�鶹Ů��

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has issued a call to action to her rank and file to fight Republican efforts to scrap the health care law by highlighting the risks of repeal for millions of Americans. In a letter to her Democratic colleagues late Wednesday, Pelosi said that with the new GOP-controlled Congress and Donald Trump's administration, "House Democrats stand ready to fight vigorously for America's hard-working families." She urged lawmakers to hold media events in early January to tell voters about Republican plans to repeal the law, called the Affordable Care Act, at the beginning of the year. (Jalonick, 12/22)

House Democrats are planning to spend January highlighting the dangers of making changes to the health care system as Republicans plan to repeal Obamacare, according to a letter to lawmakers by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi is asking members to plan events on Jan. 7 back in their home districts featuring constituents who would be affected by a repeal of the 2010 health care overhaul (PL 111-148, PL 111-152) and potential changes to Medicare. Similarly, on Jan. 14. House Democrats will join with senators and governors for a “national day of action,” the letter said. “At these events the most effective voices are those of the constituents whose lives will be affected by attacks on the ACA and Medicare,” Pelosi said in the letter, using the acronym for the health care law. "Advocates and health care groups stand ready to participate and assist us." (Siddons, 12/22)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi attempted to rally her caucus this week by urging members to plan press events focused on the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi sent a letter Wednesday asking House Democratic lawmakers to plan events for early January that showcase support for the Affordable Care Act and Medicare. Pelosi said Jan. 7 should include events that “highlight the risks of repeal of the ACA and of ending the Medicare guarantee.” Constituents who would be directly affected by changes to either program are “the most effective voices” at such events, she said. (McIntire, 12/22)

Even without Congress repealing the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration could undermine the law by unilaterally ending billions of dollars the government pays insurers to subsidize the health coverage of nearly 6��million Americans. Given that insurers would still be required to provide consumers that financial help, such a move could create upheaval in the ACA’s marketplaces — prompting health plans to raise their prices or drop out, according to health-policy experts in both major political parties. (Goldstein, 12/22)

House Republicans on Thursday released what they say is evidence showing the Obama administration broke the law when it funded an Affordable Care Act program aimed at helping lower-income people pay for insurance coverage. The Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees released an addendum to a July report that argued the 2010 law did not provide funding for the program known as “cost-sharing reductions” or CSR. The 31-page addition includes information the committees have gathered from the administration since July, including descriptions of conversations between officials debating whether to use a permanent appropriation for tax credits and refunds for program. (McIntire, 12/22)

Leading Republicans have vowed that even if they repeal most of the Affordable Care Act early in 2017, a replacement will not hurt those currently receiving benefits. Republicans will seek to ensure that “no one is worse off,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in an interview with a Wisconsin newspaper earlier this month. “The purpose here is to bring relief to people who are suffering from Obamacare so that they can get something better.” But that may be difficult for one big reason —��Republicans have also pledged to repeal the taxes that Democrats used to pay for their health law. (Rovner, 12/23)

Facing a years-long wait before they can fully implement a planned repeal of Obamacare, Republicans lawmakers are exploring how the Trump administration can quickly trim required health insurance benefits under the law and lower the cost of health plans, said key GOP congressional aides. Republicans plan to use a fast-track procedure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but with a built-in delay to postpone full repeal for years while they navigate the complexities of passing a replacement. By going after the benefit rules now, however, they can take advantage of the broad authority given to the executive branch when the law passed to make faster changes, said the aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is ongoing. (Edney, Kapur and Tracer, 12/23)

With only weeks to go before the GOP-controlled Congress begins work on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republican lawmakers and staff are struggling to address potentially catastrophic effects of killing off the program without a suitable replacement in hand. (Pianin, 12/22)

An error by Covered California has left about 24,000 policy holders at risk of losing their federal tax credits in January if they don’t give the state health insurance exchange permission to verify their income. Covered California is engaged in a last-minute scramble to reach those individuals and families before the end of the month, spokeswoman Lizelda Lopez said. For policy holders who don’t give the agency their consent by Dec. 31, federal tax credits will not be applied to their January premiums. That means they may need to pay the full, unsubsidized amount of those premiums until they rectify the situation, she said. (Bazar, 12/23)

