The Wall Street Journal reports tonight that “White House negotiators said they aim to reach a deal with Democrats on a new coronavirus-relief package by the end of the week, with both sides saying they made progress in talks to bridge differences in unemployment payments and other aid proposals.” It’s hard to believe that a new law will not come out of these talks next week as it is a Presidential and Congressional election year.

The Journal also informs us that

The National Institutes of Health on Tuesday said it is launching wide-ranging studies of potential Covid-19 drugs known as monoclonal antibodies, the synthetic targeted versions of proteins produced by recovered Covid-19 patients.

The potential drugs that emerge from the research could be among the foremost medical treatments to prevent or treat infections with the new coronavirus while the U.S. and world await possible vaccines. Anthony S. Fauci, who heads the NIH institute overseeing the work, said monoclonal antibodies have great potential because they are specifically designed to block the virus from infecting a human cell.

Also on the COVID-19 front, the FEHBlog today ran across this handy CDC site full of varying U.S. map perspectives on the COVID-19 emergency. Check it out.

Promptly following up on the President’s executive order issued yesterday concerning rural healthcare access and telehealth, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has issued proposed rules that would implement significant aspects of the order. As part of this proposed rules package, CMS issued its proposed 2021 calendar year update to the Medicare Part B physician fee schedule. Here are Fierce Healthcare and Healthcare Dive articles on these actions.

Health Affairs alerts us that “Provider consolidation into vertically integrated health systems increased from 2016 to 2018. More than half of US physicians and 72 percent of hospitals were affiliated with one of 637 health systems in 2018. For-profit and church-operated systems had the largest increases in system size, driven in part by a large number of system mergers and acquisitions.” Check out this statistic — “the share of primary care physicians affiliated with vertically integrated health systems increased from 38 percent to 49 percent, or 11 percentage points, from 2016 to 2018.” This statistic is bound to keep growing as Baby Boomer physicians retire.

Since the NCQA Digital Quality Summit last month, the FEHBlog floated the idea of adding racial, ethnic, and gender identification to the ICD-10 as a way to help identify and address healthcare disparities. He notes that those codes could be added to the Z section of the ICD-10. It’s worth adding that SDOH considerations (which are not the same as racial disparity considerations) are already found in the Z section, e.g. , Z56 , Z59, and Z62 .