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A Weekly Health Policy Round Up From Health Affairs            

**December 13, 2020**

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IN THE JOURNAL

NEW ISSUE:
CLIMATE & HEALTH

The December issue of Health Affairs covers the intersection of climate
change and health. This issue was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.

Read the December 2020 table of contents.

L
isten
to an introduction to the issue from Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil.

Read "From the Editor-in-Chief."

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH

A key takeaway from this month's issue is that the health sector is a
major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Experts agree that health
care organizations should take steps to measure and reduce their carbon
pollution, but where do we begin? Matthew J. Eckelman and coauthors
provide new estimates of environmental emissions in the US health care
sector
to
document the scope of the problem; Martin Hensher and Forbes McGain
outline priorities for developing sustainability metrics
;
and Andrea MacNeill and coauthors propose solutions to transform the
health care supply chain
.

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How Indigenous Communities Are Adapting To Climate Change: Insights From
The Climate-Ready Tribes Initiative

By Paul J. Schramm, Angelica L. Al Janabi, Larry W. Campbell, Jamie L.
Donatuto, and Shasta C. Gaughen

Climate change can interrupt traditional practices and ways of life for
Indigenous communities. Based on lessons learned from the Climate-Ready
Tribes Initiative, Paul Schramm and coauthors offer ideas for making
climate and health policy more effective for tribes. Read More >>

Go in-depth and check out this week's new episode of A Health Podyssey

featuring Shasta Gaughen, the Environmental Director for the Pala Band
of Mission Indians.

Adding A Climate Lens To Health Policy In The United States

By Renee N. Salas, Tynan H. Friend, Aaron Bernstein, and Ashish K. Jha

In the face of the generational threat of climate change, health policy
must be discussed, funded, and implemented through a climate lens.
According to Renee Salas and coauthors, this means assessing the health
risks driven by climate change and integrating them into policies to
improve the nation's health. Read More >>

AHEAD OF PRINT

Income-Related Inequality In Affordability And Access To Primary Care
In Eleven High-Income Countries

By Michelle M. Doty, Roosa S. Tikkanen, Molly FitzGerald, Katharine
Fields,
and Reginald D. Williams II

A survey of noninstitutionalized adults in eleven countries shows that
US residents with lower incomes rank last or near last on health status,
material hardships, affordability, and some measures of primary care
access. The Commonwealth Fund's study collected representative samples
of adults from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the US
between February and May 2020. Read More >>

THIS WEEK ON THE BLOG

COVID-19

COVID-19 Challenge Trials Would Save Lives And Avert Years In Poverty By
Significant Margins

By Pedro Rosa Dias, Ara Darzi, and Nir Eyal (12/11/20)

Overall, even the most conservative estimates of the expected social
value of accelerating vaccine trials through controlled human infection
studies are dramatic. The risk to study volunteers would have to be
colossal for faster designs to be rejected on the basis of plausible
research ethics. It is not. Read More >>

FOLLOWING THE ACA

ACA Round-Up: Guidance For 2022, Funding For States, And More

By Katie Keith (12/11/20)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the
2022 draft letter to issuers in the federal Marketplace, key dates for
calendar year 2021, a draft rate review timeline, and draft actuarial
value (AV) calculator and AV calculator methodology for 2022. CMS also
issued guidance regarding its evaluation of EDGE data submissions for
2020, a limited EDGE data set, and a $23.7 million funding opportunity
for states. Read More >>

The Missing Piece In America's COVID-19 Isolation And Quarantine
Strategy: Wraparound Services

By Syra Madad, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, and Margaret Bourdeaux (12/10/20)

The goal is to remove as many barriers as possible to enable compliance.
The more support we can offer to those needing to isolate or quarantine,
the better our chances of getting out of this pandemic sooner. Read More
>>

Increased Reimbursement May Help Overcome Barriers To Administration Of
Seasonal And Routine Vaccines