A��group��of Christian leaders, including several pastors��from��Tennessee, are opposing��the repeal of the Affordable Care Act if there is not��a sufficient replacement ready to go. The Southern Christian Coalition��announced Thursday in a media call that they plan to send��a letter to members of Tennessee's congressional delegation and President-elect Donald Trump, asking them to stop efforts to roll back Obamacare. "Repealing the ACA without a replacement plan would not bring us closer to our Christian values, but would instead endanger the health and life of millions of American people ... Politics should not come before��the needs of the truly vulnerable in our nation,"��the letter reads. (Meyer, 12/22)

A letter praising President Barack Obama's health care law circulated widely in recent days and was purported to be sent by New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. But the Republican governor did not write the letter or know about it. The head of New Mexico's health care exchange office said Thursday her office wrote the letter without Martinez's knowledge or approval. (Lee, 12/22)

About 100,000 people with individual health insurance policies can still sign up for coverage that starts in January, even though the general enrollment deadline came earlier this month. On Wednesday, the state's MNsure health insurance exchange started prominently publicizing the "special enrollment" option with e-mails to insurance agents and notices on its website. (Snowbeck, 12/22)

Obamacare enrollment may be up for 2017 compared with 2016, both nationally and in Ohio, despite uncertainty over the insurance program's future under President-elect Donald Trump, new figures show. (Koff, 12/21)

At least 80 hospitals have closed nationally since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. In that time, six hospitals have closed in Georgia and about 10 more are in jeopardy of closure, says Jimmy Lewis, CEO of the rural hospital group��Hometown Health. Republican control of the White House and Congress next year opens��the door to new approaches to health care��financing that could turn states into the "laboratories of democracy" the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote they should be in 1932. (O'Donnell, 12/22)

With the potential for major changes in federal health care policy looming, hospital leaders are watching closely, worried especially that cuts to Medicaid could bring a big financial hit and that a repeal of Obamacare could raise the number of uninsured Connecticut residents. (Levin Becker, 12/23)

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks. Rep. Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, bought and sold stock in about 40 health-care, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies since 2012, including a dozen in the current congressional session, according to a Wall Street Journal review of hundreds of pages of stock trades he filed with Congress. (Grimaldi and Hackman, 12/22)

Donald Trump’s flair for connecting with veterans won him an overwhelming share of their votes, but the durability of the alliance is already being tested as��Trump’s search for a Veterans Affairs secretary veers in a direction��that has alarmed��some of America’s most influential retired soldiers. Under pressure from conservative activists, including former House Speaker��Newt Gingrich and organizations funded by the Koch Brothers,��Trump is contemplating choosing an agency chief��who would upend the entire veterans healthcare��system. That would come��over the protest of the country’s major veterans groups. (Halper, 12/22)

Silicon Valley startups and Washington policymakers get a lot of credit for driving health care innovation. Steve Case thinks they're getting too much. "Silicon Valley's going to play an important role. I think the D.C. area is going to play an important role," Case told POLITICO's "Pulse Check" podcast. But, he said, "a lot of the innovation in health care is going to be in the middle of the country, because some of the most important institutions in health care are in the middle of the country." (Diamond, 12/22)

A group of 34 Senate Democrats is calling on President-elect Donald Trump not to scrap an Obama administration regulation protecting Planned Parenthood.��The Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), wrote to Trump��on Thursday��calling on him to implement the rule finalized by the Obama administration last week. The regulation would protect Planned Parenthood by preventing states from cutting organizations out of federal family planning grants unless the groups are unable to properly provide the necessary services. (Sullivan, 12/22)

