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Presented by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living: Delivered daily by 10 a.m., Pulse examines the latest news in health care politics and policy. | | | | | |  | | By Adam Cancryn | Presented by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living | With Alice Miranda Ollstein, Leah Nylen, Darius Tahir and Daniel Lippman Editor’s Note: POLITICO Pulse is a free version of POLITICO Pro Health Care's morning newsletter, which is delivered to our subscribers 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 is stepping up his personal involvement in the Covid aid push, urging Democrats to quickly finalize the massive relief package. — Longtime Democratic health policy expert Chiquita Brooks-LaSure has emerged as the top contender to be Biden's CMS chief. — A former senior Trump HHS official is suing the Biden administration over his abrupt firing, alleging it was illegal. WELCOME TO THURSDAY PULSE — where if there's any joy to be found during this pandemic, it likely involves Mandy Patinkin. Send tips: acancryn@politico.com. | | A message from the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living: As of January 2021, nearly two-thirds of long term care providers are operating at a loss – and without assistance, they won’t make it another year. We need to make long term care residents and staff a priority for funding before it’s too late: https://saveourseniors.org | | | | | | BIDEN’s COVID AID PUSH ACCELERATES — After two weeks of bipartisan negotiations went nowhere, Biden “worked the phones and hunkered down with fellow Democrats at the White House” Wednesday, racing to finalize the next coronavirus relief package, POLITICO’s Natasha Korecki and Tyler Pager report. The president personally urged lawmakers to move quickly, stressing the need for party unity and listing a series of demands he expects lawmakers to meet. Aides have stressed the importance of the relief package’s success to their ability to end the pandemic and kickstart the economy — including funding the nation’s vaccine distribution effort and safe reopening of schools. AMONG THE MUST-HAVES: $1,400 stimulus checks, which Biden views as a promise to the American public that Democrats can’t break — though the White House has seemed more flexible on who exactly should get them, leaving the door open to phasing the checks out for higher earners. Democrats will also need to navigate the tricky politics around their inclusion of a mandate to raise the minimum wage to $15 — which, as POLITICO’s Marianne LeVine and Burgess Everette write, threatens to hold up the whole package. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has voiced opposition to the minimum wage hike, and several other Democrats remain noncommittal. And remember: Because Democrats are going the route of budget reconciliation, one Senate Democrat voting no is all it would take. FOR NOW, THOUGH, THE PARTY is generally united behind Biden’s aid push. The House on Wednesday approved a measure setting up the budget reconciliation process and has directed a dozen committees to start drafting pieces of the bill. The key for Democratic leaders now will be maintaining that speed, while still holding together an ideologically diverse caucus, in passing a bill that could touch nearly every aspect of American life. “We cannot afford to slow down,” House Budget Chair John Yarmuth told POLITICO’s Caitlin Emma, Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle. “We need to hurry the hell up.” | | | | TRACK FIRST 100 DAYS OF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION: The Biden administration hit the ground running with a series of executive orders his first week in office and continues to outline priorities on key issues. What's coming down the pike? Find out in Transition Playbook, our scoop-filled newsletter tracking the policies, people and emerging power centers of the first 100 days of the new administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | BROOKS-LASURE IN THE LEAD FOR CMS CHIEF — Biden is zeroing in on a nominee to lead the agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, amid what’s become a lengthy search, POLITICO’s Rachel Roubein, Susannah Luthi and Adam Cancryn report. A former Obama administration health official, Brooks-LaSure co-chaired the Biden transition team assigned to the health department and also has ties to HHS secretary nominee and former California Rep. Xavier Becerra, who sat on the House Ways and Means Committee when Brooks-LaSure was a staffer for that panel. — Yet Biden is in no rush to make a final decision. The CMS job is one of two major health care posts that remain open, and could stay in flux for weeks as the White House focuses its efforts on the pandemic response and getting Becerra through his Senate confirmation. That’s unnerved some health care advocates, who worry that the delay could slow Biden’s efforts to unwind much of former President Donald Trump’s health care legacy. While CMS has begun work on a range of rollbacks and new initiatives, the agency’s acting heads have limited authority to speed work along. — Among the potential items on CMS’ to-do list: Reversing Trump’s expansion of short-term health plans and association health plans, rewriting rules governing enrollment in the Obamacare markets and overhauling the agency’s approach to red states that sought permission to impose Medicaid work requirements. TRUMP HEALTH OFFICIAL SUES