About Covid-19
COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan Applications Submitted from Foreign IP Addresses “We evaluated the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) controls to flag or prevent potentially fraudulent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) applications submitted from foreign Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
Although the agency implemented several layers of controls to prevent or reduce fraud from foreign countries, individuals at foreign IP addresses were able to access the COVID-19 EIDL application system. SBA received millions of attempts to submit COVID-19 EIDL applications from foreign IP addresses and stopped most of them; however, the agency processed more than 233,000 of these applications from March 20, 2020 to November 12, 2021, our review period. Of this amount, SBA approved and disbursed 41,638 COVID-19 EIDLs, advances, and grants for $1.3 billion.”
About health insurance/insurers
AMA Releases 2023 CPT Code Set, Aims to Reduce E/M Coding Burden The article provides a good summary of the changes.
Support for greater government role in health care for older adults “Expanding Medicare coverage of certain services is… popular across age groups, racial and ethnic groups, and party identification. More than 8 in 10 adults think Medicare coverage should be expanded to cover dental care (87%), eye examinations for prescription glasses (87%), hearing aids (86%), and long-term care (81%).
Public satisfaction with the current state of health care—overall and for older adults—is quite low. Just 12% of adults think health care in general is handled very or extremely well in the United States, and few think health care for older adults, community support and resources for older adults, and the quality of care at nursing homes are handled well.
Overall, 66% of adults think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health insurance coverage. Those age 18-49 are more likely to say so than those age 50 and older (73% vs. 58%). While those age 50 and older are more supportive of government policies to address the costs of care for older adults, younger adults are more supportive of a single-payer health care system for all Americans (47% vs. 38%).”
See the poll for more results.
About hospitals and healthcare systems
Purchaser Business Group on Health Announces Five-Year Plan, Goals to Reduce and Reallocate Health Care Spending in Push for Higher Value Care for its Members “The Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH), a nonprofit coalition of nearly 40 large, private employers and public health care purchasers committed to transforming health care nationwide, today announced a series of strategic goals that will guide the organization over the next five years. Additionally, the organization is launching a new public purchaser advisory committee to help better illuminate and address the unique needs of public purchasers, while enhancing its long-standing work aligning public and private efforts to reform health care payment. ..
Specifically, PBGH’s newly announced goals are to address:
Affordability by redirecting existing health care spend to high-quality, equitable and evidence-based care while holding total cost flat
Health by redirecting purchasing to support whole-person health (the full spectrum of medical, behavioral, socioeconomic and needs) and
create accountability for health and well-being outcomesEquity by eliminating disparities in care delivery and in health outcomes.
In a related article:EmsanaRx and Cleveland Clinic Collaborate to Bring Transparency to Pharmacy Benefits “EmsanaRx, a public benefit corporation, and Cleveland Clinic have announced a first-of-its-kind strategic affiliation today. This collaboration will align EmsanaRx with Cleveland Clinic to further both organizations’ mission of providing cost-effective, high-quality care.
Cleveland Clinic will advise clinicians and multidisciplinary teams at EmsanaRx to support the company’s formulary development and utilization management programs and inform some of its benefit offerings…
EmsanaRx is the first company launched by Emsana Health, an innovation studio created by the Purchaser Business Group on Health (PBGH) to tackle the largest problems facing employers today.”
About pharma
Examining 340B Hospital Price Transparency, Drug Profits, and Incentives Highlights:
“340B hospitals’ own self-reported pricing data reveals that they price the top oncology drugs at 4.9 times their 340B acquisition costs, assuming a 34.7 percent discount, which is a conservative estimate…
Hospitals remain slow to adopt biosimilars. For certain products, up to 26 percent of hospitals were found to only list prices for an innovator product but not its biosimilar and only 10 hospitals carry all of the biosimilars studied.
Cash paying patients, of whom many may be uninsured, receiving care at 340B hospitals do not seem to receive discounts on their drugs.”
About the public’s health
First US death due to monkeypox confirmed in Los Angeles County “A Los Angeles County resident's death has been attributed to monkeypox, the county Department of Public Health said Monday, the first known death from the virus in the US.
The department and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the link and said the person had a severely weakened immune system and had been hospitalized.”
Food Insecurity for Families With Children Reached Two-Decade Low in 2021 “Food insecurity for households with children declined to its lowest rate in two decades last year, the Agriculture Department said on Wednesday, as government assistance programs continued to blunt the effect of the coronavirus on the economy.
The department’s findings were in line with data last year showing that vast expansions of government aid helped reduce hunger. But experts warned that picture was almost certain to change as pandemic-era programs expire and inflation remains high.”
Biden touts cancer ‘moonshot’ at JFK Library, despite setbacks “Leaning into the symbolism of President John F. Kennedy’s aspirational effort to send a man to the moon, President Biden on Monday sought to give a renewed boost to his own “cancer moonshot” initiative, aimed at cutting the U.S. death toll from the disease in half over the next 25 years…
Biden on Monday also signed an executive order for a biotechnology initiative that the White House hopes will make the U.S. less dependent on foreign countries for the tools and raw materials needed for medical progress.”
Screening for Prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes in Children and Adolescents “The USPSTF concludes that the evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for type 2 diabetes in children and adolescents. There is a lack of evidence on the effect of screening for, and early detection and treatment of, type 2 diabetes on health outcomes in youth, and the balance of benefits and harms cannot be determined.”
FROM 2016 TO 2020, MENTAL HEALTH INEQUITIES COST NEARLY 117K LIVES, REPORT FINDS “KEY TAKEAWAYS
From 2016 to 2020, the costs associated with premature mental and behavioral health-related deaths among indigenous populations and racial and ethnic groups linked to mental illness, substance abuse, and suicide were $278 billion.
Solutions for mental health inequities include development of socio-culturally crafted approaches to mental and behavioral health services as well as tackling the social and political determinants of health inequities.”
About healthcare personnel
Physician Salaries Ranked by Hourly Rate Compare these hourlies to partners at a law firm.
Nurse practitioner will be fastest-growing job over next decade “The occupation with the highest projected percent change of employment in the U.S. between 2021 and 2031 is nurse practitioner, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bureau estimates that employment of nurse practitioners will grow by 46 percent during that period, from 246,700 to 359,400.
Other healthcare occupations among the 20 with the highest projected percent change of employment in the U.S. between 2021 and 2031 are:
Medical and health services managers (28 percent)
Physician assistants (28 percent)
Physical therapist assistants (26 percent)”
Doctor Wait Times Average Almost Four Weeks In Big Cities “Patients are waiting an average of 26 days for a scheduled appointment with a doctor, according to a study of commonly used specialty physicians in 15 major U.S. cities.
The survey by Merritt Hawkins, a unit of healthcare staffing firm AMN Healthcare, polled more than 1,000 physician offices looking at average wait times among family medicine, dermatology, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopedic surgery and cardiology.
The average wait time is up 8% from 24.1 days in 2017, ‘the last year the survey was conducted, and up from 21 days in 2004, when the survey first was conducted,’ according to Merritt Hawkins and AMN Healthcare…
Though the analysis looked at major U.S. cities, the wait times are likely worse elsewhere in the country given large markets tend to have more physicians because they are home to academic medical centers and high concentrations of healthcare facilities generally.”