Midweek update

At this morning's business meeting of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Committee reported favorably Dale Cabaniss's nomination to be OPM Director and Chairman Ron Johnson's (R WI) bill to end the ACA's multi-state program which OPM manages. There is currently only an Arkansas Blue Cross plan participating in that program.  For what it's worth, the FEHBlog expects that Ms. Cabaniss will be confirmed as OPM Director within the month.

Becker's Hospital Review discusses the Leapfrog Group's Spring 2019 hospital patient safety ratings.

For the spring update, Leapfrog contracted with the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to update its mortality estimates linked to medical errors, infections and injuries at graded hospitals. Researchers found that patients treated at hospitals given a "D" or "F" safety grade face a 92 percent higher risk of avoidable death, compared to 88 percent for "C" hospitals and a 35 percent for "B" hospitals.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that

About 3.79 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2018, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. That was a 2% decline from the previous year and marked the fourth year in a row that the number fell. The general fertility rate—the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44—fell to 59.0, the lowest since the start of federal record-keeping.

With the latest decline, births in the U.S. have fallen in 10 of the last 11 years since peaking in 2007, just before the recession. Many demographers believed that births would rebound as the economy recovered, but that trend hasn’t materialized.

The article adds that

“We see these continuing trends: births to older moms increasing, births to younger moms going down,” said Brady Hamilton, a statistician/demographer with NCHS who co-wrote the report.

The trends suggest that a decline in unplanned pregnancies is a big part of America’s lower fertility. Research led by Kasey Buckles, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, found that about 35% of the fertility decline from 2007 to 2016 is because of declines in pregnancies that were likely unintended.

“It’s really remarkable, not something that we’ve seen over the last century,” Prof. Buckles said of the changing fertility patterns. 

Also

Abortion doesn’t appear to be responsible for the birth decline. The Guttmacher Institute found that both the total number and the overall rate of abortions have fallen to their lowest levels since around the time that Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973.