Health Care Reform Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

November 15, 2020

Weary justices skeptical about GOP plan for high court to kill Obamacare

Although it’s risky to read too much into justices’ comments about cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, legal analysts found strong suggestions in such remarks to assert that the latest GOP challenge to the Affordable Care Act may have exceeded the legal validity of its extreme contentions.

This could mean that Republicans — state attorneys general as well as the Trump Administration — may find failure in California v. Texas. This is political partisans’ legal push to get the high court to strike down Obamacare, focusing on the individual mandate that imposed financial penalties to ensure that Americans obtain health insurance.

The mandate originally was portrayed by supporters as integral to Obamacare, ensuring its insurance markets did not get swamped with only the poorest and sickest Americans and dooming federal efforts to provide affordable health coverage to poorer and middle-class Americans. The high court, in an earlier and important case, upheld the ACA, arguing its use of the mandate was a legitimate exercise of government taxing powers.

November 13, 2020

Patients finally gaining new access to medical records and doctors’ notes

by Patrick A. Malone

Millions of Americans may be finding that their doctors routinely refer to them with terms like SOB and BS. But patients will be better off with this knowledge, once they learn how to translate medical abbreviations.

The Associated Press reported that hospitals and health care systems nationwide quietly are complying with deadlines, and, under a 2016 federal law, are opening up convenient, fast access to patients to not only view and access their electronic health records but also physicians’ notes about their care. As the AP wrote:

“If you already use a patient portal such as MyChart to email your doctor or schedule an appointment, you may soon see new options allowing you to view your doctor’s notes and see your test results as soon as they are available. You may get an email explaining where to look, how to share access with a caregiver and how to keep other eyes off your information. Many people won’t notice a change. About 15% of health care systems already are letting patients read doctor notes online without charge. That means about 53 million patients already have access to their doctor’s notes.”

November 8, 2020

As nation focused on vote tallies, coronavirus cases and deaths kept soaring

by Patrick A. Malone

While Americans have been riveted for days about incremental shifts in election results, other confounding numbers raced ever higher and into worrisome places. Just consider these numbers: 128,000, 9.6 million plus, and 235,000 and more.

“Covid, covid, covid. By the way, on Nov. 4 you won’t hear about it anymore,” President Trump asserted during his closing re-election campaign rallies.

If only. The nation’s coronavirus pandemic is unchecked and showing signs of worsening, bigly, with records shattering on consecutive days for infections diagnosed: 100,000 on Nov. 4, 120,000 on Nov. 5, and 128,000 on Nov. 6.

October 18, 2020

Centuries of restraint fall: Top journals assail Trump’s science denialism

by Patrick A. Malone

They are a unique combination — august publications in science and medicine that harken back for centuries yet now inform 21^st century practitioners about the latest advances in their fields. And now these leading scientific journals say the present moment forces them to abandon their prized political neutrality to oppose the science denialism of the incumbent leader of the free world.

This is an unprecedented and uncomfortable development for the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Scientific American, and Lancet Oncology (a journal for cancer specialists). They have never taken a political stand of this kind in their histories, dating to 1812 for NEJM, 1845 for Scientific American, and 1869 for Nature.

Their editors say they would much prefer to stay out of presidential endorsements and to keep their focus on publishing important, rigorous research and peer-reviewed information about advancements in the fields of science and medicine.

October 2, 2020

In the midst of a crisis, Trump administration throws billions at giveaways to favored political targets

by Patrick A. Malone

Taxpayers and lawmakers have ensured that the federal Health and Human Services agency operates with roughly $2 trillion in discretionary and mandatory funding. This means the agency can employ about 80,000 staffers, many of them top experts in medical science, health care policy, and public health.

This concentration of expertise and experience, however, may mean less than ever.

That’s because just one man, and his hand-picked few, insist that they hold the absolute power to make life and death decisions for more than 330 million Americans, especially when it comes to health care and government spending on it.