Pharmaceutical companies that manufacture or distribute highly addictive pain pills have hired dozens of officials from the top levels of the Drug Enforcement Administration during the past decade, according to a Washington Post investigation. The hires came after the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to curb a rising opioid epidemic that has resulted in thousands of overdose deaths each year. In 2005, the DEA began to crack down on companies that were distributing inordinate numbers of pills such as oxycodone to pain-management clinics and pharmacies around the country. (Higham, Bernstein, Rich and Crites, 12/22)

The research is unassailable: Staying in recovery and avoiding relapse for at least a year is more than twice as likely with medications as without them. Medications also lower the risk of a fatal overdose.��Addicts who quit drugs under an abstinence-based program are at a high risk of fatally overdosing if they relapse. Within days, the abstinent body’s tolerance for opioids plummets and even a small dose of the drugs can shut down the lungs. And yet as the country’s opioid epidemic worsens — every day, more than 70 Americans die from overdoses, and the numbers are climbing — only about a fifth of the people who would benefit from the medications are getting them, according to a new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (Vestal, 12/23)

Heroin overdoses killed thousands nationwide last year — some 75 over just three days in Chicago. The central culprit in many of the fatalities was fentanyl, a lethally powerful compound often added to drugs sold on the street. As a result, health officials have called fentanyl a new public menace, and police forces across the U.S. are searching their neighborhoods for the dangerous painkiller. (Gabrielson, 12/22)

A dozen programs supporting women coping with addiction have been awarded more than $12 million in grants from the state of Minnesota. The programs that received the funds range from treatment programs to organizations that help women get resources like stable housing that make it easier to stay sober. (Collins, 12/22)

After Holly Platts overdosed on heroin in July and was revived at the hospital with the reversal drug naloxone, she went to a rehabilitation program and stayed for 78 days. ... She could afford that lifesaving therapy because of Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor run jointly by the states and the federal government. And she was one of the lucky ones, as many Medicaid recipients have trouble finding therapy beds. Even as the opioid epidemic rages, that shortage could become worse next year, unless advocates can beat back a plan to limit federal matching funds for Medicaid drug rehab to 15 days a month. The limit would apply to all facilities with more than 16 beds. (Bond, 12/22)

Across the United States, 580 people, on average, will start using heroin today. Those who become addicted and survive will likely need to manage the disease for the rest of their lives. To get a sense of what it takes to beat this addiction, we're following Joey, from Everett. (Bebinger, 12/23)

A fatal drug overdose in Baton Rouge has prompted the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner to warn the public about��the influx��of deadly��synthetic opioids and other��psychoactive drugs that can be legally purchased on the Internet. Dr. Beau Clark said a man who died on Sept. 28 was found to have ingested three drugs Clark had not previously seen in the parish: furanyl fentanyl, a high-potency fentanyl analog sold as a designer drug; Etizolam, which mimics the sedating effects of benzodiazepines��like Xanax; and U-47700, an opioid analgesic known by the street names "pink" or "pinky." (Lipinski, 12/22)

A bill in the New Hampshire legislature could make it legal to hospitalize someone against their will because of a drug addiction. The bill would amend the state law that allows authorities to involuntarily commit people suffering from a serious mental illness who pose a threat to themselves. (Rodolico, 12/22)

In a scientific triumph that will change the way the world fights a terrifying killer, an experimental Ebola vaccine tested on humans in the waning days of the West African epidemic has been shown to provide 100 percent protection against the lethal disease. The vaccine has not yet been approved by any regulatory authority, but it is considered so effective that an emergency stockpile of 300,000 doses has already been created for use should an outbreak flare up again. (McNeil, 12/22)

“While these compelling results come too late for those who lost their lives during West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, they show that when the next Ebola outbreak hits, we will not be defenseless,” Marie-Paule Kieny, the study's lead author and WHO assistant director general for health systems, said in announcing the results. When preliminary findings were unveiled in July 2015, WHO Director General Margaret Chan called the vaccine a potential “game-changer.” (Cha, 12/22)

