Y primero en la lista de preocupaciones se encuentra un producto químico llamado 6PPD, que se agrega a los neumáticos para que duren más tiempo. Cuando los neumáticos se van desgastando por el roce con el pavimento, liberan 6PPD.

Al entrar en contacto con el ozono, esta sustancia reacciona y se convierte en un producto químico diferente, el 6PPD-q, que puede ser extremadamente tóxico, tanto que se ha relacionado con muertes de peces en el estado de Washington.

Pero los problemas no terminan ahí.

Los neumáticos están hechos principalmente de goma natural y goma sintética, pero contienen cientos de otros ingredientes, que a menudo incluyen acero y metales pesados como cobre, plomo, cadmio y zinc.

A medida que los neumáticos se desgastan, la goma desaparece en partículas, tanto trozos que se pueden ver a simple vista como micropartículas. Las pruebas realizadas por una empresa británica, Emissions Analytics, encontraron que los neumáticos de un automóvil emiten 1,000 millones de partículas ultrafinas por kilómetro conducido: entre 5 y 9 libras de goma por automóvil de combustión interna por año.

Y lo que hay en esas partículas es un misterio, porque los ingredientes de los neumáticos son de propiedad exclusiva.

“Tienes un cóctel químico en estos neumáticos que nadie realmente entiende y que los fabricantes de neumáticos mantienen en secreto”, dijo Nick Molden, CEO de Emissions Analytics. “Nos resulta difícil pensar en otro producto de consumo tan prevalente en el mundo y utilizado prácticamente por todos, donde se sepa tan poco sobre lo que contiene”.

Los reguladores apenas han comenzado a abordar el problema de la toxicidad en los neumáticos, aunque ha habido algunas acciones sobre el 6PPD.

El producto químico fue identificado por un equipo de investigadores, dirigido por científicos de la Universidad Estatal de Washington y de la Universidad de Washington, que estaban tratando de determinar por qué estaban muriendo masivamente los salmones coho que regresaban a arroyos del área de Seattle para desovar.

Trabajando para el Washington Stormwater Center, los científicos probaron alrededor de 2,000 sustancias para determinar cuál estaba causando las muertes, y en 2020 anunciaron que habían encontrado al culpable: 6PPD.

La Tribu Yurok en el norte de California, junto con otras dos tribus nativas de la costa oeste, han pedido a la Agencia de Protección Ambiental (EPA) que prohíba el producto químico. La EPA dijo que está considerando nuevas normas que lo regulen.

“No podríamos quedarnos de brazos cruzados mientras el 6PPD mata a los peces que nos sostienen”, dijo Joseph L. James, presidente de la Tribu Yurok, en un comunicado. “Esta toxina letal no tiene lugar en ninguna cuenca salmonera”.

California ha comenzado a tomar medidas para regular el producto químico. El año pasado comenzó a calificar a los neumáticos que lo contienen como un “producto prioritario”, lo que requiere que los fabricantes busquen y prueben sustitutos.

“El 6PPD juega un papel crucial en la seguridad de los neumáticos en las carreteras de California y, actualmente, no hay alternativas más seguras ampliamente disponibles”, dijo Karl Palmer, subdirector del Departamento de Control de Sustancias Tóxicas del estado. “Por esta razón, nuestro marco es ideal para identificar alternativas al 6PPD que sigan garantizado la seguridad de los neumáticos en las carreteras de California, protegiendo al mismo tiempo las poblaciones de peces y las comunidades que dependen de ellas”.

La Asociación de Fabricantes de Neumáticos de EE.UU. (USTMA) dice que ha movilizado un consorcio de 16 fabricantes para llevar a cabo un análisis de alternativas. Anne Forristall Luke, presidenta y CEO de la USTMA, dijo que “proporcionará la revisión más efectiva y exhaustiva posible de si existe una alternativa más segura al 6PPD en los neumáticos”.

Sin embargo, Molden dijo que hay un inconveniente. “Si no investigan, no se les permite vender en el estado de California”, dijo. “Si investigan y no encuentran una alternativa, pueden seguir vendiendo. No tienen que encontrar un sustituto. Y hoy no hay alternativa al 6PPD”.

California también está estudiando una solicitud de la California Stormwater Quality Association para clasificar los neumáticos que contienen zinc, un metal pesado, como un producto prioritario, lo que requeriría que los fabricantes busquen una alternativa. El zinc se utiliza en el proceso de vulcanización para aumentar la resistencia del caucho.

Sin embargo, cuando se trata de partículas de neumáticos, no ha habido ninguna acción, incluso cuando el problema empeora con la proliferación de automóviles eléctricos. Debido a su aceleración más rápida, los vehículos eléctricos desgastan los neumáticos más rápido y emiten aproximadamente un 20% más de partículas que los de un automóvil de gasolina promedio.

Un estudio reciente en el sur de California encontró que las emisiones de neumáticos y frenos en Anaheim representaban el 30% de PM2.5, un contaminante atmosférico de partículas pequeñas, mientras que las emisiones de escape representaban el 19%.

Las pruebas realizadas por Emissions Analytics han encontrado que los neumáticos producen hasta 2,000 veces más contaminación por partículas en masa que los tubos de escape. Estas partículas acaban en el agua y el aire y a menudo se ingieren. Los neumáticos también emiten partículas ultrafinas, incluso más pequeñas que PM2.5, que pueden ser inhaladas y viajar directamente al cerebro.

Nuevas investigaciones sugieren que las micropartículas de neumáticos deberían ser clasificadas como un contaminante de “alta preocupación”. En un informe el año pasado, investigadores del Imperial College de Londres dijeron que las partículas podrían afectar al corazón, los pulmones y los órganos reproductivos, y causar cáncer.

Las personas que viven o trabajan junto a carreteras, muchas veces de bajos ingresos, están expuestas a más de estas sustancias tóxicas.

Los neumáticos también son una fuente importante de microplásticos. Más de tres cuartas partes de los microplásticos que llegan al océano provienen de la goma sintética de los neumáticos, según un informe del Pew Charitable Trusts y la empresa británica Systemiq.

Y todavía hay muchas incógnitas sobre las emisiones de neumáticos, que pueden ser especialmente complejas de analizar porque el calor y la presión pueden transformar los ingredientes del neumático en otros compuestos.

Una pregunta pendiente de investigación es si el 6PPD-q afecta a las personas y qué problemas de salud, si los hay, podría causar. Un estudio reciente publicado en Environmental Science & Technology Letters encontró altos niveles del producto químico en muestras de orina de una región del sur de China, con niveles más altos en mujeres embarazadas.

Molden dijo que el descubrimiento del 6PPD-q ha generado un nuevo interés en el impacto sanitario y ambiental de los neumáticos, y espera una gran cantidad de nuevas investigaciones en los próximos años. “Las piezas del rompecabezas se están armando”, dijo. “Pero es un rompecabezas de mil piezas, no de doscientas”.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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— Nearly a half-million health workers who stand to benefit from California’s nation-leading $25 minimum wage law could be in for a rude awakening if hospitals and other health care providers follow through on potential cuts to hours and benefits.

A medical industry challenge to a new minimum wage ordinance in one Southern California city suggests layoffs and reductions in hours and benefits, including cuts to premium pay and vacation time, could be one result of a state law set to begin phasing in in June. However, some experts are skeptical of that possibility.

The California Hospital Association brought a partly successful legal challenge to Inglewood’s $25 minimum wage ordinance, which barred employers from taking those sorts of steps to offset their higher costs.

“Layoffs, reductions in premium pay rates, reductions in non-wage benefits, reductions in hours, and increased charges are consequences of an employer having less money to spend—which will necessarily be the case given the significant increase in spending on wages due to the minimum wage,” the association said in its lawsuit. Additional examples include reducing health coverage and charging for parking or work-related equipment.

Inglewood voters approved the ordinance in November 2022, nearly a year before California legislators enacted a $25 minimum wage for health workers. Those statewide higher wages are to be phased in starting in June under California’s first-in-the-nation law, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has since said they are too expensive as the state faces a deficit estimated between $38 billion and $73 billion. It’s unclear if lawmakers will agree to a delay or take other steps to reduce the cost.

U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer agreed with the hospital industry in a March 11 tentative ruling when he shot down the portion of Inglewood’s ordinance banning layoffs and clawbacks by employers, while allowing the rest of the ordinance to remain in effect. He gave the sides time to object to his preliminary decision, though none did.

The California Hospital Association represents more than 400 hospitals and was a key backer of the state’s carefully crafted compromise law, which notably contains none of the employee safeguards included in the Inglewood ordinance.

Spokesperson Jan Emerson-Shea said the association doesn’t know how providers will react once the state law takes effect. “We don’t have any insights,” she said.

