House Appropriations Committee eliminates AHRQ, targets health outcomes
The House Appropriations Committee released and passed on a party-line vote the FY25 Labor-HHS appropriations bill. This bill would zero out the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, cuts CDC by 22 percent, removes funding for research in Firearm Injury, Opioid Overdose Prevention, Rape Prevention, Suicide Prevention, and Tobacco Prevention, Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative, Climate and Health initiatives, the Preventative Health and Health Services Block Grant, and many, many more programs. It would also eliminate Title X Family Planning funding alongside a $647 million cut to HRSA. AcademyHealth strongly opposes this bill. This legislation is widely seen as a messaging bill to counter higher funding levels from the Senate. The full House is expected to vote on this legislation before the House leaves for the August recess.
AcademyHealth provided guidance to the White House on disability data needs
AcademyHealth responded to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for information on implementing a federal evidence agenda for disability equity. We recommended that OSTP acknowledge the complexity and breadth of disabilities and ensure that definitions, collections, and practices are aligned. This requires reforms in how data is collected, what data is relevant to individuals with disabilities, how that data is protected, and how researchers are able to access it and implement their findings.
Senators considering ways to reduce medical debt
Senators on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP) Committee held a hearing on medical debt, with two very different perspectives being articulated. Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pointed to the profits of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies, while Ranking Member Bill Cassidy (R-LA) called for better aligning of federal subsidies with patient care.
ONC proposes new data interoperability rule
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) releasedv a sweeping proposed rule that includes plans to improve data sharing with public health authorities — a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposal, called the Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Patient Engagement, Information Sharing, and Public Health Interoperability rule, or HTI-2, builds on the agency’s long-term work to improve interoperability and information sharing between providers, payers and the public health ecosystem, said ONC head Micky Tripathi.
Bipartisan groups of senators release bill on cybersecurity in health care
Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Todd Young (R-IN), and Angus King (I-ME) released the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act, which would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and HHS to collaborate on improving cybersecurity and make resources available to non-federal entities relating to cyber threat indicators and appropriate defense measures. It would also create a special liaison to HHS within CISA to coordinate during cybersecurity incidents and collaborate to support health care and public health sector entities.
What we’re reading
A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at CDC on emotional support among teenagers found a surprising variation in how parents and teenagers perceived support. Parents were far more likely to say that their teenager always received the social and emotional support they needed (76.9 percent of parents compared to 27.5 percent of teenagers). Higher perceived levels of support strongly correlated with better physical and mental health and positive wellbeing outcomes.
When it comes to cybersecurity attacks on health systems, “we’ve started to think about these as public health issues and disasters on the scale of earthquakes or hurricanes,” said Jeff Tully, a co-director of the Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity at the University of California at San Diego to KFF Health News. Many hospitals are unprepared for long outages, cybersecurity experts say. And the federal government has offered little in the way of required protocols or standards to protect patient safety in attacks on the health sector, which have risen precipitously in recent years. More than a dozen doctors and nurses at Ascension told the authors that patient care at its hospitals was compromised in the fallout of the cyberattack.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote in JAMA Health Forum about the need for Congress to update how the FDA regulates AI platforms. He calls on Congress allowing the FDA to engage in firm-based approaches to regulation, which would enable to the FDA to oversee the methods used to develop a technology and validate its reliability, rather than trying to decouple the product’s construction.