Patients cannot find promised cheaper insulin
In the months since drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co cut the price of its generic insulin Lispro to $25 a vial, diabetic patients have found a complex bureaucracy to actually buy it. One patient would find that pharmacies did not have Lispro in stock, that it was priced above $25, that they could not buy it because their prescription was for a more expensive name-brand, and more challenges. These challenges highlight the difficult task ahead for Congress—whether to simply cap how much people pay for insulin or to tackle the root issues that have driven up the cost of medicine.
HRSA announced $100 million in training grants for the nursing workforce
The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) announced awards of more than $100 million to train more nurses and grow the nursing workforce. These investments will address the increasing demand for registered nurses, nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and nurse faculty. These grants focus on helping licensed practical nurses to become registered nurses, to train nurses for primary care, mental health care, and maternal health care, and supporting more nurse faculty.
Biden Administration announces first ten prescription drugs to be negotiated
The Biden administration identified ten expensive prescription drugs that will be included in price negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers as the government seeks to ease the financial burden on older and disabled Americans, an unprecedented step in a long political war over the nation’s exorbitant drug costs. Half of these first drugs chosen for price negotiations are medications used to prevent blood clots and treat diabetes and were taken by millions of people on Medicare in the past year, according to a list released by federal health officials who oversee Medicare, the vast public health insurance system. Others are used to treat heart trouble, autoimmune disease and cancer. Consumers will not see benefits swiftly, with the lower, negotiated prices due to become available in early 2026. Medicare spends over $50 billion a year on these ten drugs alone.
CDC Director Cohen outlines steps to regain public trust
The pandemic was a key opportunity for the CDC to lead, however the crisis left the agency marred by political interference and confusing messaging, leading to a loss of trust among Americans. New CDC Director Mandy Cohen has focused on the importance of rebuilding trust in the agency and science as a top priority. In an interview with NPR, she listed three steps to help rebuild trust: 1. Making sure the agency is transparent; 2. Ensuring CDC has good performance in what the agency is meant to do; and 3. Build better relationships and partnerships.
Abortion-rights states are beginning to shield personal digital data near clinics
States positioning themselves as abortion safe havens are beginning to shield location information that can be gleaned from mobile phones, and to protect the privacy of other data that can show who is visiting a health-care facility. Beginning this summer, Washington, Connecticut, and New York are establishing first-of-their-kind data privacy safeguards for health-related information, in part to prevent anti-abortion groups from targeting people who terminate their pregnancies. A similar Nevada law will take effect next March. Other states, led by California, are passing or proposing measures that aim to limit out-of-state law enforcement agencies access to certain kinds of data collected by big tech companies like Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.
Rising costs for patients are being tied to private equity ownership
Private equity ownership of medical practices was linked to consumer price increases for 8 of 10 specialties examined in a new report, with the most notable gains reported for oncology and gastroenterology. The report was a collaboration of UC Berkeley staff and researchers from two nonprofits, the American Antitrust Institute and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. It provides "convincing evidence that incentives to put profits before patients have grown stronger with an increase in private equity ownership of physician practices," said lead author Richard Scheffler, PhD, of UC Berkeley in a statement. The report also noted that private equity acquisitions of physician groups have risen sixfold in just a decade, increasing from 75 deals in 2012 to 484 deals in 2021. Additionally, Dr. Joseph Dov Bruch wrote a systematic review that found that private equity ownership was associated with higher costs to patients with generally mixed to harmful impacts on quality. After decades of unchecked mergers, health care is the land of giants, with one or two huge medical systems monopolizing care top to bottom in many cities, states, and even whole regions of the country. An estimate 75 percent of markets are now considered highly consolidated.
New Department of Transportation mandates that new airplanes have accessible bathrooms
The Transportation Department announced new regulations to require more commercial aircraft to have accessible bathrooms, a major complaint from disabled travelers about the barriers to flying. Under the regulations, new single-aisle planes with at least 125 seats will eventually be required to have at least one lavatory large enough for a disabled passenger and an attendant to enter and move around in. Twin-aisle planes are already required to have an accessible lavatory. Airlines have increasingly used single-aisle planes on lengthy flights, worsening the discomfort for disabled travelers who cannot use existing lavatories. The new requirement for accessible lavatories does not kick in immediately. It will apply to new single-aisle planes that airlines order beginning in 2033 or that are delivered beginning in 2035. But that timeline is faster than what the advisory committee laid out in 2016 and what the Transportation Department proposed last year.
Drug Industry, AMA, and advocates sound the alarm on Mifepristone ruling
The pharmaceutical industry joined providers, reproductive health experts and Biden administration officials in sounding an alarm over the broader implications of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling to reverse FDA’s flexible prescribing conditions for the abortion pill mifepristone, saying the ruling could create an unprecedented ability for judges without scientific expertise to overturn FDA approval decisions. Contrary to FDA’s repeated findings, the judges say mifepristone poses significant safety risks to patients. They also credit the arguments by the plaintiffs, anti-abortion physicians and other providers that they are injured by the need to provide care to patients who experience harm after taking the pills.
HHS published a list of AI uses
HHS’ Office of the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer posted an inventory of the ways in which HHS is using artificial intelligence (AI). This is the result of a 2020 executive order that required agencies to prepare an inventory of non-classified and non-sensitive current and planned AI use cases.
Spending on Medicare Advantage quality bonus payments will reach at least $12.8 billion
To encourage Medicare Advantage plans to compete for enrollees based on quality, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a quality bonus program that increases payments to plans based on a five-star rating system. Federal spending on Medicare Advantage bonus payments has increased every year since 2015 and will reach at least $12.8 billion in 2023, an increase of nearly 30% ($2.8 billion) since 2022.
What I am reading
As the effects of the climate crisis continue to build around us, I was interested to read an interview Dr. Nori-Sarma did with Vox on how extreme heat affects mental health. Her research examines the association between heat and mental health-related emergency room visits among US adults. During the hottest days of the summer, more people went to the emergency room for mental health conditions like substance use disorders, mood and anxiety disorders, stress disorders, other behavioral disorders, and more. What does a rapidly warming planet mean in a health care system where mental health care is so often inaccessible to those who need it?
Too often in our society, inactivity is equated with laziness or worthlessness. However, fatigue is one of the most common and most disabling of Long COVID’s symptoms. I appreciated the article by Yong in the Atlantic about how debilitating chronic fatigue is for patients with long COVID. Fatigue turns every daily action into a cost-benefit analysis – if the patient does laundry, how long will it take for them to rest up enough to make a snack? What can the health system and our society do to better support these patients?
There were two different stories that came out in recent weeks that really tell one story about the structural racism that has been long intertwined with scientific research. First, the family of Henrietta Lacks announced that they reached a settlement with the technology company that used cells taken without Lack’s consent in the 1950s that they later sold for profit. Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 when doctors removed cells from her tumor without her knowledge or permission. Those cells — now known as HeLa cells — had remarkable properties that allowed them to be endlessly reproduced, and they have since been used for a variety of scientific breakthroughs, including research about the human genome and the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines. This settlement is a step in the right direction of scientific organizations recognizing practices that targeted disenfranchised patients.
The second story is a series from the Washington Post on the human remains that are in the Smithsonian Institute collections. The paper spent a year examining the Smithsonian’s collection of human brains and other remains, and found that much of the collection was taken from communities of color and disadvantaged groups without the knowledge or consent of the communities and families. Many of the brains in the collection were collected to further racist theories that sought to prove white supremacy. These stories are heartbreaking and infuriating to see not only how people were treated a century ago, but through recent years as the repatriation of the remains has been slow, sporadic, and often fought by the museum.