“The challenge for any health care organization is figuring out how to pay for the higher wages,” said Joanne Spetz, director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California-San Francisco. “Since labor costs are the largest part of any health care organization’s costs, it’s hard to figure out how to reduce spending without looking at labor costs.”

Providers can try to increase revenues by bargaining for higher reimbursements from commercial insurers, she said. Public hospitals, nursing homes, and community clinics get most of their money through Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

Providers could reduce the services they offer, pare back charity care, and cut or delay capital investments, Spetz said. In the long term, she expects some combination of spending cuts and revenue increases.

Both the state law and local ordinance cover far more than doctors and nurses, with a definition of health worker that includes janitors, housekeepers, groundskeepers, security guards, food service workers, laundry workers, and clerical staff.

The most recent estimate by the Health Care Program at the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center is that as many as 426,000 health workers would make an average of $6,400 extra in the law’s first year, a 19% average pay bump mainly benefiting lower-income workers of color and women. State finance officials project that well over 500,000 workers will benefit.

Researchers didn’t include layoffs and other potential staffing and benefit reductions when they projected the state law’s costs and benefits, said Laurel Lucia, the program’s director. But she pointed to initial projections by hospitals, doctors, and business and taxpayer groups that the wage hike would cost $8 billion annually, thereby imperiling services and resulting in higher premiums and higher costs for state and local governments.

“It seems like a contradiction to say this law’s going to cost billions of dollars while at the same time saying it’s going to reduce workers’ total compensation,” said Lucia, who projects a far lower price tag.

She added that state finance officials had anticipated that Medi-Cal reimbursements would reflect the increased labor costs, while Medicare would eventually at least partially compensate for the higher labor costs.

Michael Reich, chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and affiliated economist Justin Wiltshire recently argued that California’s new $20 minimum wage law for fast-food workers won’t result in mass layoffs and price increases, as some have predicted.

Health care is much different than fast food, Reich acknowledged, but he argued for much the same positive result.

“A higher minimum wage will make it easier and cheaper for hospitals to recruit and retain these workers. The cost savings, and the productivity benefits of more experienced workers, could offset much of the labor cost increase,” Reich said.

The hospital association filed its lawsuit against Inglewood’s ordinance in July, while it was still opposing early versions of the statewide minimum wage legislation. Among many other provisions, the statewide law put on hold an initiative to cap hospital executives’ salaries in Los Angeles.

The hospital association’s legal challenge referenced in part layoffs and reduced working hours imposed by Centinela Hospital Medical Center after Inglewood’s ordinance took effect.

But Centinela said the reduction was entirely unrelated to the ordinance and that all staff were offered alternate positions, which many accepted.

“Centinela Hospital also has since added many more jobs in new clinical positions above minimum wage scale,” the hospital said in a statement.

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the prime backer of both the local ordinance and the statewide law, sued the hospital in April 2023 alleging that it cut workers’ hours to offset the higher minimum wage. The case is still pending.

The union did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In a court filing, however, the union and city of Inglewood said similar employer restrictions in previous minimum wage laws have survived.

The ordinance “merely sets the backdrop for collective bargaining negotiations,” and does not bar employers from locking out employees or hiring replacement workers during a strike. Employers can still lay off workers or reduce their hours, they said, so long as they don’t do so to fund the higher minimum wage.

But Fischer agreed with the hospital association that layoffs and reductions in employees’ total compensation packages are “obvious responses by an employer to rising compensation costs.”

Restricting employers’ options would violate federal labor relations rules, he said.

“The minimum wage an employer has to pay its employees will invariably affect the total amount of compensation it is able or willing to pay,” he wrote “This will then invariably affect the number of employees it can retain and the number of hours those employees will be scheduled to work.”

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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State and local governments are receiving billions of dollars in opioid settlements to address the drug crisis that has ravaged America for decades. But instead of spending the money on new addiction treatment and prevention services they couldn’t afford before, some jurisdictions are using it to replace existing funding and stretch tight budgets.

Scott County, Indiana, for example, has spent more than $250,000 of opioid settlement dollars on salaries for its health director and emergency medical services staff. The money usually budgeted for those salaries was freed to buy an ambulance and create a financial cushion for the health department.

In Blair County, Pennsylvania, about $320,000 went to a drug court the county has been operating with other sources of money for more than two decades.

And in New York, some lawmakers and treatment advocates say the governor’s proposed budget substitutes millions of opioid settlement dollars for a portion of the state addiction agency’s normal funding.

The national opioid settlements don’t prohibit the use of money for initiatives already supported by other means. But families affected by addiction, recovery advocates, and legal and public health experts say doing so squanders a rare opportunity to direct additional resources toward saving lives.

“To think that replacing what you’re already spending with settlement funds is going to make things better — it’s not,” said Robert Kent, former general counsel for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Certainly, the spirit of the settlements wasn’t to keep doing what you’re doing. It was to do more.”

Settlement money is a new funding stream, separate from tax dollars. It comes from more than a dozen companies that were accused of aggressively marketing and distributing prescription painkillers. States are required to spend at least 85% of the funds on addressing the opioid crisis. Now, with illicit fentanyl flooding the drug market and killing tens of thousands of Americans annually, the need for treatment and social services is more urgent.

Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have restricted the practice of substituting opioid settlement funds for existing dollars, according to state guides created by OpioidSettlementTracker.com and the public health organization Vital Strategies. A national set of principles created by Johns Hopkins University also advises against the practice, known as supplantation.

Paying Staff Salaries

Scott County, Indiana — a small, rural place known nationally as the site of an HIV outbreak in 2015 sparked by intravenous drug use — received more than $570,000 in opioid settlement funds in 2022.

From August 2022 to July 2023, the county reported using roughly $191,000 for the salaries of its EMS director, deputy director, and training officer/clinical coordinator, as well as about $60,000 for its health administrator. The county also awarded about $151,000 total to three community organizations that address addiction and related issues.

In a public meeting discussing the settlement dollars, county attorney Zachary Stewart voiced concerns. “I don’t know whether or not we’re supposed to be using that money to add, rather than supplement, already existing resources,” he said.

But a couple of months later, the county council approved the allocations.

Council President Lyndi Hughbanks did not respond to repeated requests to explain this decision. But council members and county commissioners said in public meetings that they hoped to compensate county departments for resources expended during the HIV outbreak.

Their conversations echoed the struggles of many rural counties nationwide, which have tight budgets, in part because they poured money into addressing the opioid crisis for years. Now as they receive settlement funds, they want to recoup some of those expenses.

The Scott County Health Department did not respond to questions about how the funds typically allocated for salary were used instead. But at the public meeting, it was suggested they could be used at the department’s discretion.

EMS Chief Nick Oleck told KFF Health News the money saved on salaries was put toward loan payments for a new ambulance, purchased in spring 2023.

Unlike other departments, which are funded from local tax dollars and start each year with a full budget, the county EMS is mostly funded through insurance reimbursements for transporting patients, Oleck said. The opioid settlement funds provided enough cash flow to make payments on the new ambulance while his department waited for reimbursements.

Oleck said this use of settlement dollars will save lives. His staff needs vehicles to respond to overdose calls, and his department regularly trains area emergency responders on overdose response.

“It can be played that it was just money used to buy an ambulance, but there’s a lot more behind the scenes,” Oleck said.

Still, Jonathan White — the only council member to vote against using settlement funds for EMS salaries — said he felt the expense did not fit the money’s intended purpose.

The settlement “was written to pay for certain things: helping people get off drugs,” White told KFF Health News. “We got drug rehab facilities and stuff like that that I believe could have used that money more.”

Phil Stucky, executive director of a local nonprofit called Thrive, said his organization could have used the money too. Founded in the wake of the HIV outbreak, Thrive employs people in recovery to provide support to peers with mental health and substance use disorders.

Stucky, who is in recovery himself, asked Scott County for $300,000 in opioid settlement funds to hire three peer specialists and purchase a vehicle to transport people to treatment. He ultimately received one-sixth of that amount — enough to hire one person.

In Blair County, Pennsylvania, Marianne Sinisi was frustrated to learn her county used about $322,000 of opioid settlement funds to pay for a drug court that has existed for decades.

“This is an opioid epidemic, which is not being treated enough as it is now,” said Sinisi, who lost her 26-year-old son to an overdose in 2018. The county received extra money to help people, but instead it pulled back its own money, she said. “How do you expect that to change? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?”

Blair County Commissioner Laura Burke told KFF Health News that salaries for drug court probation officers and aides were previously covered by a state grant and parole fees. But in recent years that funding has been inadequate, and the county general fund has picked up the slack. Using opioid settlement funds provides a small reprieve since the general fund is overburdened, she said. The county’s most recent budget faces a $2 million deficit.

