From Washington, D.C.

• Politico tells us,
• “The House Energy and Commerce Committee will examine how Medicare pays doctors, Robert King reports.
• “The panel’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee will hold a hearing next week to get an update on the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, which overhauled the formula used to pay doctors under Medicare, members confirmed.
• “Doctors have complained that their Medicare payments are effectively being cut under the current system, fueling consolidation among doctors and hospitals.”

• HR Dive informs us
  • Employers will have to wait at least a few more months for some long-awaited regulatory changes, the U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday.
  • A proposal to increase the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime salary threshold previously expected in May has been pushed to August, DOL’s Wage and Hour Division indicated in its spring regulatory agenda.
  • A final rule expected from WHD, one that would likely tighten rules for classifying workers as independent contractors, was similarly delayed to August. Just days before the agency published its agenda, it also indicated in a court filing that it expects to have the independent contractor rule out soon — by October at the latest.

From the public health front –

• Health Day points out
  • “Most women diagnosed with early breast cancer will become long-term survivors, according to new research that finds a substantial reduction in the risk of death since the 1990s.
  • “This news should reassure both patients and their doctors, researchers report June 13 in the BMJ.
  • “Our study is good news for the great majority of women diagnosed with early breast cancer today because their prognosis has improved so much,” said the authors, who included Dr. Carolyn Taylor, a professor of oncology at the University of Oxford in England. 
  • “Most of them can expect to become long-term cancer survivors,” they added in a journal news release.”

• The National Institutes of Health announced
  • “Men were significantly more vulnerable than women to overdose deaths involving opioid and stimulant drugs in 2020-2021, according to a new study(link is external) analyzing death records data from across the United States. The study found that men had a 2–3 times greater rate of overdose mortality from opioids (like fentanyl and heroin) and psychostimulants (like methamphetamine and cocaine). While it has been known that men use drugs at higher rates than women, the researchers found that this alone does not explain the gap in overdose deaths, noting that biological, behavioral, and social factors likely combined to increase the mortality risk for men.
  • “The study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, was led by investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health.
  • “Though men and women are being exposed to the modern, fentanyl-contaminated drug supply, something is leading men to die at significantly higher rates. It may be that men use drugs more frequently or in greater doses, which could increase their risk of death, or there may be protective factors among women that reduce their risk of death compared to men,” said Nora Volkow, M.D., director of NIDA and one of the co-authors on the study. “Understanding the biological, behavioral, and social factors that impact drug use and our bodies’ responses is critical to developing tailored tools to protect people from fatal overdose and other harms of drug use.”

• NFC relates,
  • “Over the past 12 months, roughly half (45%) of American workers reported spending between $500 and $6,000 on mental health services, with nearly one-third (32%) saying they spent more than $1,501. This comes at a time when 95% of workers report they are concerned about the economic situation in the US, and financial worries are adding to their stress and burnout.
  • “Despite rising employee stress, fewer than 6% of employers say they spend more than $500 on mental health per employee, and 72% do not plan to add additional mental health support in the year ahead.
  • “These are among the findings from leading benefits consultant NFP’s 2023 US Benefits Trend Report.”

• Bloomberg reports on chemotherapy drug shortages facing our country.

In conference news, AHIP reports on the final day of its conference while Healthcare Dive discusses the actions taken at the AMA House of Delegates meeting. Beckers Hospital Review reports on Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams’ keynote speech at the AHIP conference.

From the U.S. healthcare business front —

• Beckers Hospital Review tells us
  • “A data visualizer shows the ten most similar hospitals to any one benchmark hospital, challenging traditional, ordinal rank lists in a time of great volatility for hospitals. 
  • “SimilarityIndex | Hospitals comes from Trilliant Health, which created the tool so health economy stakeholders can learn how similar a selected benchmark hospital is to — or different from — highly regarded U.S. hospitals. 
  • “Becker’s took the ten top-ranked hospitals from the latest U.S. News and World Report’s Honor Roll to find their five most similar aggregate peers. Their similarity scores are listed [in the article].” 

• BioPharma Dive reports
  • “Coherus BioSciences has batted back a legal challenge from AbbVie weeks before it plans to launch a much cheaper version of the latter company’s best-selling rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira.
  • “The latest dispute began after Coherus on June 1 announced plans to sell its biosimilar, dubbed Yusimry, at an 85% discount to Humira and work with Mark Cuban’s online pharmacy to provide it to other patients for even less starting in July. On June 6, Coherus received a notice from AbbVie saying that the plans violated a licensing agreement between the two companies.
  • “After a round of correspondence and dueling court filings, the companies resolved the dispute on Wednesday. AbbVie won’t terminate the license agreement based on its June 6 notice and agreed not to try to terminate the license in the future unless it both notifies Coherus of an alleged breach and also gives the company a chance to fix the problem, Coherus said in a regulatory filing.”

• KFF reports
  • “A new report has provided the first national count of Americans who rely on health care sharing plans — arrangements through which people agree to pay one another’s medical bills — and the number is higher than previously realized.
  • “The report from the Colorado Division of Insurance found that more than 1.7 million Americans rely on sharing plans and that many of the plans require members to ask for charity care before submitting their bills.
  • “The total membership numbers are likely even higher. The state agency collected data from 16 sharing plans across the U.S. but identified five other plans that did not report their data.
  • “These plans cover more people than we had previously known,” said JoAnn Volk, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.
  • “Under the arrangements, members, who usually share some religious beliefs, agree to send money each month to cover other members’ health care bills. At least 11 of the sharing plans that reported data operated in or advertised plans in all 50 states in 2021.”

• The Washington Post reports on consumer concerns about employer-sponsored and public health plans.
  • “By the numbers:
  • “About 26 percent said that a doctor covered by their insurance didn’t have any available appointments. One-third of Medicaid enrollees reported having such an issue.
  • “Roughly 18 percent of those surveyed indicated their insurance didn’t pay for care they thought was covered. That complaint was more common among those with employer-sponsored health insurance and Obamacare plans.
  • “Nearly 3 in 4 insured adults who have received mental health treatment in the past year report experiencing a problem with their insurance.”