medicare would be a much better program for patients, doctors, and hospitals in several ways. Lower-income families suffer because Medicaid is a federal-state partnership, and some states have stingier Medicaid programs than do other states. In particular, Florida, Texas, and twelve other states have not signed up for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, leaving more than two million lower-income Americans uninsured. Under our current Medicaid system, access to health care for the indigent depends where they live. Folding Medicaid into Medicare would give the poor access to health care in every state.

Read More

Ambassador-at-Large Deborah Birx giving a speech from a podium with an American flag and PEPFAR banner in the background

One of the Biggest Public Health Initiatives in History: PEPFAR and HIV

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

In October, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a conference of world-leading experts in HIV/AIDS to discuss one of the biggest public health successes in history: PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR was launched in 2003 in response to a burgeoning global epidemic of HIV. The program offered $2 billion annually, rising to about $7 billion in 2019, to surveil, diagnose, treat, and reduce transmission of HIV around the world.

PEPFAR prevented what could have become an exponentially growing epidemic. It is estimated to have saved more than 17 million lives and avoided millions of new HIV infections. As a result, the speakers at the conference were quick to extol the virtues of the program. Professor Ashish Jha called it an “unmitigated success”; Professor Marc C. Elliott named it a “historic effort”; Dr. Ingrid Katz described PEPFAR as “nothing short of miraculous.”

However, several undercurrents within the conference, as well as more explicit points made by several panelists, suggested the importance of enlarging the discussion beyond PEPFAR itself to include other policies that impact HIV and AIDS, and even other diseases.

Read More

The Week in Health Law podcast logo twihl.com

John Cogan on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

Nicolas P. Terry 1 Comment

By Nicolas Terry

Recorded at the 2019 annual meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools during a panel reviewing the year in health care financing, this episode features a talk by Professor John Cogan from the University of Connecticut School of Law. Professor Cogan focuses his research and teaching on health care organizations and finance, health law and policy, federal health programs, health care fraud and abuse, and health insurance law. He is the co-author of a treatise on Medicare and Medicaid bankruptcy issues, as well as the author of numerous scholarly articles on a range of health insurance topics, including the Affordable Care Act and HIPAA. In this talk Professor Cogan discussed first, Medicaid: including expansion, work requirements, and the latest court decisions; second, Section 1557 and the proposed civil rights regulations; and third, the DeOtte v. Azar case and the resultant contraceptive mandate mess.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Tunein or Podbean.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry and @WeekInHealthLaw.

Subscribe to TWIHL here!

Pennsylvania Not Alone in Denying Abortion Coverage for Low-Income Women

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

By Adrienne Ghorashi

Last week, a lawsuit was filed challenging Pennsylvania’s decades-old statute restricting the use of state Medicaid funding to pay for abortion services. The lawsuit, brought by a group of abortion providers in the state, claims the restriction discriminates against low-income women on the basis of sex, in violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Read More