Healthcare

Today, the Senate Committee on Aging is holding a hearing on the National Alzheimer’s Plan. The efforts outlined in the plan, as well as the research work shepherded by biopharmaceutical research companies, can only move forward if we have a consistent and comprehensive set of patient-centric public policies.

On Wednesday, members of the House will have a clear choice. Vote for H.R. 1549, the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, to defund a key ObamaCare slush fund and cripple the administration’s implementation efforts. Or, vote against the bill, which would allow for the continued implementation of the guts of ObamaCare through an unaccountable slush fund wielded by the administration.  

This week, a study released by a leading economist, Alex Brill, highlights shortcomings in how Congress estimates the costs of health proposals: our model timelines are too short to capture the true effects of good legislation.  So while we work to advance policies that help address the prevalence of chronic diseases – including obesity, diabetes and heart disease –our budgeters do not tell us whether these policies will work in the long-term and what savings they generate. Read more...

ObamaCare champions made many promises during debate about the law—such as that it wouldn’t add to the deficit and Americans who like their health insurance would get to keep it—which have since been broken. But there’s one promise the Administration can and should keep: the promise made to help people with pre-existing conditions.

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During the last three decades, the biopharmaceutical industry has invested significantly in new and improved vaccines. The results have provided remarkable new ways to prevent cases of cervical cancer, meningitis, pneumonia, pandemic influenza, and rotavirus diseases.
 
The collaborative efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), national governments and industry have led to major progress in addressing global immunization goals and reducing illness and death due to vaccine-preventable diseases.

Wikipedia changed the way we look up ideas. GPS revolutionized how we get from point A to point B.  Digital cameras transformed photography. What if new technology could do the same for tobacco? It could, if industry and government regulators were willing to reexamine their long held beliefs about tobacco harm reduction.

For too many years, tobacco policy has been mired in an all-or-nothing philosophy. Under this approach, smokers were presented with just one alternative: quit. This mindset, however, has led to a destructive debate that has prevented the implementation of a comprehensive public health strategy designed to reduce tobacco-related disease.

The Obama administration recently announced that later this year negotiations will start for a Transatlantic trade and investment agreement with the European Union. This move anticipates the completion of the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) negotiations this fall. In the coming weeks, the administration will be asking Congress for trade promotion – or “fast track” - authority to cover both treaties.

The TPPA has been touted as the model trade agreement for the 21st century, and the U.S. hopes that it will serve as a rough draft for the Atlantic treaty. Eleven countries are involved, with others in the pipeline, and it will be the largest trading regime in the world save the WTO. It also seeks to liberalize trade in new and significant ways, giving foreign corporate investors unprecedented rights and protections. It has been described as “NAFTA on steroids.”

Three years to the day after President Obama signed into law his massive healthcare overhaul, the Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure to repeal two provisions limiting families’ freedoms. For a brief moment in Washington, politics took a back seat, and the needs of nearly 33 million Americans were addressed.
 
These families, who take the initiative to budget for their healthcare expenses using flexible spending accounts (FSAs) or health savings accounts (HSAs), were some of the first to feel the impacts of the president’s health law. It requires them to obtain a doctor’s prescription to purchase over-the-counter (OTC) medications with their own money set aside specifically to cover health-related expenses. Beginning this year, it places a $2,500 cap on FSA contributions, limiting families’ abilities to use specialized accounts to pay for medical expenses sometimes not covered by health insurance.

When it comes to health care there are many challenges and chief among them is cost. In 2009, Congress and the nation engaged in a broad debate about the direction of federal healthcare reform. On our side of the aisle, we warned that not enough attention was being paid to affordability and too much focus went into expanding federal control. We all know how the story unfolded from there. Those warnings fell on deaf ears, and the president followed the partisan path to health reform.

Wednesday, Gov. Bill Haslam (R-Tenn.) announced that the state of Tennessee would not expand Medicaid as envisioned by President Obama under the Affordable Care Act. The federal government’s insistence on a one-size-fits-all approach under Medicaid is a poor solution for solving our health insurance access problems, especially given the access problems so many of our citizens already face under this program. The governor’s preferred approach – to use federal dollars to expand Tennesseans’ access to private coverage – seems like it may be a better solution for access to health insurance, and it seems to me he deserves an opportunity to put this plan to the test.