Viewpoints: Opening For Medicare Long-Term Care?; Texas Seeks Planned Parenthood Money
A selection of opinions on health care from around the country.
Forbes:
Congress May Open The Door To Some Medicare Long-Term Care
Congress is taking a small, but important, step towards expanding Medicare to include some long-term supports and services. ... the biggest changes would apply to the care provided by managed care programs. One would expand the use of those special needs plans, which are explicitly aimed at people with chronic conditions and high medical needs. Some of these programs already provide supports and services as part of their benefit packages but they remain relatively small. The other would give Medicare Advantage plans important new flexibility to offer social supports and other non-medical services to their members. (Howard Gleckman, 5/17)
Los Angeles Times:
Texas Wants To Use Federal Money To Attack Planned Parenthood — And Might Get It
Five years ago, Texas voluntarily gave up $30 million a year in federal funding for women’s health programs, just so it could exclude Planned Parenthood from the roster of approved providers. Instead, the state established its own so-called Healthy Texas Women program in which it could set its own rules. Now, staggering under the cost of the program and hopeful that the Trump administration will see things its way, Texas is applying for a restoration of the federal subsidy under the same terms. Signals from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services suggest the state might succeed. If so, some other states may follow, and the cause of women’s reproductive health will suffer a major blow. (Michael Hiltzik, 5/18)
Des Moines Register:
Health Has No Religion; Health Care Shouldn't Have One Either
A policy with wide-ranging consequences for patients of Mercy Medical Center was made public recently through a Facebook post on a page for mothers. It came from a woman who was denied a tubal ligation after having a cesarean section because Mercy is a Catholic hospital. In verifying that prohibition, I discovered other religious-based restrictions at Mercy and 547 other Catholic hospitals across the U.S. How are these institutions fulfilling their legal and professional obligations to their patients and the taxpayers who subsidize them with billions of dollars? (Rekha Basu, 5/18)
Next Avenue:
Aging at Home Will Be Harder With Medicaid Cuts
Proposed cuts to Medicaid under the American Health Care Act passed by the House recently could change life for (Ti) Randall and many others. Medicaid is not only an insurance program for low-income people. It’s a lifeline for older adults like Randall who need supportive services to stay at home. At-home services are a lifeline for Medicaid as well, which would otherwise be paying for more expensive care in an institutional setting. (Beth Baker, 5/17)
Stat:
Doctors Must Be Honest About Their Own Biases When Treating People In Pain
Many doctors enter medicine to prevent and treat suffering. Yet it seems that as we advance in our training, the more bothersome and frustrating evaluations of pain become. We want to make people feel better, but we don’t always know why or how much someone is hurting. And there are consequences of both prescribing too much or too little pain relief. So we turn to this language to minimize the pain we don’t understand or can’t fix. Unfortunately, this tends to occur more often with patients of color. (Katherine Brooks, 5/17)
Stat:
Why Taking Drugs To Treat Addiction Doesn't Mean You're 'Still Addicted'
My patient was lucky: He didn’t die because of a widely held, and completely inaccurate, definition of addiction — one that was recently supported by remarks from Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who disparaged medication use as merely “substituting one opioid for another.” But until politicians, the media, and the public catch up with addiction science, we will not be able to stop the epidemic of overdose deaths. (Sarah E. Wakeman and Maia Szalavitz, 5/18)
JAMA:
Primary Care Of Patients With Chronic Pain
Primary care physicians have the responsibility for the care of patients with chronic pain, often in follow-up to an episode of acute pain treated in an urgent care center, emergency department, or specialty clinic setting. The lack of a full understanding of how chronic pain differs from acute pain can lead to all pain being treated as acute pain, often with opioids. The current widespread use of opioids is essentially a case-finding system that identifies the roughly one-sixth of the adult population particularly susceptible to opioid misuse, sometimes leading to escalating doses, a shift to illegal nonprescription opioids, addiction, and unintentional overdose. (Jill Schneiderhan, Daniel Clauw and Thomas L. Schwenk, 5/18)
Des Moines Register:
Iowa Should Allow Needle Exchange Programs
The Iowa Department of Public Health in February released its first report on hepatitis C infections in this state. The number of Iowans diagnosed with the liver-damaging virus that can lead to death has increased nearly three-fold, from 754 cases in 2000 to 2,235 cases in 2015. The number of infected Iowans aged 18 to 30 has quadrupled in recent years. ... preventing the spread of the virus is so important, and Iowa is not doing all it can. Unlike several other states, we do not have a needle exchange program, which is an important part of infection prevention. (5/18)
The (Eugene, Ore.) Register-Guard:
Oregon’s Medicaid Mess
"Troubling” doesn’t begin to describe the current situation at the Oregon Health Authority, which, state auditors have discovered, has been doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients who may or may not be eligible for the benefits. ... About three years ago, Oregon got permission from federal regulators to temporarily quit verifying that each OHP patient still qualified for Medicaid. At the time, the state was in the throes of extricating itself from Cover Oregon, which failed spectacularly in setting up an online program to enroll people in health care. Somehow, the state never got around to resuming these routine eligibility checks. (5/19)
Morning Consult:
Turning Up The Volume On Over-The-Counter Hearing Aids
Hearing aids currently cost around $5,000 per pair. Fitting and tuning are not covered by Medicare or most private insurance plans. Unable to afford these out-of-pocket costs, nearly 80 percent of Americans with hearing loss choose to suffer on their own. ... It shouldn’t be this way. The technology exists to deliver relief to these patients and the families that love them. But government has to act to ensure that those who stand to gain the most from that innovation are able to access it. The Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017 would be a needed update to federal policy. (Rep. Joe Kennedy III (R-Mass.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), 5/18)
The Kansas City Star:
Vital Diabetes Device Denied By Medicare
I’m angry because people like me are being denied an essential medical treatment by Medicare, the federal program that’s supposed to be supporting seniors, not forcing them to abandon an essential medical device. The device I use is called Omnipod. It’s a wireless insulin delivery pump. ... A few months before turning 65, I was told that unlike almost all private insurers in this country, Medicare wouldn’t pay for Omnipod. And I was even more confused to learn that this was the only FDA-approved insulin pump not covered by Medicare. (Susan Vietti, 5/18)