By Emily Belowich, Kelsey Jones, Sheila Fifer, Penelope Solis, and
Richard Hughes IV (12/9/20)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated one of the country's largest
public health challenges: improving population health through routine
and seasonal immunizations for diseases such as influenza and pneumonia.
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights
that uptake rates plummeted for all recommended childhood vaccines in
March and April of this year. Read More >>

Generic Drug Repurposing For Public Health And National Security:
COVID-19 And Beyond

By Rena M. Conti, Susan Athey, Richard G. Frank, and Jonathan Gruber
(12/8/20)

In this post, we propose that the federal government take the lead in
promoting the deployment of drugs to prevent and treat COVID-19 but also
the additional epidemics and pandemics that will, unfortunately, likely
occur in the future. Read More >>

LEGAL & REGULATORY ISSUES

Updates To Stark Law Regulations Will Drive Value In The Health Care
System

By Seema Verma and Kimberly Brandt (12/9/20)

The Stark Law addressed a legitimate problem. However, since the law was
enacted in 1989, the regulations implementing it have become woefully
outdated. Too often, they have hindered, rather than advanced, the cause
of affordable, quality health care for patients. Read More >>

SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH

Building Health: Lessons From Seven Years Of The Healthy Futures Fund

By Carol Cahill, Chris M. Kabel, and Emily Bourcier (12/10/20)

Between 2012 and 2019, the Healthy Futures Fund (HFF), a collaboration
of the Kresge Foundation, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and
Morgan Stanley, invested $180 million to finance projects that embed
health-enhancing features and services in real estate development. The
fund experimented with two existing tax credit programs to finance those
projects. Lessons from an evaluation of the HFF are especially timely
given the increasing number of hospital systems and health plans
investing in affordable housing and other forms of community
development. Read More >>

MEDICAID

Making Care Work Pay: How A Living Wage For LTSS Workers Benefits All

By Christian Weller, Beth Almeida, Marc A. Cohen, and Robyn I. Stone
(12/7/20)

Raising the pay of direct care workers would yield an impressive return
on investment. Care recipients would receive more consistent and
reliable care; workers would enjoy enhanced financial security;
long-term services and supports (LTSS) providers would see fewer
staffing shortages, reduced turnover, and higher productivity; and local
economies would expand as direct care workers increased their spending
and depended less on government assistance to make ends meet. Read More
>>

ACCESS TO CARE

President-Elect Biden Can Take Administrative Action To Dramatically Cut
Consumers' Health Care Costs And Cover Millions Of Uninsured

By Stan Dorn and Frederick Isasi (12/7/20)

The Biden administration can make important progress by using its
administrative authority to make individual health insurance
substantially more affordable while extending health care to millions of
hard-working families who are uninsured today. Read More >>

TELEHEALTH

As Value-Based Care And Telehealth Rise, Patient Experience Measurement
Desperately Needs An Update For The Digital Age

By Sarah Hudson Scholle, Margaret E. O'Kane, and Paul Cotton (12/7/20)

There is broad and growing agreement about the need to develop better
tools to measure patient experience. Fortunately, there is an array of
digital tools to make this possible: They are readily available and
widely used in other industries. Read More >>

WOMEN'S HEALTH

Despite Many States Doing What They Can, The Federal Government Must Act
Now To Extend Postpartum Medicaid Coverage

By Emily Eckert (12/8/20)

It is essential that both federal and state governments implement policy
solutions that preserve care for women in the postpartum period.
Extension of Medicaid coverage for the full year after delivery is a
critical step in our nation's efforts to combat unacceptable maternal
mortality and morbidity rates. Read More >>

HEALTH AFFAIRS BRANDED POST

Targeting Health Care's "Triple Aim": Leaders Equipped with Tech
and Business Expertise

Supported by Stanford Medicine

For decades now, health care leaders and policy makers have sought to
achieve health care's "Triple Aim": reduce cost, broaden access,
enhance quality care. Read More >>

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Climate Change And The Future Of Health Policy

Listen to Health Affairs' Leslie Erdelack and Chris Fleming discuss why
health policy is ready to enter the climate change discussion.

Listen here.

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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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