|
Presented by Better Medicare Alliance: Delivered daily by 10 a.m., Pulse examines the latest news in health care politics and policy. | | | | | |  | | By Adam Cancryn | Presented by |  | | With David Lim, Sarah Owermohle and Brianna Ehley Editor’s Note: POLITICO Pulse is a free version of POLITICO Pro Health Care's morning newsletter, which is delivered to our s each morning at 6 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day’s biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro. | | | — President Joe Biden will nominate Obama-era veteran Chiquita Brooks-LaSure to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. — Democrats could leave major policies aimed at helping sick workers stay home out of their coronavirus aid package. — Life expectancy in the U.S. declined by one year in the first half of 2020, with minorities seeing even steeper declines. WELCOME TO THURSDAY PULSE — where National Institutes of Health scientist and Covid vaccine designer Kizzmekia Corbett is now also a TIME100 Next honoree and was dubbed a "rising star" by Anthony Fauci. Send tips and other health care stars to watch to acancryn@politico.com. | | A message from Better Medicare Alliance: Medicare Advantage isn’t just better health coverage for seniors, it’s a winning issue for policymakers. A new poll shows that Medicare Advantage has a 98% satisfaction rating and 93% of beneficiaries agree that a candidate’s support for Medicare Advantage is important to earn their vote. Together, we can protect and strengthen this bipartisan success story for the 26 million diverse Americans who count on Medicare Advantage’s care, coverage, and security. Learn more. | | | | | | BIDEN BETS ON BROOKS-LaSURE — A longtime Democratic policy expert, Brooks-LaSure’s prior stint at the health department focused on implementing Obamacare’s coverage and insurance market overhauls. As CMS chief, she’d oversee a further expansion of the health law — and would unwind the Trump administration’s efforts to minimize it, POLITICO’s Adam Cancryn, Susannah Luthi and Rachel Roubein report. — Brooks-LaSure emerged as the clear frontrunner earlier this month, after winning praise for her co-leadership of the Biden transition’s HHS agency review team. Her candidacy also got a boost in December, when the health secretary nomination went to Xavier Becerra — a former congressman with whom Brooks-LaSure had worked closely during her time as a staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee. — As the Biden administration’s second-most powerful health official, Brooks-LaSure would be charged with boosting coverage through the Obamacare markets and Medicaid expansion — and she’s previously outlined specific policies to that end. During her time as a consultant at Manatt Health, she laid out state-level options for implementing a public insurance option, and testified in 2019 that offering a public option would stabilize the individual insurance market while preserving the current Medicare program — unlike the single-payer approach championed by progressives. And in line with Biden's broader focus on health equity, Brooks-LaSure has written extensively on disparities and barriers to care, focusing in particular on maternal mortality. SENATE SETS DATE FOR BECERRA’s CONFIRMATION HEARING — The Senate Finance Committee will hold its hearing on Becerra’s HHS nomination next Wednesday, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports. It’ll be the second hearing in two days for Becerra, who is slated to appear before the HELP Committee on Tuesday. But the Finance Committee’s vote will determine whether his nomination makes it to the Senate floor. COVID AID PUSH LEAVES WORKER SUPPORT IN LIMBO — Economic policies like paid federal sick leave, a higher minimum wage and insurance subsidies for laid-off workers — measures that public health experts have pointed to for months as key to keeping infected Americans isolated and limiting the virus’ spread — may be cut from the next stimulus bill, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports. — The workplace is a top breeding ground for Covid-19, especially in industries where employees can’t keep a safe distance from each other or can’t miss work for fear of being fired. One recent study found that, after Congress temporarily mandated paid sick leave, states that did not previously guarantee that benefit saw 400 fewer Covid cases per day. A lack of federal protections has also widened health disparities between workers who can telecommute or take paid leave and those whose jobs require them to be on-site. — But many lawmakers are still skeptical that the benefit is necessary. Paid sick leave is sure to be a costly provision, making it a prime target for negotiators trying to limit what is already shaping up as a nearly $2 trillion package. Republicans have accused Democrats of using the pandemic to try to advance longstanding progressive priorities. And some moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have already refused to support a minimum wage hike. HOW TO COME BACK FROM COVID — The coronavirus has exploited the biggest weaknesses of the American health care system and exposed longstanding failures in the way it manages primary care, disease prevention and health equity. But the crisis has also offered the country a blueprint for how to fix those problems, POLITICO’s Joanne Kenen writes in Recovery Lab, a new series of stories on the nationwide effort to combat the pandemic. Also in Recovery Lab: — POLITICO’s Sarah Owermohle on state and local officials’ view of what went right — and wrong — with the nation’s Covid vaccination program, and how to make it better. — A visualization of the nine states that outpaced their peers in fighting the winter Covid wave and accelerating vaccinations, from POLITICO’s Tucker Doherty. | | | | TUNE IN TO GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS: Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. The world has long been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, and these