Ex-FDA Chief Fined
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester Crawford, D.V.M., Ph.D., has been sentenced to 3 years of supervised probation and fines of slightly less than $90,000 for charges stemming from his ownership of stock in companies regulated by the FDA. The penalty exceeded a $50,000 fine in a plea agreement Dr. Crawford and federal prosecutors struck last year but still spared the former FDA chief jail time. U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson of the District Court for the District of Columbia also ordered Dr. Crawford to perform 50 hours of community service. Dr. Crawford resigned his FDA administrator post in September 2005 after just 2 months and did not give a reason for his resignation. In October 2006, he pleaded guilty to charges of having a conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks that he and his wife owned. Prosecutors said that Dr. Crawford filed seven incorrect financial reports with a government ethics office and Congress beginning in 2002.
Insurance Cost Sharing
Fewer than 24% of private sector employees covered by employer-sponsored health insurance do not pay a portion of their own premium, down from 35% in 1998, according to a report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In both years, employers were more likely to offer no-contribution single coverage than no-contribution family coverage. In 1998, 18% of employees eligible for health insurance from their employer worked in a firm that offered at least one family coverage plan that required no employee contribution; by 2004, that rate had fallen to 13%, the report said.
Majority Want Access Guarantee
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the federal government should guarantee access to health care, and 60% are willing to pay more in taxes for that guarantee, according to a poll released last month by the New York Times and CBS News. Half of those polled said they would be willing to pay as much as $500 a year in additional taxes, while nearly 8 in 10 said they thought it was more important to provide universal access to health insurance than to extend the Bush administration's tax cuts. In addition, a quarter of those with insurance said that they or someone in their household had gone without a medical test or treatment because insurance would not cover it; 60% of those without insurance reported the same situation. The nationwide telephone poll of 1,281 adults was conducted in late February 2007.
Hospital Demonstration Extended
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved a 3-year extension of the Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration, a value-based purchasing project involving more than 260 hospitals across the country. Recently released second-year results of the demonstration show “substantial improvement” in quality of care across five clinical focus areas, including acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, coronary artery bypass graft, pneumonia, and hip and knee replacement, with total gains in quality over the first 2 years of 11.8 percentage points, according to a CMS statement. The hospitals involved have received incentive payments for providing high-quality care. During the first 3 years of the project, only top-performing hospitals have been eligible for incentive payments, but the 3-year extension will test the effectiveness of offering incentive payments to hospitals achieving a defined level of quality (or quality threshold) or achieving the greatest improvement in quality and a quality threshold.
Medicaid Growth Sustainable
Expected growth in government revenues is likely to be large enough to sustain Medicaid spending increases over the next 40 years while still allowing substantial real growth in spending for other public services, according to a study published in the journal Health Affairs. The analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation's Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured looked at both potential long-term Medicaid spending and the availability of government revenues to support it. “While a substantial component of state government spending, Medicaid is not likely to be the financial burden squeezing out other public priorities that some policy makers fear,” said study coauthor Richard Kronick of the University of California, San Diego, in a statement. After accounting for demographic and health coverage trends such as an aging population and declines in employer-sponsored insurance, the study found that Medicaid's share (17% in 2005) of national health expenditures is expected to remain about the same until 2025 and then rise slowly to 19% by 2045. “Efforts to reduce the growth in Medicaid by shifting costs or threatening coverage will ultimately require better controlling the rate of growth of health spending overall,” Diane Rowland, executive director of KFF's commission, said in a statement.