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A Weekly Health Policy Round Up From Health Affairs
February 2, 2020
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THIS WEEK ON THE BLOGFOLLOWING THE ACA
ACA Litigation Round-Up: A Status Check
By Katie Keith (1/29/20)
While all eyes have been on whether (and when) the Supreme Court will hear a challenge in Texas v. United States, other Affordable Care Act litigation continues before the Supreme Court, appellate courts, and district courts across the country. This post briefly summarizes the status of many of the lawsuits we are tracking. Read More >>
ELSEWHERE @ HEALTH AFFAIRS
Health Affairs In 2019: Editor’s
Picks
By Alan Weil (1/27/20)
As Health Affairs Editor-in-Chief, I enjoy reading hundreds of articles each year on an incredibly wide range of health policy topics. My top ten goes beyond our “most-read” and “most-shared” articles, which tend to focus on costs and spending. I hope you find these articles compelling, enjoy reading them, and learn something from them, just as I have.
Read More >>
GLOBAL HEALTH
The Novel Coronavirus: Assessing The American Response
By Ashish K. Jha (1/31/20)
We must support and respond to those countries affected by the 2019-nCoV outbreak, but our actions cannot stop there. Ongoing preventive investments and planning are necessary to protect the health not only of Americans, but of people all over the world. Read More >>
HEALTH EQUITY
Discrimination By Artificial Intelligence In A Commercial Electronic Health Record—A Case Study
By Sara G. Murray, Robert M. Wachter, and Russell J. Cucina (1/31/20)
Software vendors should involve ethicists, clinical informaticists, and operational experts early in the process of developing any CDS method, and health care delivery organizations need to ensure a broad ethical perspective as they evaluate new tools for implementation.
Read More >>
MEDICARE
Why Medicare Advantage Plans Are Being Overpaid By $200 Billion And What To Do About It
By Richard Kronick (1/29/20)
Under reasonably conservative assumptions about the rate of growth of Medicare Advantage coding intensity, using the budget neutrality method to calculate coding intensity would likely result in approximately $200 billion in savings to taxpayers over the next decade compared to current policy. Read More >>
Improvement In Chronic Disease Outcomes For Medicare Beneficiaries Has Stalled—Where Do We Go From Here?
By Jackson Williams (1/28/20)
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must keep trying to either prove or rule out the ability to effectively coordinate care in fee-for-service Medicare. Read More >>
GRANTWATCH
The Five Most-Read GrantWatch Blog Posts Of 2019
By Lee-Lee Prina (1/27/20)
See which are the top-five blog posts of 2019 in GrantWatch, our series on health philanthropy. This year, blog posts on a variety of topics were popular. Read More >>
HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Closing The Health Disparity Gap For American Indians And Alaska Natives Through Health IT Modernization
By Theresa Cullen, Matthew A. Demaree, and Shannon Effler (1/27/20)
The administration must take immediate steps to address unfulfilled trust and treaty obligations with tribal nations by
implementing a strategy to end unacceptable health disparities and address urgent life-safety issues facing the American Indian/Alaska Native population. Read More >>
PREVENTION
As Presidential Candidates Debate Sweeping Health Care Proposals, Preventive Coverage Opportunities Are Overlooked
By Richard Hughes IV (1/29/20)
With health care remaining a top issue for voters in the upcoming 2020 elections, candidates could consider meaningful, actionable updates to provisions that advance access to preventive services for individuals with all types of health care coverage. Read More >>
PHARMACEUTICALS AND MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY
Managing Uncertainty In Drug Value: Outcomes-Based Contracting Supports Value-Based Pricing
By Daniel S. Mytelka, William M. Cassidy, Donald B. Kohn, and Mark R. Trusheim (1/30/20)
Outcomes-based
contracts do not undercut value-based pricing. Read More >>
ACCESS TO CARE
Successful
Decarceration Relies On Access To Health Care
By Jacqueline Lantsman and Mark Osler (1/30/20)
If we are going to release more people from prison (and we should), we must ensure that health care coverage is in place to stabilize their lives and enable them to thrive among us.
