Thursday Miscellany

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

Today the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) announced that

HHS and Department of Defense (DOD) have purchased an additional 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from both Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. to help meet demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. The orders placed today bring the vaccine purchased by the U.S. government from these two companies to a total of 600 million doses, enough to vaccinate 300 million people. Each company is delivering 300 million doses in regular increments through the end of July 2021. Each company will leverage U.S.-based manufacturing capacity to fill, finish and ship vials as the bulk material is produced.”

The current U.S. population is 333 million and roughly 60 million of those people under age 16 and therefore currently are ineligible for either vaccine. Consequently the government has purchased more than enough of these two vaccines to vaccinate the entire eligible population with both doses. What’s more, 34 million Americans (10% of the entire U.S. population) already has received the first dose of one of these vaccines and another 11 million have received both doses. Also the Johnson and Johnson single dose vaccine should be available early next month. It’s becoming a matter of logistics.

The Wall Street Journal which was the first paper to legally crack into Medicare pricing records has now figured out how to find transparent hospital pricing required by the new HHS rule.

Mayo Clinic offers a search interface at https://costestimator.mayoclinic.org/. The nonprofit hasn’t posted a file covering all of its negotiated rates and says it is working to have one online by this spring.

The hospital chain Sutter Health, on the other hand, is offering downloadable data for all of its hospitals on a single webpage labeled “Healthcare Cost Transparency,” here: https://www.sutterhealth.org/for-patients/healthcare-cost-transparency

Efforts to pull together and standardize data from many hospitals are emerging. Turquoise Health Co. has scoured the websites of every known hospital in the country—more than 6,000 providers—and found disclosures that at least partially meet the requirements for 1,700 hospitals, according to Chris Severn, a co-founder of the company. Consumers can search the data on Turquoise’s website at https://turquoise.health/

“This data was hard to find but it’s incredibly useful and, overall, a large amount of the industry has complied,” Mr. Severn said. “This is a huge step towards cost-informed decision making in health care.”

The American Hospital Association points out that

Leading health providers have come together in unprecedented fashion to unite around the goal of improving the lives of those they serve through data insights. Health provider innovators AdventHealth, Advocate Aurora Health, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Bon Secours Mercy Health, CommonSpirit Health, Hawaii Pacific HealthHenry Ford Health SystemMemorial Hermann Health SystemNorthwell Health, Novant Health, Providence health system, Sentara Healthcare, Tenet Health, and Trinity Health have formed Truveta, a new company with a vision to save lives with data. 

Through structuring, normalizing, and de-identifying data from these health providers, a new data platform will be built, with careful protection of patient privacy and security. This new platform, using the power of AI and machine learning, will enable unprecedented insights as providers are able to learn from each other with statistically significant scale and representation of diverse populations. 

Together, these 14 health providers care for tens of millions of patients and operate thousands of care facilities across 40 states. The health providers will govern Truveta’s ethical pursuit of insights from this unprecedented de-identified data set. 

Interesting.

Also the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced that

Today, a broad coalition of health care and employer groups called for achieving universal health coverage by expanding financial assistance to consumers, bolstering enrollment and outreach efforts, and taking additional steps to protect those who have lost or are at risk of losing employer-based coverage because of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Affordable Coverage Coalition encompasses groups representing the nation’s doctors, hospitals, employers and health insurance providers that collectively serve hundreds of millions of American patients, consumers and employers. The joint commitment by such a broad array of interests is a significant milestone on the path toward universal coverage, which has remained an elusive goal within the U.S. healthcare system. 

The organizations support the following steps to make health coverage more accessible and affordable: 

Protect Americans who have lost or are at risk of losing employer-provided health coverage from becoming uninsured. 

Make Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions more generous, and expand eligibility for them. 

Establish an insurance affordability fund to support any unexpected high costs for caring for those with serious health conditions or to otherwise lower premiums or cost-sharing for ACA marketplace enrollees. 

Restore federal funding for outreach and enrollment programs. 

Automatically enroll and renew individuals eligible for Medicaid and premium-free ACA marketplace plans. 

Provide incentives for additional states to expand Medicaid, in order to close the low-income coverage gap. 

Good luck. (Not to be confused with the Council for Affordable Health Coverage which appears to have similar goals.)