Forfeited Federal Dollars

Supplantation can take many forms, said Shelly Weizman, project director of the addiction and public policy initiative at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute. Replacing general funds with opioid settlement dollars is an obvious one, but there are subtler approaches.

The federal government pours billions of dollars into addiction-related initiatives annually. But some states forfeit federal grants or decline to expand Medicaid, which is the largest payer of mental health and addiction treatment.

If those jurisdictions then use opioid settlement funds for activities that could have been covered with federal money, Weizman considers it supplantation.

“It’s really letting down the citizens of their state,” she said.

Officials in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, forfeited more than $1 million in federal funds from September 2022 to September 2023, the bulk of which was meant to support the construction of a behavioral health crisis stabilization center.

“We were probably overly optimistic” about spending the money by the grant deadline, said Diane Rosati, executive director of the Bucks County Drug and Alcohol Commission.

Now the county plans to use $3.9 million in local and state opioid settlement funds to support the center.

Susan Ousterman finds these developments difficult to stomach. Her 24-year-old son died of an overdose in 2020, and she later joined the Bucks County Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee, which developed a plan to spend the funds.

In a September 2022 email to other committee members, she expressed disappointment in the suggested uses: “Please keep in mind, the settlement funds are not meant to fund existing programs or programs that can be funded by other sources, such as federal grants.”

But Rosati said the county is maximizing its resources. Settlement funds will create a host of services, including grief groups for families and transportation to treatment facilities.

“We’re determined to utilize every bit of funding that’s available to Bucks County, using every funding source, every stream, and frankly every grant opportunity that comes our way,” Rosati said.

The county’s guiding principles for settlement funds demand as much. They say, “Whenever possible, use existing resources in order that Opioid Settlement funds can be directed to addressing gaps in services.”

Ed Mahon of Spotlight PA contributed to this report.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The Host

Julie Rovner
KFF Health News

@jrovner

Read Julie's stories.

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

The Arizona Supreme Court shook up the national abortion debate this week, ruling that a ban originally passed in 1864 — before the end of the Civil War and decades before Arizona became a state — could be enforced. As in some other states, including Florida, voters will likely have the chance to decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution in November.

The Arizona ruling came just one day after former President Donald Trump declared that abortion should remain a state issue, although he then criticized the ruling as having gone “too far.”

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Rachel Roubein of The Washington Post, and Rachel Cohrs Zhang of Stat.

Panelists

Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politico

@AliceOllstein

Read Alice's stories.

Rachel Roubein
The Washington Post

@rachel_roubein

Read Rachel's stories.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang
Stat News

@rachelcohrs

Read Rachel's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Former President Donald Trump’s remarks this week reflect only the latest public shift in his views on abortion access. During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice,” but by the 2016 presidential campaign, he had committed to nominating conservative Supreme Court justices likely to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Trump later blamed Republican losses in the 2022 elections on the overturning of that right.
• Arizona officials, as well as doctors and patients, are untangling the ramifications of a state Supreme Court ruling this week allowing the enforcement of a near-total abortion ban dating to the Civil War. Yet any ban — even one that doesn’t last long — can have lasting effects. Abortion clinics may not survive such restrictions, and doctors and residents may factor them into their decisions about where to practice medicine.
• Also in abortion news, an appeals court panel in Indiana unanimously ruled that the state cannot enforce its abortion ban against a group of non-Christians who sued, siding with mostly Jewish plaintiffs who charged that the ban violates their religious freedom rights.
• A discouraging new study finds that paying off an individual’s medical debt once it has reached collections doesn’t offer them much financial — or mental health — benefit. One factor could be that the failure to pay medical debt is only a symptom of larger financial difficulties.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF Health News’ Molly Castle Work, who reported and wrote the latest KFF Health News-NPR “Bill of the Month” feature about an air-ambulance ride for an infant with RSV that his insurer deemed not to be medically necessary. If you have an outrageous or baffling medical bill you’d like to send us, you can do that here.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: Stat’s “Your Dog Is Probably on Prozac. Experts Say That Says More About the American Mental Health Crisis Than Pets,” by Sarah Owermohle.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang: KFF Health News’ “Ten Doctors on FDA Panel Reviewing Abbott Heart Device Had Financial Ties With Company,” by David Hilzenrath and Holly K. Hacker.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: The Texas Tribune’s “How Texas Teens Lost the One Program That Allowed Birth Control Without Parental Consent,” by Eleanor Klibanoff.

Rachel Roubein: The Washington Post’s “As Obesity Rises, Big Food and Dietitians Push ‘Anti-Diet’ Advice,” by Sasha Chavkin, Caitlin Gilbert, Anjali Tsui, and Anahad O’Connor.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

• Live Action’s “Hi, My Name’s Olivia” video.
• The New York Times’ “Insurers Reap Hidden Fees by Slashing Payment. You May Get the Bill,” by Chris Hamby.
• The Nation Bureau of Economic Research’s “The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence From Two Randomized Experiments,” by Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong, and Wesley Yin.
• USA Today’s “The Database You Don’t Want to Need: Check to See if Your Health Data Was Hacked,” by Cecilia Garzella.

Click to open the transcript

Transcript: Arizona Turns Back the Clock on Abortion Access

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.]

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, April 11, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast and things might have changed by the time you hear this. So here we go.

We are joined today via video conference by Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Hello.

Rovner: Rachel Cohrs Zhang of Stat News.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang: Hi, everybody.

Rovner: And we welcome back from her leave Rachel Roubein of The Washington Post.

Rachel Roubein: Hi, happy to be here.

Rovner: Later in this episode we’ll have my interview with my KFF Health News colleague Molly Work about the latest KFF Health News-NPR “Bill of the Month,” about yet another very expensive air-ambulance ride that an insurer deemed “unnecessary.” As you will hear, that is hardly the case.

But first, this week’s news, and there is lots of it. We start again this week with abortion because, again, that’s where the biggest news is. I want to do this chronologically because there were a lot of things that happened and they all built on each piece before them. So on Monday, former President [Donald] Trump, as promised, issued his long-awaited statement on abortion, a four-minute video posted on his platform Truth Social, in which he took credit for appointing the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, but then kind of declared the job done because abortion is now up to the individual states. And while he didn’t say so directly, that strongly suggested he would not be supporting efforts by anti-abortion groups to try to pass a federal 15-week ban, should Republicans retake the presidency and both houses of Congress. That alone was a big step away from some of his strongest anti-abortion supporters like the SBA List [Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America], which helped got him elected in 2016, right, Alice? I see you nodding.

Ollstein: Yes. He kind of left himself some wiggle room. He made a statement that, at first, people could sort of read into it what they wanted. And so you had several anti-abortion groups going, “Well, he didn’t advocate for a national ban, but he also didn’t rule it out.” But then, as I’m sure we’ll get to, he was asked follow-up questions and he kind of did rule it out. He kind of did say, “No, I wouldn’t sign a national ban if it were presented to me.” And so the little crumbs of hope anti-abortion groups were picking up on may or may not be there. But it was both notable for what he did say and what he didn’t say. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about what he would do in office, both in terms of legislation, which is really a remote possibility that no one thinks is real, but he didn’t say anything.

Rovner: It would need 60 votes in the Senate.

Ollstein: Exactly.

Rovner: Legislation.

Ollstein: Exactly. And no one really on the right or left thinks that is going to happen, but he didn’t say anything about what he would do with executive powers, which, as we’ve discussed, could go a long, long way towards banning abortion nationwide.

Rovner: One of the things that sort of fascinates me, I’ve been covering abortion for a long time, longer than some of you have been alive, and I have seen lots of politicians switch sides on this. I mean, Joe Biden started out as very anti-abortion, now very in favor of abortion rights. So I’ve seen politicians go both ways, but the general rule has always been you get to switch once. You get to either go from being pro-life to pro-choice or being pro-choice to pro-life. You don’t get to go back and forth and yet that seems to be very much what Trump has done. He seems to have taken every conceivable position there is on this extraordinarily binary issue and gotten away with it.

Ollstein: One last thing I wanted to flag in the statement was that he kind of said the quiet part out loud and that he directly said that this is about winning elections. So he’s saying, “This is what we need to say in order to win,” which leaves open what he really believes or what he really would do.

Roubein: Yeah, I mean, going back to Trump’s shifting view on abortion, because that’s really important and that’s something that the anti-abortion movement is sort of looking towards. I mean, in 1999 in an interview in “Meet the Press,” he called himself “very pro-choice,” and then we kind of saw by 2016, he had committed to naming justices who had anti-abortion views. And as Alice mentioned then, after the midterms in 2022, he blamed Republican losses on that.