Read More >>
INTEGRATION OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL
SERVICES
Working Across Sectors To Improve Health For Older People: The Community Care Connections Program
By Elisa Fisher, Kelley Akiya, Annie Wells, Yan Li, Christine Peck, and José A. Pagán (1/30/20)
With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, researchers at New York University and the New York Academy of Medicine evaluated the Community Care Connections (CCC) program, which aims to integrate social services into
medical systems of care. There are some promising results from the 2016 to 2019 time period—for example, CCC program participants experienced a 29 percent reduction in inpatient hospitalizations. Read More >>
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IN THE JOURNAL
PATIENT-CENTERED
CARE
The Impact Of Decision Aids On Adults Considering Hip Or Knee Surgery
By Vanessa B. Hurley, Hector P. Rodriguez, Stephen Kearing, Yue Wang, Ming D. Leung, and Stephen M. Shortell
Shared decision making is a collaborative process in which clinicians and patients discuss trade-offs and benefits of specific treatment options in light of patients’ values and preferences. Decision aids are paper, video, or web-based tools intended to help
patients match personal preferences with available treatment options. Vanessa Hurley and coauthors analyzed data for 2012–15 about patients within the ten High Value Healthcare Collaborative member systems who were exposed to condition-specific decision aids in the context of consultations for hip and knee osteoarthritis. Read More >>
GLOBAL HEALTH POLICY
Primary Care Physicians’ Role In Coordinating Medical And Health-Related Social Needs In Eleven Countries
By Michelle M. Doty, Roosa Tikkanen, Arnav Shah, and Eric C. Schneider
Primary care physicians are increasingly tasked with coordinating services delivered not just by specialists and hospitals but also by home care professionals and social service agencies. To inform efforts to improve care coordination, the 2019 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians queried primary care physicians in eleven high-income countries
about their ability to coordinate patients’ medical care with specialists, across settings of care, and with social service providers. Read More >>
The Effect Of Home-Based Hypertension Screening On Blood Pressure Change Over Time In South Africa
By Nikkil Sudharsanan, Simiao Chen, Michael Garber, Till Bärnighausen, and Pascal Geldsetzer
There is considerable policy interest in home-based screening campaigns for hypertension in many low- and middle-income countries. Nikkil Sudharsanan and coauthors evaluated the real-world impact of home-based hypertension screening on two-year change in blood pressure in a nationally representative cohort of South African adults. Read More >>
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MATERNAL & CHILD HEALTHEffects Of Medicaid Expansion On Postpartum Coverage And Outpatient UtilizationBy Sarah H. Gordon, Benjamin D. Sommers, Ira B. Wilson, and Amal N. TrivediBecause pregnancy-related Medicaid eligibility ends sixty days after delivery, one effect of Medicaid expansion is to reduce postpartum coverage losses. Comparing Colorado, which expanded Medicaid, with Utah, which did not, Sarah Gordon and coauthors find that outpatient use "increased significantly in Colorado compared to Utah across all four postpartum months we examined, with the largest increases 31–90 days after delivery—the period when new mothers transition from pregnancy to parental Medicaid coverage and are at the highest risk of losing coverage." Read More >>AFFORDABLE CARE ACTAmong Low-Income Adults Enrolled In Medicaid, Churning Decreased After The Affordable Care ActBy Anna L. Goldman and Benjamin D. SommersAnna Goldman and
Benjamin Sommers explore Medicaid enrollment churn—the frequent coverage losses that enrollees experience. In the period 2011–16, gaps in coverage and loss of coverage each declined by 4.3 percentage points in states that expanded Medicaid, a decline significantly larger than in states that did not expand Medicaid. Read More >>GRANTWATCHPhilanthropic Strategy In The Face Of An Opioid EpidemicBy Jennifer Chubinski and Michelle LydenbergThe authors are staffers at Interact for Health, a foundation that has worked to address the opioid epidemic in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area since 2008. Cincinnati was particularly hard hit. Their article (free access) discusses the evolution of the foundation’s ongoing work on the crisis. Interact was the region’s first funder to dedicate significant financial and staff resources to combating the problem. The funder’s role went beyond awarding grants, though: it served as a neutral
convener, a subject-matter expert, and—in the area of harm reduction—a catalyst for change. The article covers Interact’s funding strategy, outcomes of its funding, lessons learned (from 2008 to 2018), and plans for the future. Read More >> |
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BOOK REVIEWS
A Failed Revolution In Mental
Health
By Jeff Goldsmith
Rarely has intraprofessional conflict in medicine had such far-reaching consequences for American society as in the fight over the biological foundations of psychiatry. Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, chronicles this struggle in her new book, Mind Fixers.
Read More >>
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By Rick Mathis
Marty Makary does a masterful job of describing the business arrangements of health care and their consequences in The Price We Pay. Read More >>
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About Health Affairs
Health Affairs is the leading peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of health, health care, and policy. Published monthly by Project HOPE, the journal is available in print and online. Late-breaking content is also found through healthaffairs.org, Health Affairs Today, and Health Affairs Sunday
Update.
Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.
Copyright © Project HOPE: The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.
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