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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