Rovner: Yeah, I assume that makes it hard for people who try to follow him. I know [Sen.] Lindsey Graham came out, Lindsey Graham, who’s been sort of the major backer of the 15-week abortion ban in Congress for some time now, and suddenly Lindsey Graham, who has been nothing but loyal to Trump, finds himself on the other side of a big, important issue. I mean, Trump seems to get away with it. The question is, are his followers going to get away with having different positions on this?

Cohrs Zhang: Oh, I also just wanted to say that I think it’ll be interesting to see who Trump chooses as his running mate on this because obviously his opinion and his position is very important, but I think we saw kind of last time around with him leaning on Mike Pence a little bit for credibility with the anti-abortion movement. So I think it’ll be interesting to see whether he chooses someone again who can mend some of these relationships or whether he’s just going to carry on and make those decisions himself and lean less on his VP.

Rovner: Well, let’s move on to Tuesday because on Tuesday the Trump abortion doctrine got a pretty severe test from the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that an almost absolute abortion ban that was passed in 1864, before Arizona was a state, before the end of the Civil War, can be enforced. Alice, what’s this law and when might it take effect?

Ollstein: So the Supreme Court kicked some of those issues back down to the lower court and so it’s still being worked out. Currently, abortion is banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The total ban could go into effect in a little over a month, but it’s really uncertain. And so you’re seeing a lot of the same fear and confusion that we saw in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization], where providers and patients don’t know what’s legal and whether they can provide or receive care and are, in some instances, over-complying and holding off on doing things that are still legal.

And so just a great example of how Trump and these national political figures, they can take whatever position they want, but that often gets overtaken by events. And so you saw Trump come out and say, “States should decide.” This is arguably an instance of states deciding, although the Supreme Court upholding a law from when no one was currently alive, was part of that, the law was implemented when women couldn’t vote, when Arizona wasn’t even a state yet. So whether this is an example of “will of the people,” that can be debated. But this is an example of “leave it to states.” And then Trump was asked about the Arizona decision, whether it went too far, and he said “Yes, it did go too far.” So it’s like should states be allowed to decide or not?

Rovner: It’s like, “Leave it to states unless they go too far.”

Roubein: And who decides what too far is, because a lot of anti-abortion groups were very complimentary of the Arizona ruling and said it was the right thing to do. So depends who you ask.

Rovner: So this obviously scrambles politics beyond just the presidential race, although I think it’s pretty clear to say that it puts Arizona, which had been teetering as being sort of purple state-ish, right back in play, but it’s going to affect things down the ballot and in other states, right?

Ollstein: I mean just looking at Arizona, I mean abortion rights and Democrats have really been pushing ballot measures here, and, I think as Julie was alluding to, there’s a ballot measure effort in Arizona, and I believe the organizers have said that they have enough signatures to qualify, then there’s steps to actually qualifying. So that’s going to really put a spotlight on Arizona. But, we’ve seen ballot measures in other states, Florida. Democrats really want Florida to be in play now that there’s been a Florida state Supreme Court ruling and there’s a ballot measure there. The threshold’s higher, it’s 60%, but all around the country it’s going to be putting increasing emphasis on this ballot measure effort.

Rovner: So the Republicans now really have no place to hide. I saw there was a Senate candidate in Wisconsin who had been very completely anti-abortion, now seems to be a lot less anti-abortion. I mean Republicans have spent a lot of time putting Democrats on the spot about not wanting to be specific on their abortion position, and that’s what leads to the, “You support abortion up until the ninth month,” which isn’t a thing. But now I feel like it’s a chance for Democrats to turn this on Republicans saying, “Now you have to say exactly what your position is rather than just you are ‘anti-abortion’ or ‘100% pro-life,’ which for many, many elections was plenty and all the candidates needed to say.

Cohrs Zhang: Just as we talk about all of these different, how this is playing out, certainly I think the instance you brought up was an example of a position on the larger issue of what a candidate is going to support generally, but I think there are these kind of tangential local issues too that candidates are going to have to take positions on. I think if we look back, like IVF, that’s something that candidates have never really had to weigh in on, and I think it is going to become local in a new way, which just seeing all these offshoot rulings and court decisions. And I think that it was an excellent catch, and, certainly, it’ll be interesting to see how candidates move across the spectrum as we see some more and more extreme local cases coming up even beyond the national standard.

Rovner: And as Alice points out, this is more than just political. This affects health care on the ground. Doctors either not wanting to train in states that have strict bans or doctors in some cases picking up and leaving states, not wanting to be threatened with jail or loss of license. So that affects what other kinds of women’s health care is available. Alice, you wanted to add something?

Ollstein: Yeah, I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying, both with the Florida ruling and with the Arizona ruling, so in both of these instances, a very sweeping abortion ban is expected to go into effect, but then there’s going to be a ballot referendum in the fall where voters will have the opportunity to get rid of those bans. And so you’re seeing a lot of people saying, “OK, well this is only temporary. Voters will be so outraged over this that they’ll vote to support these ballot measures to overturn it.” But I think it’s important to remember that a lot of the impacts will linger for a long time if these clinics can’t hang on even a few months under a near-total ban and shut their doors. You can’t just flip a switch and turn that back on. It’s incredibly hard to open a new abortion clinic.

Rovner: Or even to reopen one that you’ve closed down “temporarily.”

Ollstein: Exactly. And like you said, medical students and residents and doctors are making decisions about where to live and where to practice that could have impacts that last for years and years. And so people saying, “Oh, well, it’s not that important if these bans go into effect now because in November voters will have their say.” Even a few months can have a very long effect in a state.

Rovner: Yeah. I just want to continue to reiterate this is about more than politics. This is actually about health care on the ground.

Well, in other abortion news, a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled last week that the state cannot enforce its abortion ban against a group of plaintiffs who are non-Christians and charge that the ban violates their freedom of religion because some religions, notably Judaism but others too, include tenets that prioritize the life and health of the pregnant woman over that of the fetus. This is obviously not the last word on this case. It could still go to the Indiana Supreme Court or even the U.S. Supreme Court, but it does seem significant. I think it’s the first decision we’ve seen on one of these cases, and it was unanimous. And interestingly, it turns a lot of the recent decisions protecting religious freedom for Christians right back on those who would ban abortion. Alice, there are more of these … awaiting hearing, right?

Ollstein: Yes. There’s ones going on really around the country that are testing these legal theories, and part of it is that state-level religious freedom laws are often more expansive and protective than federal religious freedom laws. And so they’re leaning on that. And yeah, it’s a really fascinating test case of, were these religious freedom laws intended to only protect one particular religion that has hegemonic power in the United States right now or were they designed to protect every one of every religion? And I think Judeo-Christian values is a term that’s thrown out a lot, and this really shows that there are very different beliefs when it comes to pregnancy and abortion and which life to prioritize between the mother and the child. And when it even counts as an abortion, when it even counts as life beginning, that is a lot more muddled.

And look, in this case it was led by Jewish plaintiffs challenging, but I’ve been tracking cases that draw from many different religions, and these protections even apply to avowed atheists in some instances. And so I think this is definitely something to keep an eye on. In addition to Indiana, the other case I’ve been following most closely is in Missouri, so it’ll be really fascinating to see what happens.

Rovner: There was one in Kentucky, too. Did anything ever happen with that one? I think that was the first one we talked about.

Ollstein: They’re still waiting.

Rovner: Like two years ago.

Ollstein: Yeah. The wheels of justice turn slowly.

Rovner: Indeed, they do. Well, finally, Tennessee is on the verge of enacting a bill that would require students to be shown a three-minute video on fetal development and strongly recommends one made by the anti-abortion group Live Action. Not surprisingly, medical experts say the video is inaccurate and manipulative. I will post a link to it so you can watch it and judge for yourself. What jumped out to me in this story is that one Tennessee lawmaker, himself a physician, said, and I quote, “Whether all of the exact details are correct, I don’t think that is important.” Is that where we have come with this debate these days, that facts are no longer important?

Cohrs Zhang: I mean, I thought it was interesting that there was an amendment rejected that would’ve allowed parents to opt out of it. And I just feel like there’s so many permission slips in schools these days for any book or movie that something like this would be mandated is just kind of like an interesting twist on that. So again, we’ll be interested to see if it actually takes effect, but …

Rovner: I mean, it’s a pretty benign video. It’s basically purporting to show fetal development from the moment of fertilization up to birth. The big complaint about it is it’s misleading on the timing because it’s counting from a different place than doctors count from. It’s counting from the moment of fertilization. Doctors generally count pregnancy from the last missed period because it’s hard to tell. You don’t know when the moment of fertilization was. But when we talk about first trimester or however many weeks, medically you’re talking about weeks since last missed period. So this makes everything look like it happened earlier than it actually does in common parlance. Have I explained that right, Alice?

