Hospitals OK Cuts for Reform
The American Hospital Association and two other hospital organizations have agreed to accept $155 billion in reimbursement cuts for hospitals over the next 10 years as part of health care reform. In a deal negotiated by Senate lawmakers and announced by Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals would see reductions in their Medicare and Medicaid fees, in addition to $50 billion in cuts in programs that help pay for care to the uninsured. Some of the cuts would take effect only if reform reduces the uninsured population. The AHA suggested that the deal was as far as hospitals could go: Reimbursement couldn't be cut further “without damaging hospitals' ability to care for their communities.” Two groups that did not take part in the negotiations, representing public hospitals and children's hospitals, warned that cuts, if not carefully crafted, could hurt institutions caring for large numbers of Medicaid patients.
FDA Seeks Tobacco Comments
The Food and Drug Administration wants public input on how to implement its new authority to regulate tobacco products. In a Federal Register notice, the FDA said it will rely on the public comments when implementing the new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and when establishing the FDA Center for Tobacco Products. The agency said it's particularly interested in suggestions for reducing tobacco use and protecting public health, but that remarks on any aspect of its new regulatory authority are welcome. Comments will be accepted at
Malpractice Payments Are Down
Medical malpractice payments reached record lows in 2008, according to an analysis by the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen. For the third straight year, 2008 saw the lowest number of malpractice payments since the National Practitioner Data Bank began tracking such data in 1990, the group said. Last year, 11,037 payments were made, which Public Citizen said was nearly one-third lower than the historical average. The monetary value of payments was either the lowest or second-lowest since 1990, depending on how inflation was calculated, and the cost of malpractice payments to patients fell to 0.2% of overall health costs, the group said. The total cost of all malpractice insurance premiums fell to much less than 1% of the total $2.1 trillion in annual health costs in 2006 (the most recent year for which full data were available). David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division, said in a statement that the data show that many victims of medical malpractice receive no compensation for their injuries.
Tool Tracks Environmental Health
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched an online tool so health professionals, scientists, and— for the first time—the public can track environmental exposures to pollutants and chronic health conditions together. The Environmental Public Health Tracking Network combines nationwide data on air and water pollution and conditions such as asthma, cancer, childhood lead poisoning, and heart disease. The CDC said the network should reveal links between environmental and health conditions. The tracking tool is located at
FTC Wants to Stop 'Pay-for-Delay'
A new law to eliminate deals in which pharmaceutical companies work with their competitors to keep low-cost generic drugs off the market could save consumers and the federal government $3.5 billion a year over the next decade, according to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz. In a speech, Mr. Leibowitz said that stopping these “pay-for-delay” deals is one of the FTC's top priorities, although a series of recent court rulings has allowed some of the arrangements to continue. For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear a case brought by consumers and health plans challenging a $398 million payment by drug maker Bayer AG to Barr Laboratories Inc. to settle the companies' patent dispute over a generic version of the antibiotic Cipro (ciprofloxacin). “The FTC is continuing to bring cases to protect consumers from these anticompetitive settlements … but waiting for a potential judicial solution is a time-consuming and expensive prescription, so the agency strongly supports legislation to eliminate pay-for-delay deals,” Mr. Leibowitz said.
Many Young Adults Uninsured
Approximately 5 million adults aged 19-23 years in the United States, or 24% of that age group, had no health insurance in 2006 for the entire year, and 30% of them said they didn't think it was worth the cost, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The AHRQ found that 46% of uninsured young adults worked full-time and 26% worked part-time. Only 19% of those who were uninsured throughout 2006 were full-time students, the agency said. In addition, 19- to 23-year-olds who were uninsured for the entire year were only about half as likely as those who had insurance part of the year to have a usual source of care, such as a family doctor—just 36% of the wholly uninsured reported a usual source of care. In fact, about two-thirds of the young adults who went without insurance for the whole year never saw a doctor at all, the AHRQ found.