April 7-10: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Director Adam Boehler are just a few of the D.C. heavyweights lined up to speak at the American Hospital Association’s annual membership meeting. Panels will take on a variety of issues that remain hot topics in policy circles: price transparency, drug costs and industry consolidation, or, as the AHA puts it, “Hospital Field Realignment: Where Hospitals and the FTC Diverge.” Day three of the event entails hospital leaders ascending Capitol Hill for a full day of lobbying lawmakers. Our intrepid D.C. reporters Susannah Luthi and Robert King will bring you coverage throughout the week in Modern Healthcare’s newsletters.
April 9: As Luthi reported last week, the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to take up a bipartisan set of bills aimed at drug price transparency. One option on the table will broach the idea of using arbitration to give HHS leverage with drug manufacturers over prices. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Hill, the Senate Finance Committee will hold the third in its series of hearings on skyrocketing drug prices. Executives from Cigna, CVS Health, Humana and OptumRX are slated to testify.
April 10: The clock is ticking for the Veterans Affairs Department to implement a key provision of the Mission Act: the Community Care Program, which consolidates and expands services provided by private providers for veterans. The Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee holds an oversight hearing to find out how the agency is doing. Senators are likely to follow up on claims VA officials made to a House committee last week that they were on track to roll out the program by the June 6 statutory deadline. This despite concerns that were raised over an IT system being developed to support the program. An evaluation from the U.S. Digital Service said the decision-support tool is flawed and could disrupt service for as many as 75,000 patients a day.
