In Case You Missed It: New From KHN This Week
For our East Coast readers who may have lost power this week, here are the top stories from KHN:
Insurance Policies Favoring Compounded Drugs For High-Risk Pregnancies Draw Scrutiny
Kaiser Health News staff writer Julie Appleby reports: "When a brand-name drug to help prevent premature births was approved last year, its $1,500-a-dose-price alarmed state and private sector insurance officials. Many restricted use of the FDA-approved Makena in favor of $20- to $40-a-dose versions that had been made for years by pharmacies, saying that would give more women access to the treatment. Federal officials, sympathetic to such arguments, allowed the pharmacies to continue making the unapproved drugs" (Appleby, 10/30). Read the story.
Consumer Advocate Cautions That State Rules Will Impact Scope Of Health Law
Kaiser Health News consumer columnist Michelle Andrews talked with Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee and a co-author of a report a group of patient advocates and health policy experts that describes problems consumers might encounter under the health law's insurance reforms. He talked about some of the ways consumers' interests could be shortchanged if insurance rules that are being developed for the implementation of the health law don’t provide specific protections (Andrews, 10/29). Read the interview.
Health Law's Promise Of Coverage Not Resonating With Miami's Uninsured
Reporting for Kaiser Health News, in collaboration with The Washington Post, Guy Gugliotta writes: "Miami-Dade is Florida's biggest county, and Florida, with 29 electoral votes, is the largest of the critical swing states in the Nov. 6 general election. Health care routinely polls nationally as one of the nation's top two or three concerns, and in Florida in August, a Quinnipiac/CBS/New York Times poll of likely voters put it in second place, four points behind the economy, and well ahead of Medicare and the budget deficit. With this high profile, the availability of health insurance should loom as a pivotal issue for Miami-Dade's uninsured voters. ... Yet most uninsured patients interviewed in mid-October visits to Peñalver and the Helen B. Bentley Health Center in Coconut Grove, did not routinely link their concerns about health care to their voting intentions" (Gugliotta, 10/29). Read the story.
How The Individual Mandate Penalty Will Be Calculated
In this Kaiser Health News video, Insuring Your Health columnist Michelle Andrews answers a reader question about the requirement to carry health insurance in 2014 and the options for subsidized coverage (10/28). Watch the video.