Podcast: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’ Ask Us Anything!

This week, KHN’s “What the Health?” panelists answered questions submitted by listeners.

Among the topics covered were why Medicare doesn’t cover most dental care, how to address high drug prices and what federal officials do with all that data they collect from health care providers.

This week’s panelists for KHN’s “What the Health?” are Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News, Joanne Kenen of Politico, Stephanie Armour of The Wall Street Journal and Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post.

The panel addressed questions including the following:

• “Besides your podcast, what resources, including books and journals, do you recommend people read to build basic knowledge about the U.S. payer system?”
• “What is the likelihood that Congress will pass legislation to include full dental care in Medicare, say in the next 10 years?”
• “CMS collects an extraordinary amount of data from its various quality reporting programs. … What does the agency do with this data and is there any evidence quality reporting improves patient outcomes or achieves other policy aims?”
• “Do you have a view on whether Medicare paying less money for prescription drugs would lead to drug companies charging more to private insurers?”
• “There’s been a lot of back-and-forth lately between the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services and the media regarding fetal tissue research. HHS is currently doing a review, and the Trump administration just posted a ban to the NIH labs to stop procuring any new fetal tissue. This jeopardizes many research studies, especially those studying HIV. What do you think the long-term consequences of this will be?”

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This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.