Sunday, November 24, 2019

Weekend Update

Congress is out of town until December 3. Before leaving town, according to the Hill,
Top negotiators from the House and Senate have reached a long-stalled deal on top-line spending figures for the fiscal 2020 bills.

House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) have settled on 302(b)s, which set the top-line number for each of the 12 government funding bills, two sources familiar with the negotiations told The Hill.

The Friday night agreement marks a breakthrough for the government funding negotiations. 
Hopefully, the ball will keep rolling and we will have a final omnibus appropriations bill before the latest deadline, December 20.

Healthcare Dive reports on Dr. Stephen Hahn's confirmation hearing as FDA commissioner before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee last week.
Hahn told senators he would make it a priority to address drug shortages, examine anti-competitive processes used by brand drug manufacturers to protect biologics from biosimilar competition and protect the United States' drug supply when considering drug importation. Hahn expressed interest in boosting use of patient-focused endpoints in clinical trials for both drugs and devices.
Fierce Healthcare reports that the Stop the Health Insurer Tax coalition has launched a campaign to halt the reimposition of the onerous tax on health insurance premiums for 2020. If history is any guide, a further suspension would apply to 2021 and possibly future years but not 2020 whose premiums already have the HIT payments baked in.

Govexec.com offers another perspective on OPM's semi-annual regulatory agenda which was released last week. Thee new OPM regulations concern temporary and seasonal employees.  For example,
[A] forthcoming proposal * * * would make temporary and seasonal employees eligible for dental and vision insurance benefits for the first time. Non-permanent feds only won regular health care under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program in 2015. OPM said the regulation would bring Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program eligibility requirements in line with FEHBP.  

Health Payer Intelligence discuses a Milliman study, funded by the Bowman Family Foundation, on the growing discrepancy between health plan payments to primary care providers versus behavioral health providers. A point that caught the FEHBlog's eye is that
Beneficiaries were also 5.2 times more likely to visit an out-of-network hospital for behavioral healthcare needs than they were to visit an out-of-network inpatient provider for medical or surgical care. That statistic spiked 85 percent from 2013.

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