Health Affairs

The list of most-read Health Affairs Blog posts for April includes four posts in Tim Jost’s ongoing series on implementing the Affordable Care Act; number one on the top-ten list is Tim’s post about proposed regulations on health insurance exchange navigators. The list also includes posts on accountable care organizations, patient-centered care, controlling health care costs. and more.

The full list is below:

At Managed Care Matters, Joe Paduda presents highlights of recent health policy blogging in a new Health Wonk Review. Among the pieces Joe highlights are Health Affairs Blog posts by John Holahan & Stacey McMorrow and Charles Roehrig on the causes and likely longevity of the recent slowdown in health spending growth.

A belated nod to the latest Health Wonk Review, posted last week by Louise Norris at Colorado Health Insurance Insider. Louise has assembled a number of great posts, including Peter Neumann and James Chambers’ Health Affairs Blog post on Medicare’s reset of its “coverage with evidence development” policy.

Poorly manufactured and fraudulent medicines kill thousands of people around the world each year. For infectious diseases like malaria and HIV, shoddy medicines also accelerate drug resistance and dramatically alter the course of epidemics. With few new drugs under development, recent progress against these major killers in the poorest countries is precarious.

Bad drugs have become a big problem for one major infectious disease in particular: tuberculosis. If we don’t solve this issue, we may see the gains we’ve made against TB slip away.

According to the World Health Organization, global TB cases continued on a slow downward trend in 2011. While this is good news, the disease still claimed 1.4 million lives that year—more than any other infectious disease except HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile, multidrug-resistant TB cases rose to 630,000 worldwide. Resistant TB is deadly and costs significantly more to treat. For example, curing a single case of it in the United States can cost more than $200,000. Treatment takes two years, and the side effects can be severe, including nausea, vomiting, joint pain, and even hearing loss.

On April 5, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services released its final Letter to Issuers on Federally Facilitated and State Partnership Exchanges. This letter lays down guidelines for insurers that will sell qualified health plans on the federal exchanges in 2014. A proposed version of this letter was published for comment on March 1, 2013, which I blogged about here. The final issuer letter tracks the proposed letter with few significant changes. In part because I am supposed to be on vacation in France and in part because of limited access to technology, I am not going to review the issuer letter in depth, but rather refer the reader to my earlier post, providing here only a brief overview of the final letter that highlights the respects in which it differs from the proposed rule discussed in my earlier post.

As the debate over federal budget allocations and cuts continues, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a leading funder for both domestic and global health research, could experience a whopping $1 billion budget cut. To date, modest investments in global health have helped create platforms for discovery science, such as large multiethnic studies of genetics and epigenetics; transformative programs, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; and life-altering interventions, such as oral rehydration salts, now widely used in the management of dehydration caused by diarrhea. Not only would large cuts to the NIH slow our progress in improving health worldwide, but they would also be out of step with the burgeoning interest in global health at universities across the United States.

In his post “Why don’t Republicans Have a Vision for Health Reform” (April 2, 2013) John Goodman offers interesting comments on my earlier post “Reflections on The Federal Budget Resolutions” (March 21, 2013). I thank him for the comments.

My post was focused strictly on the vision for U.S. health care that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill now project through the Senate budget resolution and the House budget resolution. Goodman, on the other hand, builds from my post a bridge to the vision some Republicans – including Goodman himself – have in the past projected for U.S. health care.

I can understand why Goodman used the well-known technique of the bridge, because he believes that Republicans currently do not have vision for health care. On this point, however, I beg to differ. There actually is a current Republican vision. It has been expressed through the House budget resolution.

On April 3, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services released proposed regulations establishing standards to govern navigators and non-navigator assisters in the federally facilitated exchange as well as clarifying standards on the role of navigators and on who can serve as a navigator in all exchanges.

In today’s Q and A on Patient Engagenment, we feature Rachael Fleurence, a Senior Scientist at PCORI where she leads the research prioritization initiative to help identify important patient and stakeholder generated questions and establish a rigorous research prioritization process to rank these questions. (Also, check out her recent blog post and follow the link to her February Health Affairs article here.)

The Indian Supreme Court announced a decision this week that allows drug makers to continue developing cheaper generic versions of the leukemia drug Gleevec in that country. The case centered around whether certain patents held by the brand-name drug’s manufacturer were true inventions. The decision was shaped in part by the complexities of Indian patent law, which is considered far more stringent than U.S. patent policies.


The issue of secondary patenting or “patent evergreening,” to extend the life of a brand-name drug and whether secondary patents represent true innovation was the subject of an October 2012 Health Affairs article by Tahir Amin and Aaron Kesselheim.

You are invited to join us on Wednesday, April 11, when Health Affairs will hold a briefing to discuss its April 2013 issue, “Triple Aim Goes Global.”

The April issue examines how all high-income countries are struggling to pursue better health, better care, and lower cost – and to bring all of these goals into alignment. The issue received funding support from The Commonwealth Fund, the Nuffield Trust, and Imperial College London.

The briefing will take place at the Barbara Jordan Conference Center at the Kaiser Family Foundation, 1330 G Street, NW, in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 11, 2013, 8:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

On Good Friday, March 29, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule regarding increased federal Medicaid percentage changes under the Affordable Care Act for covering adults who are newly eligible under the ACA’s Medicaid expansions. HHS published the original proposed rule on this topic in August of 2011 as part of a larger rule on the ACA’s Medicaid changes. Other parts of this rule dealing with Medicaid eligibility were finalized in March of 2012, but the parts of the proposed rule dealing with federal financial assistance were not included at that time. Because the final rule contains significantly more detail than the proposed rule, HHS is publishing the rule as final, but soliciting further comment on parts of the rule. HHS also released on March 29, 2013, a series of Frequently Asked Questions, explaining its approach to the expansion of Medicaid through the use of Medicaid funds to purchase private insurance for Medicaid recipients in the exchange, the approach that Arkansas and possibly other states are proposing. This FAQ is discussed at the end of this post.

