Weekend Update

Thanks to Alexandr Hovhannisyan for sharing their work on Unsplash.

While the House of Representatives starts its August recess / District work break this week, the Senate will remain in session for Committee business and floor voting. The Senate will be focusing on its reconciliation bill spurred by a compromise between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D NY) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D WV). The Senate is scheduled for to begin its August recess / State work break next week.

Bloomberg reports that tomorrow the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Optum’s proposed merger with Change Healthcare begins in federal district court in Washington, DC. The Bloomberg article notes

Testing new theories in court is part of the Biden administration’s antitrust push. “Settlements do not move the law forward,” Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, said in a January speech. “We need new published opinions from courts that apply the law in modern markets in order to provide clarity to businesses.”

Last Friday, the FEHBlog linked to a Health Payer Intelligence article on anticipated premium spikes for 2023.

Fierce Healthcare adds

Executives from some of the country’s largest for-profit health systems say it’s likely their organizations will be able to pass rising cost pressures along to commercial insurers during the next round of contract negotiations. * * *

Looking to the coming year’s commercial negotiations, [Sam] Hazen said HCA has already seen “some early success and recognition by the payers” and that some of its recently renegotiated contracts reflected higher price escalation than those of the past.

“I think it’s reasonable to assume that we were in 3.5% to 4% zone previously with our commercial pricing,” he told investors. “We’re in a competitive positioning as a company globally and that allows us to negotiate based upon the inflationary pressures. … I believe our relationships will allow us to get to a number that makes sense for both organizations, but I do anticipate it being somewhere around the mid-single-digits.”

Universal Health Services Chief Financial Officer Steve Filton said his company is “aggressively” looking to trim under-earning managed care contracts and seek out higher prices in the coming year.

Both its acute and behavioral care hospitals are identifying contracts that “are not even remotely” keeping pace with inflationary and labor pressure and giving those payers notice of terminations “at a pace faster than, quite frankly, I can really remember,” he told investors.

What’s more, the Wall Street Journal catalogs the large array of costly healthcare problems that “have grown in the pandemic’s shadow.”

It’s also worth calling attention to

  • An NPR article reporting on an animal sedative xylazine that is now “is showing up in illegal street drugs up and down the East Coast.” What a mess.
  • A Kaiser Family Foundation article explaining how the CDC is handling a polio case that paralyzed a man in a vaccine-resistant community in Rockland County, NY.

The chances of a major outbreak tied to the Rockland County case are slim. The virus can spread widely only where there is low vaccine coverage and poor surveillance of polio cases, said Dr. David Heymann, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former director of the world’s polio eradication effort.

Rockland County has ample experience battling vaccine-preventable outbreaks. In 2018 and 2019, the county fought a measles epidemic of 312 cases among followers of anti-vaccine Hasidic rabbis.

“Our people defeated measles, and I’m sure we’ll eliminate the latest health concern as well,” County Executive Ed Daly told a news conference July 21.