Like a man on a flying trapeze, K.T. Jones has leapt from one medical study to another during his 15-year struggle with cancer, and he has no doubt that the experimental treatments he has received have saved his life. ... Mr. Jones is one of many patients who have benefited from lifesaving advances in immunotherapy. But he’s an outlier: He is African-American. As money pours into immunotherapy research and promising results multiply, patients getting the new treatments in studies have been overwhelmingly white. Minority participation in most clinical trials is low, often out of proportion with the groups’ numbers in the general population and their cancer rates. Many researchers acknowledge the imbalance, and say they are trying to correct it. (Grady, 12/23)

As the Christmas��season kicks into high gear and we're surrounded by gorgeously decorated��fir trees and��songs of yuletide gay, it's easy to forget that the holidays represent a grim time in terms of health statistics. You're more likely to die of natural causes from Dec. 25 through New Year's Day��than at any other time of the year. (Cha, 12/22)

As people age, they start to outlive spouses and friends and become more homebound as their bodies slow down. Feelings of loneliness — and the health consequences that come with them — become more common.��About 29 percent of people age 65 or older live alone, according to the Administration on Community Living, an agency established in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to encourage housing choice and community support for older Americans and people with disabilities. (McDaniels, 12/22)

The problems started after Erich Burger returned from an unforgettable safari in Botswana and Zambia last month. ... He headed to a community hospital after about a week of fever and chills, thinking he might have malaria given his recent travel to Africa. ... A sharp-eyed hematology technician discovered when she looked in her microscope that he was suffering from a disease so rare in the United States that it has been seen only 40 times in the past 50 years. The disease is one of the few “universally lethal” infections: It always kills unless it is treated, and it kills quickly. (Sun, 12/22)

Call it the Telltale Brain. The first objective��measurement for concussion may have been identified, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature, Scientific Reports. By measuring the brain’s electrical reactions to speech sounds, researchers at Northwestern University were able to identify children who had suffered a recent concussion with 90 percent accuracy and those who hadn’t with 95 percent accuracy. (Nutt, 12/22)

Caroline Brown, a sophomore at the University of Missouri, got a fever over Thanksgiving break. Soon it became painful to bite down, and her cheek began to swell. A trip to her physician confirmed it — Caroline had the mumps. “Mumps kind of sounds like this archaic thing,” Brown said. “We get vaccinated for it; it just sounds like something that nobody gets.�� So I just didn’t think that it was possible that I would get it. (Smith, 12/23)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is awarding nearly $200 million in Zika funding to states and territories to continue the fight against the mosquito-borne virus as Texas reported a new local case, officials announced Thursday. The money, approved earlier this year by Congress as part of the emergency response to Zika, is aimed at helping local communities at greatest risk. (Sun, 12/22)

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) says he’s not worried about facing criminal charges over the Flint, Mich. water crisis despite recent criminal complaints against his appointees. “I have no reason to be concerned,” Snyder��told the Detroit Free Press.��Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette (R) on Tuesday��brought��criminal charges against four officials connected to the crisis in Flint, where water contaminated with lead has posed a threat to public health. (Henry, 12/22)

The Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter marked a major turning point this week, as state regulators lifted long-standing licensing restrictions that were imposed over persistent breakdowns in patient care and safety. The state’s largest psychiatric hospital, which treats about 360 of Minnesota’s most dangerous and psychiatrically complex patients, has been operating under a conditional license for the past five years as it struggled to protect patients and staff from violence. (Serres, 12/22)

Kansans have sunny perceptions of their own health despite health outcomes that are only so-so. One of 10 Kansans reported they had “frequent physical distress,” meaning their physical health was poor for at least two weeks of the past month, according to the recently released America’s Health Rankings Report. Only eight states had fewer residents reporting poor health.��While Kansans’ perceptions might make the state appear to be a picture of health, they are about as likely to develop health problems as the rest of the country. (Wingerter, 12/22)

Jay Maddock, who ran the University of Hawaii’s public health program for eight years before coming to Texas A&M to lead its School of Public Health, says Hawaiians are so much healthier for one main reason: Their state is willing to spend more to stay healthy. (Toohey, 12/22)

