| Happy Tuesday! It's my first time filling in for The Health 202 – my regular beat here at The Post is opioids and addiction. Not a subscriber? Sign up here. Today's edition: The White House is proposing a new rule to strengthen mental health parity laws, and a key Senate health committee dropped its legislation to regulate pharmacy middlemen. But first … | Vaccine politics may be to blame for GOP excess deaths, study finds |  A nurse prepares a syringe of a coronavirus vaccine at an inoculation station in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File) | | | The political maelstrom swirling around whether coronavirus vaccines may be to blame for a higher rate of excess deaths among registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published yesterday. The report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine underscores the partisan divide over coronavirus vaccines that have saved lives but continued to roil American politics even as the pandemic waned. Yale University researchers found that registered Republicans had a higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats in the months after vaccines became available for all adults in April 2021. The study does not directly attribute the deaths to covid-19. Instead, excess mortality refers to the overall rate of deaths exceeding what would be expected from historical trends. | - The study examined the deaths of 538,139 people 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio, between January 2018 and December 2021, with researchers linking them to party registration records. Researchers found the excess death rate for Republicans and Democrats was about the same at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
- Both parties experienced a sharp but similar increase in excess deaths the following winter. But after April 2021, the gap in excess death rates emerged, with the rate for Republicans 7.7 percentage points higher than the rate for Democrats. For Republicans, that translated into a 43 percent increase in excess deaths.
| | Researchers said the gap in excess death rates was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates, and noted that the gap was primarily driven by voters in Ohio. The results suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and the uptake among Republican and Democratic voters "may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic" in the United States. | | In their paper, Yale researchers Jacob Wallace, Jason L. Schwartz and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham cautioned the data did not include individual causes of death or whether someone had been vaccinated. The data did not look at voters who had no party affiliation and was limited to Florida and Ohio, which aren't neat comparisons to other states. | | | | | | | | Prescriptions are too expensive and managing your care can be complicated. We're finding ways to make it better ever step along the way. Learn how we're working to "Optumize" pharmacy care. | | | |  | | | | | The excess death rates between groups could be affected by other factors, such as differences in education, race, ethnicity, underlying conditions and access to health care, said Wallace, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the lead author. | - "We're not saying that if you took someone's political party affiliation and were to change it from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party that they would be more likely to die from covid-19," Wallace said.
| | Researchers also pointed out that more than 50 million Americans have yet to get an initial coronavirus vaccine, and reasons often extend "beyond political beliefs or party affiliation alone." Surveys have shown Republicans lagged in vaccination rates, including for booster shots. KFF estimated that between June 2021 and March 2022, at least 234,000 covid-19 deaths could have been prevented if people had received a primary series of vaccinations. | | The Yale study adds to a growing body of research indicating that Republican messaging on vaccines and other public health measures such as mask-wearing, limiting crowds and social distancing may have led to preventable deaths. Last year, a study from researchers at the University of Maryland and University of California at Irvine published in Health Affairs concluded that Republican-majority counties experienced nearly 73 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority Democratic counties through October 2021. The study suggested that vaccine uptake accounted for only 10 percent of the Republican-Democrat gap in deaths. "We have all these data points that really highlight the relevance of sound public health policy," said Neil Jay Sehgal, who led the Maryland study and is now an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health. | | The release of the Yale study comes as the vaccine rollout and policies under President Biden have faced criticism by some Republicans, including members of the Republican-led House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pushed the rollout of vaccines early in the pandemic. But as he prepared to mount a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis displayed increased hostility toward vaccines, petitioning for a state grand jury to investigate supposed wrongdoing related to vaccines. Florida's health department even issued a "health alert" on mRNA vaccine safety, which drew sharp rebukes. | | Public health officials fear mixed messaging on coronavirus vaccines by Republicans is shaping attitudes toward the vaccine in dangerous ways. In a nationwide survey published in March by the University of South Florida, only 49 percent of Republicans said they were "very" or "somewhat confident" that coronavirus vaccines are safe, contrasted with 88 percent of Democrats. Stephen R. Neely, a professor at USF's School of Public Affairs who conducted the survey, said the Yale study was important because it highlighted how sharply partisanship over coronavirus vaccine safety and efficacy has led to unnecessary deaths. "It's one of the most telling metrics I've seen in how the politicization of the pandemic has played out in the real world," Neely said. | | |  | White House prescriptions | | New this a.m.: White House looks to shore up mental health parity laws |  The proposed rule comes as the Biden administration looks to expand access to mental health services. (iStock) | | | The Biden administration is proposing to close some gaps in existing mental health parity laws, which require insurers to provide behavioral health benefits that are on par with medical and surgical care. The proposed rule from the Labor, Health and Human Services and Treasury departments would codify changes that Congress made to the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in 2020, including closing a loophole that allowed nonfederal governmental health plans the ability to opt out of its requirements. If finalized, the proposal would extend mental health parity protections to 90,000 state and local government workers enrolled in such plans, according to senior administration officials. | - The proposal also seeks to require health plans to conduct comparative analyses of their mental health, substance use disorder and medical benefits, and make changes to their coverage rules if they are out of compliance with the law, among other actions.
