Midweek update

Healthcare Dive reports on the National Business Group on Health’s (“NBGH”) 2021 Large Employer Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey. This squib caught the FEHBlog’s eye:

Beyond expanding online mental health resources, respondents also mentioned interest in virtual care for musculoskeletal management conditions. Musculoskeletal conditions were most frequently cited by employers as contributing to rising health care costs, and 29% of those surveyed said they will offer musculoskeletal management virtually next year.

[NBGH President Ellen] Kelsay said virtual treatments for common joint conditions can help stave off unnecessary surgical interventions, and “now that we have a workforce that for many months has been working at home and probably not in the most ideal of ergonomic situations, we expect to see musculoskeletal conditions continue to worsen.”

If the FEHBlog were an employer in northeastern Ohio, he would jump at the new accountable care organization (“ACO”) that Aetna and the Cleveland Clinic have announced today. Here’s Beckers Payer Issues report on the arrangement. The FEHBlog loves the ACO concept.

The FEHBlog also has been intrigued by the research effort to develop convalescent plasma therapy for COVID-19. The AP reports today that the FDA is not ready to give emergency use authorization to this treatment because reliable evidence of efficacy has not emerged from currently reported studies. The FEHBlog was encouraged to find that yesterday “the National Institutes of Health awarded Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore a $4.3 million grant to support a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 clinical trial that launched in April to evaluate the efficacy of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19.” The public will be better served by waiting for the results of this study.

The FEHBlog ran across this CDC site on COVID-19 contact tracing, a topic that has been in the news lately. It may be helpful for health plans to share this information with their members.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court calendared the Texas v. California case for oral argument on November 10, 2020. This is the third case to present the issue of the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. In the FEHBlog’s legal opinion, the Supreme Court unanimously will support the ACA’s constitutionality in this case. The Supreme Court took this case to stop the Fifth Circuit court of appeals from slicing up the law based on a flawed severability analysis, not to strike the law down. The proof is in the pudding — the ACA marketplace did not fall apart without the individual mandate.