House rejects 'right to try,' why health spending is so high, & OB-GYNs on Capitol Hill

House rejects controversial 'right-to-try' bill

In a surprising vote, the House rejected a controversial "right-to-try" bill last night that would've offered terminally ill patients a way to get around FDA rules to request an experimental treatment from a drug maker before it's been approved. The 259-140 vote is a defeat for House Republicans that pushed the bill, but also for President Trump, who had called on Congress to quickly pass such a measure, and Vice President Mike Pence, who has long supported the effort.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleague, New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, spent yesterday urging their peers to oppose the bill. Critics say the bill would undermine the FDA, which already has a program in place to offer access to unapproved drugs to terminally ill patients. It's not clear yet what the next steps will be — if there are any at all. Get the details from STAT's Erin Mershon here.

Why does the U.S. spend so much on health care?

A new report finds the U.S. spent nearly twice as much on health care in 2016 as 10 other high-income countries — but by and large, our health outcomes are worse. The U.S. had the highest maternal and infant mortality rates and the lowest life expectancy of the 11 countries included in the study. So what’s driving that difference in spending? A look at the numbers:

§ We spend a lot on health care. The U.S. spent about $1,443 a person on health care in 2016. The next highest: Switzerland, which shelled out $939 per person.

§ But it’s not because we use it much more often. For the most part, people in the U.S. used health care services about as often as people in other countries.

§ Prices for goods, like prescription drugs, seem to play a big part. Take the cholesterol drug Crestor, with a list price of $86 per month in the U.S., but $41 in Germany and $9 in Australia.

§ So do labor costs, such as physician salaries. General physicians in the U.S. had the highest salary of any country in the study, making $218,173 on average, compared to $154,126 in Germany, which had the next highest salary.

Suicide rates are climbing unevenly across the U.S.

(university of washington / jama)

As suicide rates continue to climb across the U.S., some counties are being hit particularly hard by the crisis, according to a new analysis. There were nearly 1.3 million suicides in the U.S. between 1980 and 2014. And while the death rate due to self-harm fell between 1980 and 2000, it’s been rising in the years since. In 2014, there were 13.9 suicides per 100,000 people nationwide. But some counties — most of them in less populated areas of the Western U.S. where firearms are more available, the researchers say — are seeing roughly seven times that death rate.

"Increasing mortality rates — especially from a preventable cause of death like self-harm — are always cause for alarm," study author Laura Dwyer-Lindgren of the University of Washington tells me. "This finding in particular illustrates the need to pay attention to, and respond to, local trends."

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Inside STAT: Biotech tries to break bread with Silicon Valley's disruptors

The multitrillion-dollar drug industry is trying to disrupt with the kids, and it’s running into a communications gap. At SXSW this week, biotech has been trying to elbow its way into a conference that has ceded most of its time to tech. And while Uber and Spotify hosted line-out-the-door events, the drug industry's efforts have mostly been awkward attempts to speak the SXSW language, like when pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb tried to rope in conference attendees with a session on “hacking childhood cancer.” STAT's Damian Garde visited Austin to get an idea of where biotech stands in the SXSW hierarchy — read here.

OB-GYNs lobby Congress on maternal mortality

Hundreds of obstetricians and gynecologists descended on Capitol Hill yesterday to advocate for women's health care, an effort organized by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Their goals: Get lawmakers to devote more resources to studying high maternal mortality rates in the U.S. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at preventing maternal deaths, but the measure never made it close to the president's desk. The OB-GYNs also pushed lawmakers to protect Medicaid — which pays for nearly half of births in the U.S. each year — from cuts.

Patient groups push to stabilize insurance markets

Dozens of patient and consumer groups are urging Congress to include legislation to stabilize the health insurance markets in the big spending bill that's currently in the works. There are a handful of proposals on the table in Congress right now to get shaky ACA markets on more solid ground, including giving insurers more money, called cost-sharing reductions, as a way to lower premiums. The American Heart Association and 19 other groups put out a statement this week urging Congress to "move swiftly, so that plans on state exchanges can stabilize, and perhaps lower, premiums for the millions of Americans who will turn to the marketplace for coverage next year."