| | |  | On the Hill | | The Senate Finance Committee's bill to regulate pharmacy middlemen is here |  Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking Republican Mike Crapo (Idaho) released the highly anticipated bill ahead of Wednesday's markup. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | | | The bipartisan deal struck by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking Republican Mike Crapo (Idaho) would impose new transparency requirements on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and change the way the third-party intermediaries are paid by health plans to negotiate prices with drugmakers. The panel is slated to markup the bill tomorrow at 2 p.m. | | A closer look: The Modernizing and Ensuring PBM Accountability Act includes a bipartisan proposal aimed at delinking certain payments that pharmacy middlemen receive from the price of a drug. Specifically, the policy would prohibit any such arrangement as a condition of entering into a contract with a Medicare Part D plan, and instead, require PBMs to charge a flat dollar amount for their services. | - The bill would also ban price spreading in the Medicaid program and require PBMs to send annual reports on their rebate and price negotiations to Part D plan sponsors and the Health and Human Services secretary, among other provisions.
| | The view from the industry: "Restricting value-oriented purchasing would be a dramatic step back from achieving high-quality, affordable health care," the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, the main PBM lobby, said in a statement provided to The Health 202. | | The Senate HELP Committee is postponing a markup of Chair Bernie Sanders's (I-Vt.) bill to overhaul the country's primary health-care system. In a statement, Sanders said that he, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and other committee members have had "very productive conversations" in recent weeks and "intend to have a major piece of bipartisan legislation ready by the first week of September." Key context: The announcement comes as the committee struggles to strike a bipartisan compromise to reauthorize funding for community health centers and a slew of other federal programs that is set to expire Sept. 30. In light of the postponement, ranking Republican Bill Cassidy (La.) reiterated his calls for the panel to consider a funding plan he introduced last week, which mirrors a bill the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced with unanimous support in late May. | | The House Ways and Means Committee unveiled its proposal yesterday to boost health-care price transparency and lower medical costs for some patients, Stat's Rachel Cohrs reports. Among other policies, the legislative package includes a provision that seeks to ensure that Medicare beneficiaries pay the discounted prices for medicines that insurers negotiate with drugmakers, rather than higher sticker prices, starting in 2027. Such a protection has yet to be proposed in any other legislation considered by health-care committees in Congress. On our radar: The committee will meet to mark up the bill tomorrow at 10 a.m. | | |  | In other health news | | - The White House said yesterday that President Biden would veto GOP-backed defense, health and agriculture spending bills if they were to reach his desk, criticizing House Republicans for drafting legislation that would restrict abortion and gender transition care and cut funding below levels agreed to during debt ceiling talks.
- A new lawsuit accuses Cigna of using an algorithm to automatically deny patients' claims in bulk without doctors ever opening patient medical records, a process plaintiffs in the case say left them with health-care bills that the insurance giant would have otherwise paid, Tara Bannow reports for Stat.
- Pfizer has identified more than 30 drugs that may experience supply disruptions after a tornado tore through the storage warehouse of one of the company's key pharmaceutical plants last week, according to Reuters.
| | |  | Health reads | | | By Dominique Mosbergen | The Wall Street Journal ● Read more » | | | | | |  | Sugar rush | | | Thanks for reading! See y'all tomorrow. | |
No comments:
Post a Comment