Ollstein: Yes. And we are seeing efforts on this front both to make these educational mandates for students, but we’re also seeing them mandated for doctors’ education in some states as well. Part of this is to address what everyone on all sides acknowledges is a problem, which is that doctors don’t understand when the exemptions to these abortion bans apply in terms of life and health of the parent coming into play. Oftentimes these bans are written with nonmedical language talking about serious threats. What’s serious? Talking about harm to a major bodily function. What’s major? So, you are seeing doctors holding off from providing abortions even in cases that they think should be exempt, these emergency situations, and so anti-abortion groups are pushing these bills mandating certain curricula for doctors to try to address this confusion. The medical groups I’ve spoken to don’t think this is a solution, but it’s interesting as an attempt.

Rovner: In some states, it has to be an affirmative defense. So as you, a doctor, consider an emergency, you perform the abortion and then instead of not getting charged, you get charged and you have to go hire a lawyer and go to court and say, “I decided that this was an emergency.” And that’s not something that’s very attractive to doctors either. And Rachel, you wanted to add …

Roubein: Oh yeah, I was just going to say I think one of the things that stuck out to me about this particular video, one of my colleagues, Dan Rosen, so I [inaudible 00:16: 52] in February, and he said that this is Live Action, which is the group that came under the spotlight in 2011 for releasing undercover videos seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood, but Live Action had been playing the Baby Olivia to legislative audiences, including at an influential conservative group, American Legislative Exchange Council. So just kind of looking at who’s kind of seeking to get this video into classrooms.

Rovner: All right, well now it is time for our weekly dive into why health care costs so darn much. We begin with a fascinating and infuriating investigation from The New York Times about another one of those third-party contractors most of us had never heard of, kind of like Change Healthcare before it got hacked. This one is called MultiPlan, and its job is to recommend how much insurers and/or employers, in self-insured plans, should pay providers. Except it turns out that MultiPlan has an incentive to pay providers less than they charge. It pockets part of the “savings.” And in most of the cases, these out-of-network charges are not covered by the surprise-billing law. I think because patients know they are going out-of-network, that part is not entirely clear to me. And of course, often patients have no other available providers, so they have no choice but to go out-of-network.

Sometimes indeed providers do overcharge outrageously. We’ve talked about that a lot. But in this case, it seems that a lot of these recommendations are to underpay outrageously. The firm told one therapist that her fair payment should be half of what Medicaid pays. Medicaid, traditionally the lowest payer of everyone. I feel like this story’s going to have legs, as they say. Apparently, the American Hospital Association has already asked the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate MultiPlan. Why do I feel like we’re all pawns in this huge competition between health care providers and insurers about who can pay who less or more and pocket the differences?

Cohrs Zhang: Yeah, I think we first heard about MultiPlan, kind of in the conversation around surprise billing, because that was just a different category of these out-of-network bills where patients were getting stuck in the middle. And I think over time we’ve seen more stories come out about loopholes in those protections. And this is another example where MultiPlan is … they have to fix their business model. And the arbitration process for these surprise bills is so backed up, in these certain cases, which are more emergency care, I think, and if patients don’t necessarily have control or knowledge of their provider being out-of-network.

But certainly, people, if you’re looking for a certain specialist or want to go to a certain place to have a procedure done, then you may just elect an out-of-network provider. And I think the part I found really interesting about this reporting, that I think we’ve seen reflected in larger trends on business reporting, is really understanding these business models better and the incentives. And I love the graphics, I think, where you’re showing that if MultiPlan can lowball these providers and manage to squeeze a little bit more of a discount for payers, then they’re taking a cut of that discount, and patients can be left on the hook for these too.

So I think, as with anything, these surprise-billing protections are going to be an iterative process. And certainly I think there’s more to be done in so many different individual cases to protect patients from some of these games that providers and insurers are engaged in and the firms that kind of specialize in brokering these negotiations.

Rovner: It feels very whack-a-mole, every time they sort of put a band-aid on one problem, another one pops up, that it’s just sort of this is what happens when a fifth of your economy goes to health care is that everybody says, “Oh, I can make money doing X.” And then, there’s an awful lot of people making money doing X, which is not necessarily having anything to do with providing or receiving medical care.

Cohrs Zhang: Absolutely. And correct me if I’m wrong, I think MultiPlan, it may be publicly traded as well. So if you look at some of these incentives here to kind of meet those quarterly targets and how that aligns with patients, I think that’s also just something we keep in mind.

Rovner: And there was private equity involved on both sides, too, which I didn’t even want to try to explain. You should really read the story, which is really very complicated and very well explained. Because this is how it works: They make it complicated so you can’t figure out what’s going on.

Well, meanwhile, in a sad payment story of the week, a new study has found that paying off people’s medical debt doesn’t actually fix their financial problems. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, paying off debts that have already gone to collection did not improve the financial status of the people who owed the money, nor their mental health, nor did it make it more likely that they would be able to pay future medical bills. One thing it did do was help their credit ratings. The researchers said that they hope maybe paying off debt before it reaches the collection status might be more helpful, but that would also be more expensive. What makes it easy to pay off medical debt after it’s gone to collections is they sell it for pennies on the dollar. And of course, the U.S. is already moving towards taking medical debt off of people’s credit report. So obviously we’re talking about patients getting stuck with these huge bills and they end up with this medical debt and now we can’t seem to figure out how to fix the medical debt problem either.

Cohrs Zhang: When I first saw the study, obviously I trust that Sarah Kliff edited her studies, but I scrolled right down to the conflict-of-interest section to see who funded this. And yeah, it was a very depressing study. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that a failure to pay medical debt is a symptom of larger economic problems. Certainly there may be cases where medical debt is the only outstanding debt somebody has or is a shocking surprise or is a lien on their home, something like that that might have just these massive consequences.

But I think one of the points that was brought up in the story was that when you have medical debt, sure, you have collections calls, you have bad impact on your credit, but you’re not getting evicted from your home. And we’ve heard about cases where providers have held outstanding balances against patients, but I don’t think that’s a general practice. You’re supposed to be seen if you go in for medical care. So I think just like the day-to-day challenges of poverty, of debt, are so overwhelming that it is a little discouraging to hear that these individual payments may not have changed someone’s life. But I think there may be anecdotal cases that would be different from that larger trend, but it was not an encouraging study.

Rovner: No. And speaking of conflict of interest, there was the opposite of conflict of interest. It was conducted in part by the group RIP Medical Debt, which was created to help pay off people’s medical debt. And they did say, obviously there are cases in this does make huge differences in individual people’s lives. It was just that, overall, apparently the model by which they are paying off people’s debt is not helping them as much as I guess they had hoped to. So they have to look on to other things.

Moving on to this week in health data security, or lack thereof, it seems that another cyberattack group is trying to get Change Healthcare to pay ransom. This is after the company reportedly paid $22 million. So it seems that after paying, the company didn’t get all of its stolen records back. Meanwhile, it seems that even though we’re not hearing as much about this as we were, there are still lots of providers that aren’t getting paid. I mean, Rachel, this thing as we predicted, has a really long tail.

Roubein: Absolutely does. Yeah, I think we’re seeing these multiple ransomware groups trying to extort money out of UnitedHealthcare. I mean, they have deep pockets. It’s such a mess. I think, who’s to say what’s true about what data they have as well. So it’s kind of hard to report on these kind of things. And I think only UnitedHealthcare has the answers to those questions. But I think we are going to see some more congressional oversight on this issue. I know providers, hospitals, and physician groups were absolutely using these arguments on Capitol Hill during the appropriations negotiations. They’re saying, “We’re in such financial distress.” Going to their lawmakers talking about how it wouldn’t be a good idea to cut provider payments or implement site-neutral payments for hospitals, all these long-term things that lawmakers have been thinking about. There were other political problems, too, but I think it’s definitely seeped into Washington how difficult this has been, how cumbersome some of the workarounds are for providers, large and small, I think who are trying to work around this fiasco.

Rovner: Yeah, I read one story, I mean it really does feel like a spy movie that they’re assuming that maybe the company that got the ransom that was supposed to split it with the company that actually did the hacking didn’t and made off with the money. And now the company that actually did the hacking is trying to get its own ransom and oh my goodness. I mean, again, this is what happens when a fifth of the economy goes through the health care system. But I mean, I want to keep on this story because this story really does keep on impacting the back-room goings-on, which keep the health care system functioning in some ways.

And while we are on the subject of health care data breaches, USA Today has now a searchable tool for you to find out if you’re one of the 144 million Americans whose medical information was stolen or exposed in the last year. Yay? I think? I suppose this is a necessary evil. It’s hard for me to imagine 10 years ago. It’s like, “Wow, you can take some time and find out if your medical information’s been exposed.”