September 22, 2020

Here are 7 big reasons why Americans should worry a lot about health care

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans have made health care a central concern of the upcoming elections with excellent reasons. Their nightmares about this issue are getting worse, not better:

Medical debt, one of the disgraces of the world’s most expensive health care in the planet’s wealthiest nations, has spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic. A consumer finance firm recently found that its 22 million members carry $45 billion in bills owed to providers and in collections. With the coronavirus also staggering the economy, bankrupting medical debt is only likely to skyrocket as the nation’s 30 million jobless exhaust their finances and lose health insurance from their work.
Health insurance offers one of the few widely available means for ordinary folks to try to protect themselves and their loved ones from seeing their finances destroyed by illness or injury. But new U.S. Census data, describing a time before the pandemic, shows that “the first three years of President Trump’s tenure were a period of contracting health insurance coverage,” the Washington Post reported. “The decreases reversed gains that began near the end of the Great Recession and accelerated during early years of expanded access to health plans and Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act — the sprawling law that was a signature domestic achievement of President Barack Obama and has been derided by Republicans, including Trump, ever since.” Just under 30 million Americans were uninsured — 1 in 10 of us, with the numbers rising by several million over the last several years of the Trump term.

September 11, 2020

California, calling drug price rises unbearable, leaps into making generics

by Patrick A. Malone

Although President Trump has made California a favored object of scorn, the Golden State has put itself on a path to help patients better rein in Big Pharma price gouging on prescription drugs in a way that Washington hasn’t. California lawmakers have given the green light for the state to leap into making generic drugs, notably affordable insulin to assist diabetics.

The state legislative season ended with a bill, advancing to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature by Sept. 30. The bill orders California’s top health agencies by January to partner with existing makers to develop and produce generics and biosimilars. As the Los Angeles Times reported of the California pharmaceuticals plan detailed in SB-852:

“Under the measure, state-developed generics would be ‘widely’ available to public and private purchasers within California. Taxpayers would pick up the costs — roughly $1 million to $2 million in startup funding, plus ongoing staff costs estimated in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, according to a state fiscal analysis. It’s unclear which drugs the state would make or procure, though it would target drugs that could produce the biggest cost savings for the state and consumers.

September 3, 2020

With conventions over, who will support or tear down crucial health supports?

by Patrick A. Malone

Health care persists as one of the top concerns for voters as they consider candidates this fall — not just for the presidency but up and down the ballot.

A lot got said at the political conventions in the last two weeks on the topic, and, to their credit, media organizations have engaged in fact-checking and myth-busting about health-related topics.

But beyond the crafted speeches over four nights for each party and looming past the repeated talking points of the candidates and their hand-picked supporters, voters will confront issues of huge gravity — some well known and others maybe less so.

June 30, 2020

GOP keeps insisting on a health care showdown. Voters may give it to them.

by Patrick A. Malone

In the middle of a pandemic with a novel virus that has infected at least 2.5 million Americans and killed roughly 127,000, and with 20 million people jobless, what is a prime Republican response? They are advancing yet again a court case to strip tens of millions of poor, working poor, and middle-class Americans of health insurance.

By the way, when doing so — by seeking a total repeal of the Affordable Care Act — the Trump Administration and a collection of states led by Republican attorneys general also would put at huge risk key health insurance safeguards that Americans embrace, including:

They no longer would be guaranteed the protection of insurers denying them coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

June 24, 2020

New twists with job-related health coverage for unemployed and vulnerable

by Patrick A. Malone

Wall Street investors may be seeing their portfolios flush again. But the Covid-19 pandemic has left tens of millions of Americans jobless. And if the once-flourishing health care business has not snapped back into rosy condition as it so often has in difficult times, the battle of the last decade over health insurance will haunt patients and employers throughout the coronavirus infection.

The New York Times reported that record-setting, sudden unemployment has exposed the perils to workers of their reliance on health insurance they get via their jobs:

“While hospitals and doctors across the country say many patients are still shunning their services out of fear of contagion — especially with new [Covid-19] cases spiking — Americans who lost their jobs or have a significant drop in income during the pandemic are now citing costs as the overriding reason they do not seek the health care they need. ‘We are seeing the financial pressure hit,’ said Dr. Bijoy Telivala, a cancer specialist in Jacksonville, Fla. ‘This is a real worry,’ he added, explaining that people are weighing putting food on the table against their need for care. ‘You don’t want a 5-year-old going hungry.