issues have exploded over the past year amid a global pandemic. This podcast helps to identify and understand the impediments to smart policymaking. Subscribe and start listening today. | | | | | | | | | | | U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY DROPS AMID COVID PANDEMIC — Life expectancy in the U.S. fell to the lowest level recorded since 2006, POLITICO’s Brianna Ehley reports. New CDC data released Thursday shows life expectancy at birth was 77.8 years in the first six months of 2020, down from 78.8 year in 2019. — It’s an early snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on mortality — but the shift does not capture the full effect of the Covid crisis, researchers cautioned, since it only reflects data from January to June 2020. Overall, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people. — Communities of color saw significant drops in life expectancy. The expectancy for Black people dropped by nearly three years — from 74.7 in 2019 to 72 during the first half of 2020. Life expectancy for Hispanic people fell to 79.9 years, from 81.8. — Meanwhile, overdose deaths keep climbing. Separate preliminary data released Wednesday by the CDC projected more than 86,000 drug overdose deaths between August 2019 and July 2020 — by far the most over a 12-month period that the agency has ever recorded. Nearly every state is now seeing an increase in fatal overdoses in a sad reversal from 2018, when several recorded a drop in overdose deaths. DEMOCRATIC SENATORS PLEAD FOR MORE ADDICTION TREATMENT FUNDING — A group of Senate Democrats wants the Biden administration to seek higher funding for drug addiction grants and programs in its forthcoming budget proposal to Congress, Brianna writes. In a letter to Biden, the senators, led by Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, argued the opioid abuse epidemic continues “to evolve and ravage communities across the country,” and the coronavirus has forced health departments to step up their response. | | | |   | | | | | | WHAT THE NEWEST DATA ON VARIANTS AND VACCINES TELLS US — Results from early trials suggest the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines are less effective against the variant first found in South Africa, backing up similar findings from Moderna last month, Sarah reports. Neutralizing antibodies from the Pfizer vaccine were two-thirds less effective against that variant, dubbed B.1.351, in a lab study published by the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday, though scientists stressed the shot still protected patients and that its long-term effects were still unclear. Moderna said in January that patients produced fewer antibodies against B.1.351, but that its vaccine was also still protective, a conclusion backed up by another NEJM letter. The company starts human trials next month for a booster shot targeting the newer strain. FEDS SEIZE 11M COUNTERFEIT N95 MASKS — The federal government intercepted nearly 11 million counterfeit N95 masks bound for frontline health care workers across five states, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday, with more operations planned the coming weeks. The counterfeits are driven by an unprecedented demand for high-quality masks that's incentivized bad actors to try to profiteer off the pandemic, Kevin Rhodes, deputy general counsel for mask-maker 3M, told POLITICO's David Lim. The company is currently manufacturing over 95 million respirators a month in the U.S. “What we're seeing now is a pretty sophisticated cross-border counterfeiting landscape,” Rhodes said. “The people who are making these fakes, they're not interested in testing them to see if they work." | | | | GET TRANSITION PLAYBOOK TO 100K: In three months, our scoop-filled Transition Playbook newsletter has grown from zero to more than 90,000 s. Find out what’s really happening inside the West Wing, who really has the ear of the president, and what’s about to happen, before it occurs. Transition Playbook chronicles the people, policies, and emerging power centers of the Biden administration. Don’t miss out, subscribe today. And once you do, we’d be grateful if you could spread the word to your friends and colleagues, or, even better, post about Transition Playbook on Facebook or Twitter using this link: politico.com/newsletters/transition-playbook | | | | | | | | The American Medical Association is removing a public bust and display of its founder and stripping his name from an annual award, after determining he played a central role in “blocking integration and promoting and embedding racism” in the AMA during his late 19th century tenure atop the organization. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has declared gun violence a public health crisis, WJLA’s Samantha Mitchell and Sam Ford report. A former Microsoft engineer is leading a new and contentious business venture that aggregates and sells deidentified data on millions of American patients, STAT’s Casey Ross reports. | | A message from Better Medicare Alliance: For seniors, health care has never been more important. As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, 26 million Americans from all walks of life are finding care, coverage, and security from the protection that Medicare Advantage provides. A new poll, taken at the height of the public health crisis, shows that:
· 98% of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries are satisfied with their health plan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
· 97% of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries are satisfied with their network of physicians, hospitals, and specialists
· 95% of all seniors agree it’s important for beneficiaries to have a choice in coverage other than Traditional Medicare
· 93% of Medicare Advantage beneficiaries say a candidate’s support for MA is important to earn their vote
Let’s come together to protect and strengthen Medicare Advantage’s bipartisan success story. Learn more. | | | | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |  |