BIDEN OVER OUSTER — Former HHS Office of Civil Rights head Roger Severino is suing the Biden administration over his abrupt removal from the Administrative Conference of the United States, POLITICO’s Matthew Choi writes. The lawsuit claims Gautam Raghavan, a deputy director in Biden’s personnel office, told Severino earlier this week that he needed to resign or be fired from ACUS, an unrelated agency that advises on administrative law. Severino refused to resign and is now seeking a court order preventing his ouster, arguing that Biden does not have the authority to fire him. — The suit comes on the same day that Severino officially joined the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center as a senior fellow, where he’ll lead an HHS accountability project tracking Biden administration actions that “threaten quality healthcare and civil rights for all Americans, from conception to natural death.” — The Biden administration also fired three others on the panel, Severino's suit claims: former Trump DOJ official Jennifer Dickey; Andrew Kloster, an attorney in the Trump White House's personnel office; and Daniel Epstein, a former Trump White House lawyer. | | | TEXAS BLOCKED FROM KICKING PLANNED PARENTHOOD OFF MEDICAID — A federal district court judge granted a temporary restraining order Wednesday to stop Texas from removing Planned Parenthood’s clinics from its Medicaid program amid ongoing litigation, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports. It’s the latest development in a legal battle sparked by Texas’ effort to label Planned Parenthood as “unqualified” because of its clinics’ willingness to provide abortions. Since the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals approved the decision in November, other federal appeals courts have split on the issue, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to potentially weigh in with a final verdict. In the meantime, this latest intervention will prevent roughly 8,000 Medicaid patients from losing access to Planned Parenthood clinics. | | | |   | | | | | | FIRST IN PULSE: BALDWIN, BERA BILL WOULD FUND COVID VARIANT SURVEILLANCE — Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) will propose allocating $2 billion for a program to sequence at least 15 percent of Covid-19 cases, in an effort to better track emerging variants, Alice writes. The new legislation would fund guidance, technical assistance and grants for state and local public health labs to systematically sample viruses and work with the CDC to develop mitigation strategies. It would also send $10 million to the National Center for Health Statistics to collect data on the new variants. The U.S. has so far only conducted sequence-based surveillance of about 0.3 percent of coronavirus cases, far less than many other countries. FIRST IN PULSE: DEMOCRATS PUSH MEDICAID EXPANSION INCENTIVES — A group of Senate Democrats are reintroducing legislation aimed at incentivizing holdout states to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Alice reports. The proposal, led by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), would give additional federal funding to the states that expanded Medicaid after 2014 as well as those that choose to do so in the future; the extra money would be enough to cover the full cost of expansion for three years, before tapering down to a 90 percent federal match by the sixth year of expansion. KLOBUCHAR SEEKS ANTITRUST OVERHAUL — The incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary antitrust panel, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), is releasing a new bill that would revamp antitrust laws and make it far harder for the biggest U.S. companies to make deals, POLITICO’s Leah Nylen reports. The bill would require companies with more than $100 billion in annual revenue show that any potential mergers wouldn’t hamper competition, and would boost funding for the Federal Trade Commissioner and Justice Department, which Klobuchar told Leah have become “shadows of their former selves” after years of employee attrition. Klobuchar is also planning a series of hearings on corporate competition across a series of industries, including the pharmaceutical sector. | | | DOUGLAS O’BRIEN has joined Rush University Medical Center as associate VP for government programs and innovation. He most recently was a regional director at HHS. | | A message from the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living: The high cost of personal protective equipment (PPE), testing and staff support have caused long term care providers to close, leaving vulnerable residents without the care they need. We’re calling for adequate funding to help keep staff and residents safe from COVID-19 – and to continue delivering the high quality of care seniors depend on: https://saveourseniors.org/ | | | | | | McKinsey & Co. will agree to a $573 million settlement with states over its work advising Purdue Pharma and other drug companies to aggressively market opioids, The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Randazzo and Jonathan Randles report. Primary care firm One Medical has let people who say they’re health care workers get Covid-19 vaccines without requiring proof of identification, Forbes’ Leah Rosenbaum reports. An amateur mask broker awarded more than $38 million in federal contracts last year to provide N95 masks has pleaded guilty to fraud, ProPublica’s J. David McSwane reports.
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