Monday, June 5, 2017

Opinion: The Affordable Care Act is still law. Signing up for health insurance is still hard

By Daniel Marchalik

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The call from the emergency department came in just as my urology clinic was winding down. “I’ve got a young guy here with a testicular mass; it doesn’t look good,” said the physician on the other end of the line.

I walked down to the department’s overflow section and found Jason sitting up on a gurney. On the chair next to him hung the freshly pressed shirt he had exchanged for the standard-issue green and beige hospital gown. Jason was worried — over the last nine months, his left testicle had been getting progressively larger, and today it was causing him severe pain. I examined him and said we would need to run some more tests and imaging studies; I was worried, too.

By Associated Press

Susan Walsh/AP

WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin said Monday the department will be overhauling its electronic health records, adopting a commercial product used by the Pentagon that he hopes will improve care for veterans and reduce wait times for medical appointments.

Shulkin made the announcement at a news conference following a promotional tweet by President Trump that it will “be a big day for our veterans.”

By Liz Szabo — Kaiser Health News

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Less and less of the research presented at a prominent cancer conference is supported by the National Institutes of Health, a development that some of the country’s top scientists see as a worrisome trend.

The number of studies fully funded by the NIH at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) — the world’s largest gathering of cancer researchers — has fallen 75 percent in the past decade, from 575 papers in 2008 to 144 this year, according to the society, which meets Friday through Tuesday in Chicago.

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STAT Plus: A last-ditch effort is underway to revive a Nevada bill to contain diabetes drug costs

By Ed Silverman

Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

In a last-ditch effort, the Nevada state Senate late Sunday night passed legislation that combines Democratic and Republican efforts to contain the rising cost of diabetes drugs.

The move comes as the Nevada legislature holds it last day of the session and two days after the Nevada governor, a Republican, vetoed one of the bills over concerns it could backfire by hurting patients and might also raise thorny legal questions. That legislation, which was introduced by a Democratic state senator, would have drug makers report pricing histories and disclose costs, among other things.

By Chris Pope

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Reforms to Medicaid proposed in the Republican-led American Health Care Act have provoked a certain degree of hysteria. Politicians, interest groups, and lobbyists have launched epithets at them ranging from “unsustainable” and “damaging” and have warned that the reforms are the “real death panels” and that “people will die.” A recent report from the Brookings Institution turned up the heat by suggesting that “implementing a Medicaid per-capita cap during the 2000s would have reduced federal Medicaid funding to more than half of states.”

The federal government currently allocates Medicaid money to states according to how much they are themselves able to spend on the program. The AHCA’s proposed caps would limit the amount by which each state is able to automatically claim increases in funding per Medicaid enrollee from federal taxpayers in any particular year.