A group of savvy businesses are figuring out what cubicle dwellers already know: It can be tough to duck out of work for routine medical appointments. So providers are bringing the office to them.��The latest to set its sights on the Chicago market is 2020 On-site, a Boston company that recently expanded into Chicago with a 34-foot RV tricked out to offer eye exams outside employers' offices.��The company tapped Chicago for expansion because the city has a lot of midsize employers and many people have long commutes and are looking to ways to save time, said 2020 On-site founder and CEO Howard Bornstein. (Schencker, 12/22)

One of the earliest hints arrived when Chris Dureiko was picking up her eldest son, Sean, from day care. She noticed the then-9-year-old's hands were red and bruised, as if he had a rash. "[Then] I caught him one day washing his hands while counting for half an hour," recalled Dureiko, who lives in Irvine. "He was always extremely afraid of germs. If something would touch another, that thing would become contaminated and had to be removed. (Escobar, 12/22)

We compare health care coverage for children and parents under the ACA and under a reconciliation bill repealing the ACA similar to the one vetoed in January 2016, addressing two issues specific to children’s coverage: maintenance of eligibility and federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). We find that 4.4 million children and 7.6 million parents could lose coverage in 2019 if Congress’s budget reconciliation process repeals pieces of the ACA without a replacement plan. Under the repeal bill, states would be able to reduce Medicaid and CHIP eligibility for children beginning in 2017. We find that up to 9 million more children could lose coverage if states lower Medicaid/CHIP eligibility to the new minimum standards. (Buettgens, Kenney and Pan, 12/21)

Prior to the ACA’s full implementation, one in five women reported they postponed or went without preventive care because of cost, a much greater barrier for low-income and uninsured women. This factsheet summarizes the ACA preventive services policy’s impact on women, with a focus on the women’s services that are promulgated by HRSA. ... A repeal of the ACA as proposed by President-elect Trump would end the requirement that recommended preventive services be covered by private plans without cost sharing, unless this provision is included as part of replacement legislation. The specific preventive services for women that were updated and promulgated by HRSA, however, could also be eliminated or scaled back by administrative action. (12/20)

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, this study found that while the prevalence of hearing loss has continued to decline among adults aged 20 to 69 years, adult hearing loss is associated with increasing age, sex, race/ethnicity, educational level, and noise exposure. (Hoffman et al., 12/15)

This report highlights the successes and challenges of permanent supportive housing projects funded as part of the Missouri Foundation for Health’s Show Me Healthy Housing (SMHH) program. ... Permanent supportive housing combines long-term rental subsidies with community-based services. Tenants typically receive permanent rent subsidies for as long as they remain in the program and have access to case management and support services for house maintenance and personal well-being. ... Fifty-five percent of heads of households in the sites currently housing tenants had been chronically homeless before entering supportive housing, while 91 percent reported having a mental illness, 67 percent reported having a chronic health condition, and 36 percent were in fair or poor health. (Leopold et al., 12/14)

Expanding Medicaid -- the U.S. federal-state health insurance program for the poor -- gives people access to a broader array of hospital choices than they had when they were uninsured, a new study suggests. Often, people are choosing hospitals closer to home, researchers reported. The study uses data from two investor-owned hospital systems to see whether the 2014 Medicaid expansion provided under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- often called Obamacare -- affected emergency department use. (Pallarito, 12/20)

To look at helmeted children gliding down Colorado’s ski slopes like bundled-up lollipops is to see an image of careful safety. But, for years, researchers have debated about how effective helmets are at��preventing head injuries — especially those such as��concussions and other closed-head trauma. Do helmets actually keep kids safe��on the slopes? Now, a new study by doctors at Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado School of Medicine is adding to a growing body of research that shows helmets are important in lessening the severity of head injuries that kids may suffer while skiing or snowboarding — but only up to a point. (Ingold, 12/13)