Roubein: It’s better than not knowing because you can change your passwords, you can do some credit monitoring, you could protect your information in some ways. But it’s not the same as better protections for the breaches happening in the first place.

Rovner: I know Congress is talking about a privacy bill, but apparently it is in truly embryonic stages at this point because I don’t think Congress really knows what to do about this either. They just know that they probably should do something.

All right, that is the news for this week. Now we will play my bill of the month interview with Molly [Castle] Work. Then we will come back and do our extra credits.

I am pleased to welcome to the podcast my colleague Molly Work, who reported and wrote the latest KFF Health News-NPR “Bill of the Month” installment. Molly, thanks for joining us.

Molly Castle Work: Thanks so much, Julie.

Rovner: So this month’s bill, like last month’s bill, is for an air-ambulance ride, a bill that should have been prevented by the federal No Surprises Act. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, who is our patient this month?

Work: So our patient is Amari Vaca. He was a 3-month-old baby at the time from Salinas, California.

Rovner: And what happened to him?

Work: When Amari was a 3-month-old baby, he had issues with his breathing. His mother took him to a local ER and pretty quickly his team of doctors decided that he needed more specialized care at a larger hospital in San Francisco. So they organized an emergency transport.

Rovner: Via helicopter, yes?

Work: It was actually by air ambulance. So like a small airplane.

Rovner: Ah. OK. And before we get too far, he’s OK now, right?

Work: Yes, he is OK. Unfortunately, he was transported to the hospital. He was there for three weeks. They diagnosed him with RSV, but he’s fortunately doing well, now.

Rovner: Well, and then as we say, the bill came. And how much was it?

Work: It was $97,599.

Rovner: Of which the insurance paid how much?

Work: Zero.

Rovner: Now, as I mentioned at the top, the federal surprise-billing law should have prevented the patient from getting a big bill like this, except it didn’t in this case. So why not?

Work: Yeah, so this was really interesting. Cigna, which was Amari’s health plan at the time, decided that the care was not medically necessary. Their argument was that he could have taken a ground ambulance. There was nothing to prove that he had to take this emergency airplane. And so, because of this, Cigna was able to avoid No Surprises Act and they didn’t pay for any of the bill.

Rovner: And, therefore, the patient was left on the hook.

Work: Yes. Amari and his family were left on the hook for the entire bill.

Rovner: So this feels like something that should have been taken care of with a phone call. The insurer calls the doctor and says, “Hey, why’d you order an air ambulance when the hospital’s only 100 miles away?” And the doctor says, “Because it was an infant on a ventilator.” But that would’ve been too easy, right?

Work: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of issues with this. First off, one of the best things about No Surprises Act is it’s supposed to take patients out of this. It’s supposed to make it so health plans and providers deal with all these negotiations before it even goes to a patient. But because of how this was handled, instead, Amari’s family is having to do all these negotiations. They’re the ones who are writing letters, using his medical records, to Cigna, and doing multiple appeals.

Rovner: And so far, has there been any progress or is the bill still outstanding?

Work: It’s still outstanding. His mother, Sara, has done two internal appeals. So that means she applied to have the bill changed within Cigna. They denied her both times. Right now she’s working on an external appeal, where an outside provider helps evaluate, and she’s still waiting to hear back on that.

Rovner: So what’s the takeaway here? I mean, obviously you take your critically ill child to a hospital, and they say he has to go, he needs a higher level of care, and recommends an air ambulance. Are you supposed to say, “Wait, I have to call my insurer first to make sure they’re not going to deem this medically unnecessary?”

Work: Yeah, that’s what’s so frustrating because obviously if any of us were in that situation, we would’ve done the same thing. If our baby was sick, we would do the emergency air ambulance, or what we would do what the doctors told us to do. I think what I’ve been hearing from people is that, first off, hospitals should become better acquainted with what plans cover. Of course, we can only hope. But the hospital, for example, should have checked which air-ambulance providers are covered by Cigna before they made the call, because the one they did call was out-of-network for Amari’s family. As patients, what you can really do is you just need to advocate for yourself. It’s easy to be intimidated, but there are lots of times that hospitals just get the medical bill wrong or insurance companies. So do what Sara is doing and appeal. If internal appeals don’t work, go push for that external appeal as well.

Rovner: Yes, these days it helps to know your rights and to try to exercise them when you have them. Molly Work, thank you so much.

Work: Thank you so much, Julie.

Rovner: OK, we are back. It’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Rachel, Rachel Zhang. Why don’t you go first this week? Yep. We have both Rachels.

Cohrs Zhang: Yes. Confusing. So I chose a story in KFF Health News actually, and the headline is “Ten Doctors on FDA Panel Reviewing Abbott Heart Device Had Financial Ties With Company.” And I think this was just a really illuminating explanation of some of the loopholes in conflict-of-interest disclosures with FDA advisory committees. There’s a lot of controversy over what role these committees should play, when they should meet. But we’re seeing them play some very high-profile roles in drug approvals as well. But we have a medical device reporter on our team, and we just think it’s such an important coverage area as we’re looking at the money that the medical device industry spends. And I mean, you’re looking at some of these advisory board members who’ve received, on Open Payments, $200,000 from this company, and they’re not disclosing it because it’s not directly related to this individual device.

And I think it’s fair to say that some of them argued, “It was for a clinical study. The university got the money. I wasn’t spending it on a fancy car or something.” But nonetheless, I think there’s a good argument in this piece for some more stringent requirements for conflict of interest, especially if this data is publicly available.

Rovner: Yes, I was kind of taken this week about how very many good stories there were about investigations into conflicts of interest. Speaking of which, Rachel, other Rachel, why don’t you go next?

Roubein: My extra credit this week is titled “As Obesity Rises, Big Food and Dietitians Push ‘Anti-Diet’ Advice” and it’s a joint investigation by The Washington Post and The Examination, which is a new nonprofit newsroom that’s specializing in global health. And I thought it was a really fascinating window into the food industry and its practices at a time when the FDA and its commissioner wants to crack down, make front-of-package labeling more prevalent. And so basically the story dives into this anti-diet movement, which began as an effort to combat weight stigma and unhealthy obsession with thinness. And the movement has now become kind of a behemoth on social media, and basically food marketers are kind of trying to cash in here. The story kind of focused on one company in particular, General Mills, and its cereal, and the investigation found that the company launched a multipronged campaign to capitalize on the anti-diet movement and giveaways to registered dietitians who promote the cereals online. And I just thought it was kind of a fascinating exploration of all of these dynamics.

Rovner: Yes. Good journalism at work. Alice.

Ollstein: Yeah, I have a story from the Texas Tribune [“How Texas Teens Lost the One Program That Allowed Birth Control Without Parental Consent“] by Eleanor Klibanoff about the impact of the court ruling that said that Title X federal family planning clinics that all across the country have a policy of dispensing contraception, prescribing contraception to teens, whether or not they have parental consent, and doing that in a … advancing privacy and protecting them in that way. There was just a recent court ruling that said, just in Texas, the state’s parental consent laws override that. And they found that at a lot of these clinics, instances of teens coming in and seeking contraception have really fallen off. These are teens, the story documents, who don’t feel comfortable going to their parents. There’s instances of parents even getting violent with their kids when they find out about this. And so it really shows the effect of this, and this is something we should be continuing to track because it went to the 5th Circuit and it could go to the Supreme Court. We don’t know yet.

Rovner: Yeah, we talked about this case a couple of weeks ago. It was another of those cases that was very much aimed at a particular judge that they were confident would rule in their favor, who indeed did rule in their favor.

All right, well, my extra credit this week is not an investigation, it’s just a story I really liked from Stat News from Rachel’s colleague Sarah Owermohle, and it’s called “Your Dog Is Probably on Prozac. Experts Say That Says More About the American Mental Health Crisis Than Pets.” And full disclosure, that is one of my dogs in the background messing with a bone. My dogs are not on Prozac, but I am, and we are all three the better for it. It’s a serious story, though, about how our mental health impacts that of our pets, not just vice versa, and about how so few new medicines there are for anxiety and depression. And as an officer of a dog training club, I will say that it’s more than humans’ projections. We are definitely seeing more dogs with behavioral issues than at any time that I can remember, and I’ve owned dogs all my life.

OK, that is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks as always to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our editor, Emmarie Huetteman. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org. You can still find me mostly at X. Alice, where are you these days?

Ollstein: I’m at @AliceOllstein on X, and @alicemiranda on Bluesky.

Rovner: Rachel Zhang?

Cohrs Zhang: I’m at @rachelcohrs on X and also spending more time on LinkedIn these days. 

