With Premiums Likely To Spike Just Before Midterms, Lawmakers Are Bracing For Blame Game Battle
Language on abortion threw a wrench in both sides' plans to add money to stabilize the marketplace into the sweeping spending bill that Congress passed last week. Now they'll have to deal with the potential fallout. Meanwhile, some Americans are opting to take a chance they'll stay healthy over paying astronomical insurance bills.
The Wall Street Journal:
Health-Insurance Premiums Loom As Election Issue
Health-insurance premiums are likely to jump right before the November elections, a result of Congress’s omission of federal money to shore up insurance exchanges from its new spending package. Lawmakers from both parties had pushed to include the funding in the $1.3 trillion spending law signed Friday, but they couldn’t agree on details. A battle has already begun over how to cast the blame for the expected rate increases. Democrats blame GOP lawmakers for the failure of negotiations over the funding, saying Republican leaders demanded the inclusion of abortion restrictions they knew would be unacceptable to Democrats. Republicans say that they negotiated in good faith and that Democrats rejected reasonable rules on abortion. (Armour, 3/25)
Bloomberg:
Why Some Americans Are Risking It And Skipping Health Insurance
Across America there are thousands of people like the Buchanans, the Owenses and the Bobbies making the same hard decision to go without health insurance, despite the benefits. They’re risking it—betting that they’ve got enough savings, enough of a back-up plan, or enough luck to get them through a twisted knee, a cancer, or a car wreck. Bloomberg is following a dozen of these families this year in an effort to understand the trade-offs when a dollar spent on health insurance can’t be spent on something else. Some are financially comfortable. Others are scraping by. (Tozzi, 3/26)
In other national health care news —
NPR:
The Omnibus Budget Grants CDC Right To Research Gun Violence. Researchers Don't Think It Will Help
Government health agencies have spent more than two decades shying away from gun violence research, but some say the new spending bill, signed by President Trump on Friday, will change that. That is because, in agency instructions that accompany the bill, there is a sentence noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence. "I think this is a huge victory for our country and our communities and our children. This is one step in many to help stop gun violence in this country," says Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Democrat from the Orlando, Fla., area, where a mass shooting left 49 dead at a gay nightclub in 2016. But researchers who study gun violence are unimpressed. (Greenfieldboyce, 3/23)
The Washington Post:
Tenacious New Gun Researchers Are Determined To Break Cycle Of Mass Shootings
Yifan Zhang was finishing her PhD in biostatistics at Harvard five years ago when news broke of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. As a graduate student from China, specializing in highly technical design of clinical drug trials, she had little connection to America’s long-running debate over gun violence. But even now, she said, the anguished faces of those parents she saw on television remain seared in her memory.So when she heard about a gun-violence research project at Stanford University that could use the statistical skills she had honed on pharmaceuticals, she jumped at the chance. (Wan, 3/24)
The New York Times:
Why Can’t Dying Patients Get The Drugs They Want?
At first glance, a bill passed by the House of Representatives this week seems like the kind of thing anyone could get behind. Known as the “Right to Try” legislation, it would allow terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs without the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. But the bill and a similar one passed last summer by the Senate do little to address the main barrier that patients face in getting unapproved treatments: permission from the drug companies themselves. (Thomas, 3/23)
NPR:
Patients' Comment About Drug Side Effects On Social Networks
When Allison Ruddick was diagnosed with stage 3 colorectal cancer in October 2014, she turned to the world of hashtags. After her initial diagnosis it wasn't clear if the cancer had metastasized, so she was in for a nerve-wracking wait, she says. She wanted outside advice. "But they don't really give you a handbook, so you search kind of anywhere for answers," Ruddick says. "Social media was one of the first places I went." (Wilhelm, 3/23)