Did President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney miss an opportunity in Tuesday night's debate to attract the much-coveted female voting bloc by barely touching on healthcare issues? Or should moderator Candy Crowley take responsibility for that instead?
Ilisa Halpern Paul, managing government relations director at the law firm Drinker, Biddle and Reath watched the 90-minute debate with her colleague Jodie Curtis, who serves as government relations director at the firm. When I spoke with them late Tuesday, they both expressed surprise that the town hall discussion didn't include one direct question on healthcare.
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America's Health Insurance Plans on Friday had reason to celebrate after HHS released the 2013 quality ratings for Medicare's health and drug plans.
“Currently, 37% of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries are enrolled in a plan with four or more stars, an increase from 24% in 2011,” Karen Ignagni, president and CEO at AHIP, said in an e-mail. “This increase is indicative of the commitment by Medicare Advantage plans to advance new and innovative strategies to improve healthcare quality and health outcomes.”
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Here's to diving below the overheated healthcare rhetoric.
It's widely assumed that tonight's vice presidential debate will be a health policy wonkfest (with zingers) that submerges deeply into the numerous conflicting approaches of the two presidential tickets. Specifically, the debate likely will focus on Medicare due to the significant changes the Obama administration has made to the program and because of the overhaul proposed by the Romney-Ryan ticket.
But there are a couple health policy questions that each campaign has rarely addressed that could give some insight and move beyond the rhetoric of which side is “ending Medicare as we know it.”
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Coming off a historic slapdown by the government’s nonpartisan ethics watchdog over a recent political speech, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hopped right back into the political fray this week.
Sebelius spoke Wednesday to a Washington gathering of the National Hispanic Council on Aging just a few weeks after the independent U.S. Office of Special Counsel found she violated federal law. The office cited her “extemporaneous partisan remarks” delivered during a February speech in which Sebelius was acting in her official capacity as head of HHS. It was the first such finding against a senior administration official since 2007.
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“Debates are what make America great,” Johnny Carson said on The Tonight Show 28 years ago this month. “The candidates stand before their electorate and reporters ask hard-hitting questions, and it's up to the people to decide which one evaded them more skillfully.”
We'll have our first chance to do that in this election cycle tonight, as President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will match up at the University of Denver for the first of three presidential debates this month. On Tuesday, lawmakers and health policy experts prepared for healthcare to feature prominently in that discussion.
In a call with reporters, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm centered on women's health and equal pay for women. Granholm said she expects “zero details” from Romney about his plan for the future, even though American women and their families deserve more than “vague platitudes.”
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Just as truth is the first casualty of war, policy nuance dies quickly in political combat.
The latest example of that was seen in the healthcare firefight over emergency department use and the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney got things started when he was asked in a Sept. 23 “60 Minutes” interview about any government responsibility to provide healthcare. Romney responded that “different states have different ways of doing that,” including care through clinics, emergency departments and “a solution that worked for my state.”
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In Washington, the National Institutes of Health is special. But is it super special?
That is, will the research agency's unique bipartisan appeal inside the Beltway produce both an agreement to avoid looming cuts to the agency under a deficit-reduction law and show the way to broader deficit deal? At least one member of Congress who sits on an influential committee thinks it can.
Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Thursday that bipartisan efforts under way to avoid cuts to the relatively tiny NIH budget could “build the foundation” for an agreement replacing many of the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts required by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Providers are among the multitude watching discussions to replace the so-called sequester, as it requires Medicare to cut $11.1 billion from their reimbursements next year.
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Later this week, the nation's hospitals and physicians will launch another round of ads in Washington-based publications to warn Congress of the disastrous results that will come from cuts to Medicare early next year. Meanwhile, an investigative study from the Center for Public Integrity shows one way hospitals and doctors are coping with the tough federal reimbursement environment: steadily billing higher rates for treating Medicare patients in the last 10 years.
Established in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit, investigative news organization. In its new study, the center found that from 2001 through 2010, thousands of providers chose more expensive billing codes over less costlier ones, even though “there's little hard evidence they spent more time with patients or that their patients were sicker and required more complicated—and time-consuming—care.”
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Cue the ominous legislation soundtrack.
Congressional Democrats welcomed Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan back to Capitol Hill through a day-long series of attacks on his plan to repeal the healthcare overhaul and add an insurance subsidy option to Medicare.
Like other Democrats, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) took to the Senate floor to blast the Romney-Ryan campaign's healthcare plans that echo many of the provisions included in budgets Ryan authored as chairman of the Budget Committee.
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The NFL and the NIH are two acronyms that you’ll rarely find in the same sentence let alone in the same huddle.
But that was the case this week, when the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health announced the NFL agreed to donate $30 million for the Foundation’s new Sports and Health Research Program. The philanthropic gift—the largest in the league’s 92-year history—made the NFL the founding donor to the new program, which an NIH spokeswoman says will involve multiple NIH centers and institutes.
“We hope this grant will help accelerate the medical community’s pursuit of pioneering research to enhance the health of athletes past, present and future,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a news release.
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Did the door to compromise close for Catholic hospitals this week?
Even as the Obama administration attempts a delicate negotiation with Catholic hospitals and other religious-run institutions over the healthcare law's birth control mandate, speech after speech at the Democrats' nominating convention showed little interest in compromising on the issue.
“We ensured life-saving preventive care and the full range of reproductive services are now covered,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) in her primetime convention speech in reference to the inclusion of birth control within preventive services that all insurance policies are required to cover.
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