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Presented by Facebook: Delivered daily by 10 a.m., Pulse examines the latest news in health care politics and policy. | | | | | |  | | By Adam Cancryn and Sarah Owermohle | Presented by Facebook | 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. With Joanne Kenen and Susannah Luthi | | | — President Joe Biden on Wednesday night laid out his big plans for overhauling the health system. What will actually become of them? — The Biden administration is fast approaching the promising — yet increasingly delicate — endgame stage of the pandemic. — The FDA will propose a nationwide ban on menthol cigarettes, its most aggressive tobacco reform effort in decades. WELCOME TO THURSDAY PULSE — and RIP to Calibri, the unofficial font of PULSE and health reporters' half-written stories everywhere. Send your font faves and news tips to acancryn@politico.com and sowermohle@politico.com. | | A message from Facebook: How Facebook is supporting the COVID-19 vaccination effort
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The background: We’re helping people learn when and where they can get vaccinated, giving free ad credits to governments and NGOs and expanding efforts to remove false vaccine claims. | | | | | | BIDEN WANTS TO GO BIG ON HEALTH CARE … EVENTUALLY — For much of his 65-minute speech Wednesday night, Biden spoke like a president dead set on transforming the entirety of the nation’s health system. There was the vow to slash drug prices and lift the government’s stubborn negotiation ban, the pitch for expanding Medicare’s coverage and benefits and the call for building out Obamacare and cutting enrollees’ deductibles. He proposed creating a brand new health research agency, and argued the U.S. could find the cure to cancer, if only it made the investment. In a speech where the words “health care” were uttered just three times, Biden managed to lay out perhaps the most ambitious health agenda in decades. Left unsaid: None of that’s in the bill he’s working on now. Biden is pressing ahead instead on a flurry of other policy fronts as he tries to pass $4 trillion in spending over the next several months — and leaving progressives to wonder when, if ever, he’ll get around to following through. Senior Democrats in both the House and the Senate have already vowed to push for including a major drug price overhaul and Medicare expansion to Biden’s upcoming bills, fearful that tabling health care reforms now will mean pushing them into 2022 or beyond — when there may no longer be the political will or a Democratic trifecta. Yet in conversations with PULSE over the last week, others in and around Capitol Hill and the administration have argued for a more pragmatic approach that won't derail the largely successful roll Biden is on. That’d mean locking in a few popular health policies, like making the newly expanded Obamacare subsidies permanent, while steering well clear of the inevitable intraparty tussles that come with attempting any major health reform, at least for now. As for the president himself, Biden closed out his first 100 days by calling for getting a broader health care overhaul “done this year.” His next and far more difficult task will be to figure out how. For more on the speech: Read POLITICO’s Natasha Korecki and Cristopher Cadelago on Biden embracing his “inner Robin Hood.” | | | | JOIN AN IMPORTANT CONVERSATION, SUBSCRIBE TO "THE RECAST": Power is shifting in Washington and across the country. More people are demanding a seat at the table, insisting that all politics is personal and not all policy is equitable. “The Recast” is a twice-weekly newsletter that explores the changing power dynamics in Washington and breaks down how race and identity are recasting politics and policy across America. Get fresh insights, scoops and dispatches on this crucial intersection from across the country and hear critical new voices that challenge business as usual. Don't miss out, SUBSCRIBE . Thank you to our sponsor, Intel. | | | | | BIDEN’s COVID CHALLENGE, 100 DAYS ALONG — In some of the more triumphant moments of his speech, Biden celebrated the significant progress the U.S. has made against the coronavirus: More than a year into the pandemic, cases, deaths and hospitalizations are all going down, and vaccinations are rising fast. But the pandemic is far from over — and the next several months could easily turn into a slog. Biden’s administration has been winning the war on Covid, but it may never achieve total victory, POLITICO’s Joanne Kenen and Dan Goldberg report. “We’ve never been able to eradicate a respiratory virus, so it’s not likely we can do that with this virus,” said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johnson Hopkins Center for Health Security. The most realistic endgame, he added, is to reach a point where the coronavirus no longer interferes with Americans’ lives. There is a path to that goal. But it hinges on public trust in the vaccines continuing to grow, and a successful effort to reach the nation’s most vulnerable. Health officials at every level will also need to step up testing and contact tracing to contain new outbreaks before they spark a broader resurgence. The country is on a promising trajectory, but there’s still so much that can go wrong — including developments outside of Biden’s control, like outbreaks overseas or new variants — that