TODAY’S MUST-READ
National Health Care Spending In 2018: Growth Driven By Accelerations In Medicare And Private Insurance Spending: Every year Health Affairs publishes a summary of national healthcare costs by category and explains changes, which usually have different causes from year to year. This open-access article is the latest update. One major take-away is: “Much of the faster spending growth in 2018 was associated not with expenditures for goods and services but instead with the net cost of health insurance (the amount of insurance spending attributed to nonmedical expenses, including administration, taxes, and underwriting gains or losses). The net cost of health insurance grew more rapidly in 2018, increasing 13.2 percent after growing 4.3 percent in 2017. The faster growth in 2018 was driven primarily by the health insurance tax, a fee that was reinstated in 2018 following a one-year moratorium in 2017.”
About health insurance
Americans Still Favor Private Healthcare System: According to a recent Gallup poll: “Americans continue to prefer a healthcare system based on private insurance (54%) over a government-run healthcare system (42%). Support for a government-run system averaged 36% from 2010 to 2014 but has been 40% or higher each of the past five years.”
ACA health coverage enrollments down 300K from same time last year: After a slow start, enrollment accelerated and it looked like it was on track to match last year’s numbers. The figures are now 300,000 behind the same time last year. “CMS reported that technical issues prevented some people from choosing a 2020 plan on the first day of open enrollment, which may have contributed to the lower sign-up total.”
MedPAC: Hospitals got $201B in Medicare payments last year, a 3.6% bump from 2017: “While payments to hospitals overall grew by 3.6% last year, payments for outpatient services increased by 7.2% under Medicare’s Outpatient Prospective Payment System. The reason for the hike was due to increases in physician-administered drugs in Part B and new and expensive drugs.
Another reason was hospitals shifting services from inpatient to outpatient departments…”
About pharma
House Republicans will unveil their own drug pricing bill as countermove to Nancy Pelosi: House Republicans met to craft their own drug pricing bill in anticipation of Speaker Pelosi’s release of her plan next week. In the meantime the bipartisan Senate bill, cosponsored by Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is still on the table. We need to see how the details of all the proposals will get reconciled; but most policy experts do not see any law being passed before year’s end.
The top 15 biopharma M&A mistakes of the last decade: The article is an interesting overview of where biopharma companies “went wrong” in the last decades. Lots of material for case discussions.
About the public’s health
More than 6 million US middle and high schoolers used tobacco products in 2019, report says: The CDC survey “found that 1 in 3 high school students and around 1 in 8 middle school students are current tobacco users, meaning they had used the product at least once in the 30 days.
For the sixth year in a row, e-cigarettes were the most commonly used tobacco product among high school and middle school students. More than 55% of students reported using e-cigarettes only. Other tobacco products used by students included cigars, cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, hookahs and pipe tobacco.
More than 53% of high school students and more than 23% of middle school students reported ever trying a tobacco product.” Clearly we still have a big problem. The most successful strategy to lower smoking rates has been to increase prices (mostly through taxes).
About healthcare IT
Deep learning identifies colorectal cancer tumors with 100 percent accuracy: Combining visual inspection during colonoscopy with “deep learning,” called optical coherence tomography (OCT), can detect nearly 100% of tumors.