Rovner: Rachel Roubein?

Roubein: @rachel_roubein on X.

Rovner: We will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.

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Julie Rovner
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Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

Florida this week became a major focus for advocates on both main sides of the abortion debate. The Florida Supreme Court simultaneously ruled that the state’s 15-week ban, passed in 2022, can take effect immediately before a more sweeping, six-week ban replaces it in May and that voters can decide in November whether to create a state right to abortion.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, gearing up for the general election campaign, is highlighting his administration’s health accomplishments, including drug price negotiations for Medicare.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins University schools of nursing and public health, Tami Luhby of CNN, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Joanne Kenen
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico

@JoanneKenen

Read Joanne's articles.

Tami Luhby
CNN

@Luhby

Read Tami's stories.

Lauren Weber
The Washington Post

@LaurenWeberHP

Read Lauren's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• The Florida Supreme Court’s decisions this week will affect abortion access not only in the state, but also throughout the region. Florida’s six-week ban, which takes effect on May 1, would leave North Carolina and Virginia as the only remaining Southern states offering the procedure beyond that point in pregnancy — and, in North Carolina, abortion is banned at 12 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period.
• Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, six states have voted on their own constitutional amendments related to abortion access. In every case, the side favoring abortion rights has won. But Florida’s measure this fall will appear on the ballot with the presidential race. Could the two contests, waged side by side, boost turnout and influence the results?
• Former President Donald Trump made many attempts during his term to undermine the Affordable Care Act, and this week the Biden administration reversed another one of those lingering attempts. Under a new regulation, the use of short-term insurance plans will be limited to four months — down from 36 months under Trump. The plans, which Biden officials call “junk plans” due to their limited benefits, will also be required to provide clearer explanations of coverage to consumers.
• In other Biden administration news, March has come and gone without the release of an anticipated ban on menthol flavoring in tobacco, and anti-tobacco groups are suing to force administration officials to finish the job. Menthol cigarettes are particularly popular in the Black community, and — like Trump’s decision as president to punt a ban on vaping to avoid alienating voters in 2020 — the Biden administration may be loath to raise the issue this year. Activists say, however, that it may be at the expense of Black lives.
• “This Week in Medical Misinformation” looks at an article from PolitiFact about the health misinformation that persists even with the pandemic mostly in the rearview mirror.

Also this week, Rovner interviews health care analyst Jeff Goldsmith about the growing size and influence of UnitedHealth Group in the wake of the Change Healthcare hack.

Plus, for “extra credit” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too: 

Julie Rovner: Politico’s “Republicans Are Rushing to Defend IVF. The Anti-Abortion Movement Hopes to Change Their Minds,” by Megan Messerly and Alice Miranda Ollstein.

Tami Luhby: The Washington Post’s “Biden Summons Bernie Sanders to Help Boost Drug-Price Campaign,” by Dan Diamond.

Lauren Weber: The Washington Post’s “Bird Flu Detected in Dairy Worker Who Had Contact With Infected Cattle in Texas,” by Lena H. Sun and Rachel Roubein.  

Joanne Kenen: The 19th’s “Survivors Sidelined: How Illinois’ Sexual Assault Survivor Law Allows Hospitals to Deny Care,” by Kate Martin, APM Reports.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

• KFF Health News’ “ACA Plans Are Being Switched Without Enrollees’ OK,” by Julie Appleby.
• KFF Health News’ “Your Doctor or Your Insurer? Little-Known Rules May Ease the Choice in Medicare Advantage,” by Susan Jaffe.
• Health Affairs’ “Will the Change Healthcare Incident Change Health Care?” by Jeff C. Goldsmith.
• The Health Care Blog’s “Optum: Testing Time for an Invisible Empire,” by Jeff Goldsmith.

click to open the transcript

Transcript: Florida Limits Abortion — For Now

KFF Health News’ ‘What the Health?’Episode Title: Florida Limits Abortion — For NowEpisode Number: 341Published: April 4, 2024

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.] 

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, April 4, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast, and things might have changed by the time you hear this, so here we go.

We are joined today via video conference by Tami Luhby of CNN.

Tami Luhby: Good morning.

Rovner: Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Nursing and Public Health and Politico magazine.

Joanne Kenen: Hi, everybody.

Rovner: And Lauren Weber, the Washington Post.

Lauren Weber: Hello.

Rovner: Later in this episode, we’ll have an interview with Health Policy Analyst and Consultant Jeff Goldsmith about the continuing fallout from the Change Healthcare hack. But first, this week’s news. One of these weeks, we won’t have to lead with abortion news, but this is not that week. On Monday, the Florida Supreme Court ruled separately, but at the same time, that state voters could decide this November whether to make a right to abortion part of the state’s constitution and that the state’s constitution currently does not guarantee that right.

So the state’s 15-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April of 2022 can take immediate effect. But wait, there’s more. First, the decision on the 15-week ban overruled years of precedent that Florida’s Constitution did, in fact, protect the right to abortion. And second, allowing the 15-week ban to take effect automatically triggers an even more sweeping six-week ban that Gov. DeSantis signed in 2023. That will take effect May 1. That’s the one he signed in the middle of the night without an audience people may remember. And this is going to affect far more people than just the population of Florida, right?

Kenen: The whole South. This is it. If you count the South as North Carolina and what we think of as the South, North Carolina is the only state that still has legal abortion, and that is only up to 12 weeks. And there are some conditions and hurdles, but you can still get an abortion in North Carolina.

But to get from a place, people were going to Florida, it’s easier to get from Alabama to Florida than it is from Alabama to even Charlotte. I think I read it’s a 17-hour drive from Florida or something like that. I don’t remember. It’s long. So it’s not just people who live within Florida, but people who live in 11 or 12 states in the American South have far fewer options.

Rovner: And even though the Florida ban feels less than a complete ban because it allows abortions up to six weeks, the fine print actually makes this one of the most restrictive bans in the country. It looks, in effect, like most people won’t be able to get abortions in Florida at all.

Weber: I would say that’s right, Julie. And just to reiterate what Joanne said, 80,000 women get abortions in Florida every year. That’s about one in 12 women in America that get abortions per year, and they will no longer have that kind of access because, at six weeks, a lot of women don’t know they’re pregnant. So, I mean, that’s a very restrictive abortion ban.

Rovner: Remember that six weeks isn’t really six weeks of having been pregnant. Six weeks is six weeks since your last menstrual period, which can be as little as two weeks in some cases.

Kenen: And I also think that even if you do know within six weeks, getting an appointment, given how few places there are in the entire South, even if you know and you get on the phone right away, can you get an appointment before your six weeks is an additional challenge because access is really limited …

Rovner: Right.

Kenen: … intentionally.

Rovner: Yes, and we’ve seen this with other six-week bans. We should point out that some people consider Virginia the South still, and you can go to Virginia, but that’s basically the last place that a good chunk of the country, geographically, if not population-wise, would need to turn to in order to get an abortion.

Well, if that’s not all confusing enough, even if voters do approve the ballot measure in November, the Florida Supreme Court suggested it could still strike down a right to abortion based on a majority of justices findings that the state’s constitution could include personhood rights for fetuses.

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around why the justices would allow a vote whose results they might then overturn. But I guess this is part of the continuing evolution, if you will, to use that word, of this concept of personhood for fetuses and embryos, and what has us talking about IVF, right?

Weber: Yeah, absolutely. I think, as many conservative Christian groups will say, this is the natural line that pro-life is. I mean, they argue, and while they’re pushing this view is not necessarily held by the majority of constituents, but this is their argument that a fetus, an embryo, such as one that could be used in IVF, is a person.

And so, I mean, I think that’s kind of the natural conclusion of pro-life ideology as we’re seeing it right now. And I think it will have a lot of political effects going forward because that IVF is obviously much more popular than abortion. I think we’ll see a lot of voting firepower potentially used on that.

Rovner: Well, I’m so glad you said that because I want to turn to politics. Some Democrats are suggesting that this could boost turnout for Democrats and help, if not put Florida in play for president, maybe the Democrat running to unseat Senator Rick Scott, the Republican.

On the other hand, while abortion ballot questions have done very well around the country, as we know, even in states redder than Florida, there is evidence that some Republicans vote for abortion rights measures and then turn around and vote at the same time for Republicans who would then vote to overturn them.

There are in fact Florida abortion rights advocates who don’t want Democrats to make this issue partisan because they want Republicans to come and vote for the ballot measure, which needs a 60% majority to pass, even if those Republicans then go on to vote for other Republicans. So, who really is helped by this entire mess, or is it impossible to tell at this point?