Biden’s next 100 in office days may well be as consequential as his first. FDA’s MENTHOL CIGARETTE BAN ARRIVES — The FDA is expected to propose a nationwide ban on menthol cigarettes today, following through on years of work stretching across administrations, POLITICO’s Sarah Owermohle reports. The prohibition would take years to actually implement. But prior efforts to ban menthol cigarettes have stalled in the face of opposition from both the tobacco industry and advocates who worry it would escalate the policing of Black communities, given menthol cigarettes’ popularity among Black Americans. Even some Democrats remain wary of enacting a total ban. The move is long overdue in the eyes of public health and anti-tobacco advocates, though, who argue menthol cigarettes — with sales fueled by decades of targeted marketing — have exacerbated racial inequities in health care and particularly harmed Black children. | | | WHITE HOUSE SENDS SUPPLIES TO COVID-STRICKEN INDIA — The administration will deliver a range of medical supplies to help India combat its Covid outbreak, now the largest in the world. The first shipments are set to arrive today and will continue into next week. India will receive an initial 1,100 oxygen cylinders and another 1,700 concentrators that can pull oxygen from ambient air, as well as millions of N95 masks and Covid tests. The U.S. is also redirecting AstraZeneca manufacturing supplies that will allow India to make more than 20 million vaccine doses, and is sending thousands of courses of the antiviral treatment remdesivir. | | | |   | | | | | | AN ‘INVISIBLE PANDEMIC’ OF DRUG-RESISTANT INFECTIONS — There are alarming trends in antimicrobial use that have worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, write University of Oxford researcher Kushal Kadakia and former health official Anand Shah in a Health Affairs blog. — Why it matters: Unnecessary or excessive use of antimicrobials like antibiotic medicines increases the chances that infectious pathogens can evolve and become immune to all the options available to fight them. Officials have sought to grapple with these threats by encouraging lower and more targeted use of these drugs, but their use in hospitals soared during the pandemic. There are lessons in the way that the government and industry mobilized to develop coronavirus vaccines in record time this past year, write Kadakia and Shah. Before this year, research and development of new vaccines and new antimicrobials were both small, slow-growing fields because they aren’t usually high-profit. — What’s to be done? The authors write that the government should finance early developments in a diverse range of antimicrobial products, as was done via the Trump-era Operation Warp Speed, to boost chances of success. They also recommend applying innovative trial design learned from the coronavirus and adjusting payments to bring profit to the space. | | | | CHECK OUT FDA TODAY: Daily regulatory developments, sent directly to your inbox. AgencyIQ's daily newsletter, FDA Today, provides readers with actionable and insightful explanations of the latest FDA developments impacting the life sciences industry. Sign up for free today. | | | | | | | | CORPORATE LEADERS WANT STRONGER FEDERAL CONTROLS ON HEALTH COSTS — The cost of health insurance will reach a breaking point in the next decade — and it’ll be up to the government to step in with more coverage offerings and spending controls, an overwhelming majority of executives said in a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Purchaser Business Group on Health. The poll of executives from 300 companies shows employers are anxious about the rising costs of the private insurance system and are increasingly interested in a few specific policy solutions, POLITICO’s Susannah Luthi writes. Among them: — A lowering of the Medicare eligibility age or the creation of a public insurance option, concepts long favored by many Democrats. — Hospital price caps, out-of-network rate caps and drug price negotiation, which would give the government greater sway over health costs overall. — A broader federal role in health insurance coverage, which executives said would be better for both their businesses and their employees. Those are ideas that all face strong opposition from the health care industry. But the survey respondents indicated that if they’re forced to stick with the existing private-sector health system, their options won’t be any less drastic. Reining in costs without the government’s help would likely mean shifting more expenses to workers, moving employees to the Obamacare markets or shrinking their insurance networks, the executives warned. | | A message from Facebook: Get timely, reliable information about COVID-19 and vaccines
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· Tips and resources to stop community spread and support emotional health | | | | | | Biden's appeal for Congress to let Medicare negotiate drug prices is "an empty call to action," STAT's Rachel Cohrs writes. In diagrams and videos, The New York Times' Emma Cott, Elliot deBruyn and Jonathan Corum show how Pfizer makes its Covid vaccine. In a country with limited access to doctors, Senegal relied on aggressive interventions and on-the-ground networks to tamp down its coronavirus outbreaks, Vox's Jen Kirby reports. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |  |
