Healthcare Monday

A slow day Monday on Capitol Hill, where House lawmakers will be filtering in advance of Tuesday's scheduled vote on emergency Medicaid funding. The proposal, passed by the Senate last week, would provide cash-strapped states with $16.1 billion in Medicaid funds over the first half of next year. 

The figure represents a 3.2 percent hike in Medicaid's Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) in the first quarter of 2011, and a 1.2 percent FMAP bump in the second quarter. 

The $16.1 billion was less than Democrats wanted to lend (the initial proposal was $24 billion), but deficit spending concerns forced Senate leaders to scale back their proposal to attract the support of some GOP centrists.

The Senate left for its August vacation last week, and will return after Labor Day. 

IN THE NEWS

• President Obama used his weekly radio address to trumpet the latest report from Medicare's trustees, who found that the Democrats' healthcare reform law has extended the program's solvency by 12 years.

"We’ve made Medicare more solvent by going after waste, fraud, and abuse — not by changing seniors’ guaranteed benefits," the president said Saturday. "In fact, seniors are starting to see that because of health reform, their benefits are getting better all the time."

• Democrats still aren't showing much alacrity to run this campaign season on their health reform victory. "In an effort coordinated with the White House," the L.A. Times reports, "congressional leaders are urging Democrats to focus less on bragging about what they have done — a landmark healthcare law, a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street regulation and other far-reaching policy changes — and more on efforts to fix the economy and on the perils of Republican control of Congress."

• What do unicorns and accountable care organizations have in common? Quite a bit, one health analyst argues. 

• Some House Dems like the idea of prosecuting those reselling contaminated FEMA trailers — a remnant of the Hurricane Katrina response — to BP oil-spill workers. 

• In the nation's only uranium conversion plant, a labor battle is raging over the company's plan to slash healthcare benefits.

• End-of-life care is back in the headlines. "Last year, Medicare paid $55 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives," CBS notes. 

"That's more than the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Education. And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenses may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked." 

• Malnourishment is rampant in India, as thousands slip through the country's safety net.

OVERHEARD

In a thinly veiled shot at Kentucky GOP leaders critical of healthcare reform, Judy Myers, a Louisville-based nurse with the Friedell Committee for Health System Transformation, warns that a conservative approach to implementation threatens to "squander" the state's opportunity to improve healthcare delivery. 

"We are a small, rural, relatively poor, conservative state where change is often resisted, rather than embraced, thus it is likely that implementing the new law in our state will be challenging and difficult," Myers writes in the Lexington Herald-Leader. "If we use the new money and resources to try to solve persistent problems with the same old ways of doing things, we are not likely to see improvement in the quality or cost of health care." 

AROUND TOWN

• The nurse anesthetist lobby on Monday will urge the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to repeal its physician supervision requirement. The groups will trumpet a new Health Affairs report indicating no negative health effects when anesthetists work without physician supervision. 

Repeal, the authors of the report argue, “would free surgeons from the legal responsibility for anesthesia services provided by other professionals [and] would also lead to more-cost effective care as the solo practice of [anesthetists] increases.”

• The Center for American Progress hosts a forum touting the economic benefits of community health centers.

• And Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) plans a busy week of healthcare discussions in North Texas.