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation discusses the Multi-State Plan Program created under the Affordable Care Act. Under the program, at least two health insurance plans choosing to participate will offer coverage through every state-run, federally facilitated, and partnership exchange created under the law. Insurance companies meeting the eligibility criteria have until March 29, 2013, to submit applications to participate in 2014.

The program was created to enhance competition among health plans within the new exchanges. It will be administered by the federal Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which also administers the Federal Employees Health Benefits program offering coverage through a variety of health plans.

A Health Affairs Web First article released today describes the new rapid-cycle approach to program evaluation at the recently established Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. The Affordable Care Act created the Innovation Center within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to test payments and service delivery models, reduce costs in Medicare and Medicaid, and improve quality.

As the Innovation Center moves ahead with innovative payment and service delivery models, the Rapid Cycle Evaluation Group at the center delivers frequent feedback to providers while evaluating the outcomes of each model tested. When a model is considered for testing, staff from the Rapid Cycle Evaluation Group and CMS’ Office of the Actuary are immediately assigned to help create the model. The Office of the Actuary provides timely and impartial actuarial, economic, and statistical estimates–and monitors Innovation Center initiatives once testing has begun. This group’s rigorous and speedy assessment and evaluation is driven by performance metrics and robust new methodologies.

Researchers from the evaluation group have also been organized into “affinity groups” and use CMS data to answer critical policy questions that may shape future payment and service delivery models. The Innovation Center also plans to identify and promote population health metrics–measures of the functional status, healthy behavior, and health outcomes of a population–to promote disease prevention and achieve a more accountable, equitable, and coordinated health care system. All these efforts will contribute to the Innovation Center’s success in carrying out its mission of improving the quality of care combined with the slowing spending growth.

For those who like to look for silver linings, there are at least two events in the past few weeks that could provide a glimmer of hope. First, both the Budget Committee in the Republican controlled House has passed a budget and, for the first time in four years, the budget committee in the Democratic controlled Senate has also passed a budget. Both the House and the Senate have passed their budgets. The Senate’s budget passed by a slim 50 to 49 vote margin. And for a short time, there had been some uncertainty whether the House would approve its budget because it doesn’t eliminate the deficit fast enough for some House conservatives – some indication of the pressure the right is putting on the leadership.

The second glimmer of hope is that the President has been reaching out to Congressional Republicans in a way that he had not done during his first term–taking a group of Senate Republicans to dinner and meeting with the House Republican leadership on their home turf. However, as Mitch McConnell (R KY) was quick to point out, meeting with Republicans is far different than finding common ground or strategies for compromise.

To no great surprise, the budget documents themselves suggest two very different and divergent views of the country’s future–differences that will make finding a compromise a serious challenge.

At the Health Business Blog, David Williams gives us a lot to chew in a Health Wonk Review posted yesterday. David leads with David Satcher’s Health Affairs Blog tribute to C. Everett Koop and follows with many interesting posts.

Enjoy all the posts in this Wonk Review. And congratulations to David and the Health Business Blog on eight great years.

David Muhlestein’s survey of the Accountable Care Organization landscape leads the Health Affairs Blog most-read list for February. Also on the month’s top-ten list are three posts dealing with patient engagement by Chas Roades, Paul Wicks and John Hixson, and David Rothman. These posts accompanied the publication of Health Affairs’ February issue, “New Era of Patient Engagement.”

The most-read list also includes two posts by Tim Jost on implementing the Affordable Care Act, as well as posts on medical education, pharmaceutical pricing, and the process of setting Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians in different specialties. The full list appears below:

If you are looking for some weekend reading, check out Jaan Sidorov’s Health Wonk Review at the Disease Management Care Blog. Jaan’s review includes numerous great posts, including David Muhlestein’s Health Affairs Blog “Contributing Voices” post mapping out the Accountable Care Organization landscape.

With apologies for not doing so earlier, I wanted to call readers’ attention to the excellent Health Wonk Review Maggie Mahar posted last week at healthinsurance.org. Check it out if you haven’t already.

For the previous Health Wonk Review, Brad Wright chose a Baby New Year theme. However, there were some problems with the new beginning represented by the turnover from 2012 to 2103. For example, with the New Years fiscal cliff deal, one might have hoped that we would leave our budget crisis behind for a while and start with a fresh fiscal slate. But of course, that did not happen. Not only did we not escape our budget crisis, it multiplied into three crises: the debt ceiling, the still looming sequester, and the coming expiration of government funding –“The Trouble With Trillions,” one might say.

So I decided to give us a fresh chance at a new start by choosing an “Inauguration” theme for this Wonk Review, referring both to Monday’s celebration of a new presidential term but also to the word’s broader meaning of a formal beginning. And in the spirit of looking forward, we’ll lead with a post from Health Wonk Review cofounder Joe Paduda laying out his health policy predictions for the coming year. At Managed Care Matters, Joe offers five predictions, including these: most states will end up expanding Medicaid, and there will be a lot more mergers and acquisitions at the highest levels, among providers, health care systems, and payers.