In 2007, when [Nathan] Georgette was just 16, he published his first scientific paper, an article on immunity that appeared in the Internet Journal of Epidemiology — and which helped him win a prestigious high school scholarship. In 2009, Georgette published a second paper, this time in PLOS ONE, based on his earlier work. Georgette continued his research as a Harvard undergraduate, and it was then, in 2012, that he realized he’d made a mistaken assumption in his first article, one that wasn’t fatal to that 2007 paper — but was to the PLOS ONE paper. Georgette could have quietly let the matter drop. But rather than ignore his error, Georgette asked PLOS ONE to retract his paper. At the time, we commended Georgette for his “rigor and transparency” and for having the courage to do the right thing, even if it meant halving his list of publications. (Oransky and Marcus, 12/22)

This year produced no shortage of surprises, and a rare happy one was Food and Drug Administration approval of a muscular dystrophy drug that had been singled out for destruction by agency staffers. But the bureaucracy is now mounting a misinformation campaign, and as a result insurers are denying coverage to some patients. (12/22)

For the past eight years, Republicans have had the luxury of opposition, which enables you to blame anything and everything on your opponents without being burdened by the responsibility of coming up with your own solutions or being held accountable when things don’t go well. Now, of course, all that is going to change. And nowhere will their new situation be more vividly apparent than in health care, where they are determined to dismantle the Affordable Care Act yet can’t seem to agree on what they’ll replace it with. However it plays out, the country will get an extremely edifying instruction in conservative values as they relate to health care. And they’re probably not going to like what they see. (Paul Waldman, 12/22)

[Tom Price] emphasizes the importance of making our health care system “more responsive and affordable to meet the needs of America’s patients and those who care for them.” But as compared with his predecessors’ actions, Price’s record demonstrates less concern for the sick, the poor, and the health of the public and much greater concern for the economic well-being of their physician caregivers. (Sherry A. Glied and Richard G. Frank, 12/21)

In the last six years more than 75 rural hospitals have closed across the nation, half of them in the South and three, including Belhaven, in North Carolina. Because many people in Belhaven and the rural communities around it are poor (in Belhaven 1 in 3 residents live below the poverty line) they don’t have insurance – which puts the financial viability of any hospital at risk. If North Carolina had opted to participate in a federally-funded Medicaid program to make health insurance available to the poor, the financial outlook for rural hospitals, like Belhaven, would have improved. (12/23)

Arizona taxpayers, beware. President Obama’s administration is quietly implementing one last massive taxpayer-funded bailout for special interests. Not only that, this bailout would prop up the Affordable Care Act only months before the law will likely be repealed. So which special interests are getting your money? Health-insurance companies. (Nathan Nascimento, 12/22)

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) has been law since 2008. MHPAEA provided that health plans could not limit mental health or substance use disorder benefits in a way that was more restrictive than how most medical/surgical benefits were limited. This sounds simple enough, but in this year alone there has been a White House task force, voluminous Department of Labor guidance, a SAMHSA best practices manual, and an Energy & Commerce Committee hearing to find out why most people still can’t access care. We still don’t have all the answers. (Nathaniel Counts, Timothy Clement, Amanda Mauri, Paul Gionfriddo, and Garry Carneal, 12/22)

Iowa’s Medicaid program was operated by the state for decades. With modest��administrative costs and among the lowest per-patient spending in the country, it worked well. Then along came Gov. Terry Branstad and his unpopular idea of handing over the government health insurance program to three for-profit insurers. While providing no reliable��evidence, he insisted��privatization would save the state money and improve the health of more than 600,000 Iowans who rely on Medicaid. ... Translation: Private companies receiving billions of public dollars to operate a public program refuse to be accountable to the public. They want to do their business with the state behind closed doors. (12/22)

A national study has some good news for parents this month, just in time for Christmas: Teenagers are just not as into vaping this year as they used to be. According to the 42nd annual��Monitoring the Future study, a lower percentage of teens reported using electronic cigarettes and other nicotine-delivery devices than the previous year. This is significant because it is the first time researchers��have found a decrease in teen��vaping. (12/22)