About health insurance/insurers
Four Million People Will Lose Health Insurance If Premium Tax Credit [PTC] Enhancements Expire in 2025 From The Urban Institute: “By our analysis, if PTC enhancements expire after 2025, subsidized Marketplace enrollment would decline by 7.2 million people, and 4.0 million people would become uninsured. However, these effects aren’t felt equally across states or by race, income, and age, which means some communities may experience greater coverage losses, making health care unaffordable and inaccessible. To explore these effects by state, we produced an interactive tool displaying effects on health insurance coverage in each state by age, income, race, and ethnicity.”
The State of Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S.: Findings from the Commonwealth Fund 2024 Biennial Health Insurance Survey “Survey Highlights
More than half (56%) of U.S. working-age adults were insured all year with coverage adequate to ensure affordable access to care. But there are soft spots requiring policy attention: 9 percent of adults were uninsured, 12 percent had a gap in coverage over the past year, and 23 percent were underinsured, meaning they had coverage for a full year that didn’t provide them with affordable access to heath care.
Among adults who were insured all year but underinsured, 66 percent had coverage through an employer, 16 percent were enrolled in Medicaid or Medicare, and 14 percent had a plan purchased in the marketplaces or the individual market.
Nearly three of five (57%) underinsured adults said they avoided getting needed health care because of its cost; 44 percent said they had medical or dental debt they were paying off over time.
Delaying care has health consequences: two of five (41%) working-age adults who reported a cost-related delay in their care said a health problem had worsened because of it.
Nearly half of adults (48%) with medical debt are paying off $2,000 or more; half of those with debt said it stemmed from a hospital stay.”
About pharma
CVS Health 1st to earn new health equity accreditation “CVS Health has become the first organization to receive the Health Equity Accreditation from URAC, an independent accrediting body, for its efforts to address health disparities, according to a Nov. 19 news release from the company.”
Trump leans toward selecting surgeon and COVID mandate critic Martin Makary for top FDA job: reports “England-born Makary, current chief of Inlet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins, has received worldwide recognition for his achievements in novel surgeries and widely-used research, including a World Health Organization-sponsored checklist on surgical safety.
On the drug policy front, Makary has previously raised concerns about pharmaceutical companies “gaming the system” of the Orphan Drug Act, a pathway used to usher in treatments for rare diseases.
More recently, Makary has been an outspoken critic of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, which ‘ignored natural immunity, he argued in 2023 remarks to the Senate’s COVID subcommittee. During the pandemic, natural immunity and herd immunity were topics often addressed by Makary, who expected the concepts to help COVID be ‘mostly gone’ by April 2021.
The possible FDA commissioner pick has also argued against the use of masks for children to reduce the spread of COVID and has been accused of using misleading claims to make criticisms of the U.S. government.”
About the public’s health
A quarter of Americans suffer from chronic pain “Researchers asked more than 87,000 people how often they experienced pain in the last three months and found 24.3% reported "most days" or "every day."
To get at how many people were experiencing what they called "high-impact chronic pain" the researchers asked how often people experienced pain that limited their life or work activities. A total of 8.5% said most or all days.
The risk for chronic pain rose as people aged and was highest in rural areas.
American Indian and Alaska Native adults were more likely to have chronic pain in the past three months (30.7%) compared with white (28%), Black (21.7%), Hispanic (17.1%) and Asian (11.8%) adults.”
Total and High-density Lipoprotein Cholesterol in Adults: United States, August 2021–August 2023 From the CDC: “Key findings
During August 2021–August 2023, the prevalence of high total cholesterol was 11.3% in adults, with no significant difference between men (10.6%) and women (11.9%).
The prevalence of low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) for adults was 13.8%, was higher in men (21.5%) than women (6.6%), and declined with increasing age.
High total cholesterol prevalence declined from 1999–2000 to 2013–2014 and then did not change significantly. Low HDL-C prevalence declined from 2007–2008 to August 2021–August 2023.”
About healthcare technology
Scientists map out the human body one cell at a time “Researchers have created an early map of some of the human body’s estimated 37.2 trillion cells…
Scientists focused on certain organs — plotting the jobs of cells in the mouth, stomach and intestines, as well as cells that guide how bones and joints develop. They also explored which cells group into tissues, where they’re located in the body and how they change over time.
They hope the high-resolution, open-access atlas — considered a first draft — will help researchers fight diseases that damage or corrupt human cells.”
See: Human Cell Atlas