Weekend update

Congress remains in session on Capitol Hill this coming week. On Tuesday, the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on its bipartisan bill to lower health care costs.

This bill seeks to resolve the problem of surprise out of network billing. Kaiser Health News discusses a prime example of this problem -- air ambulance billing. The article notes that the current version of the HELP bill does not tackle air ambulance billing, but the bill is expected to be refined over the next weeks.

The FEHBlog was very impressed by this Wall Street Journal essay by a Johns Hopkins University bio-ethicist, Dr. Travis Reider, who became addicted to opioids following a motorcycle crash.  Here's an excerpt:

Opioids are not only dangerous; they also can be powerfully effective. Perhaps the greatest challenge about them today is to resist the urge to be simplistic or reactionary. America’s current crisis of overuse has led some prescribers to avoid the drugs completely, and it has led politicians to occasionally consider ham-fisted policy solutions, like limiting the lengths or dosages of prescriptions regardless of any individual patient’s needs. But when a medication has both risks and benefits, what we need isn’t one-size-fits-all policies but nuance.

The author goes onto explain what he means by nuanced policies. For example,

Doctors also must provide an exit strategy. In many instances, this would only require a plan for the number of days of use and a modest taper. But the longer a patient is exposed, the more complex the strategy may be. For every patient on opioid therapy, there must be a clinician who sees long-term management and tapering as their job. We cannot allow medical professionals to play hot potato with opioid patients, trying to toss them to someone else before the timer goes off.