Weber: I think it’s impossible to tell, but I do think what is complicating is we haven’t seen the presidential race thrown into these abortion ballots. I mean, what we’re looking at is two candidates who potentially are facing a lot of low turnout due to lack of enthusiasm in their bases for both of them. And I am curious if the abortion ballot measures could have much more of an impact on the presidential race than maybe some of these other lower-office races that we’ve seen. I think that’s the main question that I guess we’ll see in November.

Rovner: As we have spoken about many times, President Biden is not super comfortable talking about this issue. He’s an 81-year-old Catholic. It does not come naturally to him to be in favor of abortion rights, which he now is. But Vice President Harris has been sent out. She’s sort of become the standard-bearer for this administration on reproductive health issues, and she’s been very active. And Joanne, you wanted to say something?

Kenen: There are a couple of points. In addition to the abortion ballot initiative. There’s also a marijuana legalization. I think we will see higher turnout and particularly among younger people who have been pretty disaffected this election. So that’s one, whether it affects the presidential race, whether it affects the Senate race. I mean, just as Democrats feel really strong about abortion, Republicans feel really strong about immigration. We don’t know what’s going to happen in November, but I do think this boosts turnout. The second thing to remember, though, is in terms of abortion ballot initiatives have passed every time they’ve come up since the fall of Roe [v. Wade].

This is a 60% threshold, and I do not believe that any state has reached that. I think the highest was about 57%. So even though it may get well over 50, it could get 59.9, the Florida ballot initiative needs 60%. That is a tall order. So you might end up seeing a big turnout, a big pro-abortion rights vote, maybe a big legal weed vote, and the abortion measure could still fail. But I do think it definitely changes the dynamics of Florida from the presidential race on down the ballot. I do think it is a different race than we would’ve seen beforehand.

Rovner: And I will point out, since she didn’t, that Joanne has spent time covering Florida and covering the politics in Florida. So you know where of you speak on this.

Kenen: Well, I lived there for a while, though it was a while ago. The state has, in fact, changed like everything else, including me, right? But I’m somewhat familiar with Florida. I was just there a few weeks ago in fact.

Rovner: And I want to underscore something that Lauren said, which is that we’ve seen all of these ballot measures since Roe was overturned, but we have not seen these ballot measures stacked on top of the presidential race. So I think that will be interesting to watch as we go forward this year.

Well, back here in D.C., the Biden administration issued a long-awaited rule reigning in the use of those short-term health plans that Democrats like to call junk insurance and that President Trump had expanded when he was in office. Tami, what is the new rule, and what will it do?

Luhby: Well, it’s actually curtailing the short-term plans and pretty much reversing the Trump administration rule. So it’s the latest move by the president to contrast his approach to health care with that of former President Donald Trump. Trump extended the duration of the short-term health insurance plans to just under a year and allowed them to be renewed for a total of 36 months. And it was seen as an effort to weaken the Affordable Care Act, draw out younger people, make it more difficult for the marketplace, probably send the older, sicker people there, which would raise premiums, basically cause more chaos in the marketplace.

Rovner: Yeah. And remind us why these plans can be problematic.

Luhby: I will tell you that the short-term plans do not have to adhere to Obamacare’s consumer protections, which is the big difference. For instance, they’re not required to provide comprehensive coverage, and they can discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, charge them more, deny them, et cetera. As I’d said, the Trump administration heralded them as a cheaper alternative because since they can underwrite, they have typically cheaper premiums. But they also have very limited benefits, or they can have limited benefits depending on the patient or the consumer.

So the Biden rule, which was proposed last month as a series of actions aimed at lowering health care costs, limits the duration of new sales of these controversial plans to three months, with the option of renewal for a maximum of four months. So it’s going on these new plans from 36 months potentially to four months, which was the original idea of these plans because originally they were thought to be for people who might be switching jobs or have a temporary lapse in coverage. They were not intended to be a substitute for full insurance. And it also requires, notably, that the plans provide consumers with a clear explanation of their benefits and inform them of how to find more comprehensive coverage.

Rovner: And obviously this will continue to be controversial, but I think the Democrats, in general, who support the Affordable Care Act feel pretty strongly that this is something that’s going to help them. And as we talked about, we’re not sure yet how the administration is going to play the abortion issue in the campaign, but it is pretty clear that they are doubling down on health care.

One problem for the administration, as we have talked about, is that particularly on really popular things like Medicare drug price negotiations, lots of the public has no idea that that’s happened or if it’s happened that it’s because the Democrats did it. So, in part of an effort to overcome that, Biden invited Bernie Sanders to the White House this week. What was that about?

Luhby: Well, that’s my extra credit. Would you like me to discuss that now?

Rovner: Sure, let’s do that now.

Luhby: OK. So my extra credit is a Washington Post story titled “Biden Summons Bernie Sanders to Help Boost Drug-Price Campaign,” by Dan Diamond. And I have to admit, I hope I can do that here, that I am a fangirl of Dan Diamond’s stories, and even more so now because apparently, the Biden administration gave Dan a heads-up in advance, that since he published a pretty in-depth story an hour before the embargo lifted for the rest of us who were only given a few tidbits of information about what this meeting or what this speech was going to be about at the uncharacteristically late hour of 8:30 at night.

So Dan’s story looked at how the two former rivals, Joe Biden and [Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who were rivals in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, how they had very different views on how the nation’s health care system should operate and Dan’s story looked at how they were uniting to improve awareness of Biden’s efforts to lower drug prices and improve his chances in November. Biden invited Sanders to the White House to discuss the administration’s actions on drug prices, including the latest effort to reduce the out-of-pocket cost of inhalers, which really hasn’t gotten a lot of press.

Sanders brings his progressive credentials and his two-decade-plus track record of fighting for lower drug prices and, “naming and shaming individual pharmaceutical companies and executives.” He’s known to be pretty outspoken and fiery. So the story’s a good example of policy meets politics in an election year. It relays that most Americans still don’t know about the administration’s efforts despite the numerous speeches, news releases, and officials’ trips around the country, hence the need to tap Sanders, and it also provides a nice walk down memory lane, revisiting the duo’s battles in the 2020 primary as well as some of former President Trump’s drug price efforts.

Rovner: Yeah. And a little peek behind the journalistic curtain. I think we all got this sort of mysterious note from Sanders’ press people the night before saying, “If you’ll agree to our embargo, we’ll tell you about this secret thing that’s going to happen,” followed by an advisory from the White House saying that Bernie Sanders was coming to the White House to talk about drugs. [inaudible 00:13:30] …

Luhby: Right. And also, uncharacteristically, when I asked for a comment from Sanders directly, they said tomorrow, which is not like Sanders at all.

Kenen: Sanders and Biden were obviously opponents in the primary, but Sanders has really been very supportive of Biden. I think he’s really sort of highlighted the progressive things that Biden has done and stayed quiet about the more centrist things that Biden has done. He’s been a real ally, and he still has a lot of credibility, and I think they sort of like each other in a funny way. You can sort of see it, but that’s their issue.

Luhby: Biden has also been able to do things that other people have not been able to do with the congressional Democrats. Biden has been able to do things that congressional Democrats have tried to for years and have not been able to, and they may not be the extent to which the Democrats would like. If you remember the 2019 Medicare Drug Negotiation bill, I think, was 250 drugs a year. What ended up passing in the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] was 10 drugs and ramping up, but at least it’s something.

Kenen: And it’s more than 20 years in the making. I mean, this goes way, way back.

Luhby: Mm-hmm.

Rovner: And I was going to underscore something that Joanne said earlier about Florida, which is that both sides are trying to gin up their base, and young people are really fond of Bernie Sanders in a lot of the things that he says, and this may be a way that Biden can ironically use the Medicare drug price negotiation issue to stir up his young person base to get them out to vote. So I was interested in the combination.

Kenen: So it’s Bernie Sanders and legal weed.

Rovner: That’s right. It’s Bernie Sanders and legal weed, at least in Florida.

Kenen: I’m not implying anything about Bernie Sanders’ use of it. It’s just the dynamic for the young voters.

Rovner: Yes. Things to draw young people out to the polls in November. Well, while the Biden administration is doing lots of things using its regulatory power, one thing it is not doing, at least not yet, is banning menthol flavoring in tobacco.

This is a regulation that’s now been sitting around for nearly two years and that officials had promised to finalize by the end of March, which of course was last week and which didn’t happen. So now three anti-tobacco groups have sued to try to force the regulation over the finish line. Somebody remind us why banning menthol is so very controversial.

Weber: It’s controversial in part because a lot of industry will say that banning menthol will lead to over-policing in Black communities. The jury is very much out on if that is an accurate representation or part of the cigarette playbook to keep cigarettes on the market. Look, a presidential election year and things to do with smoking is not new.

When I was at KFF Health News with Rachel Bluth back in the day, we wrote a story about how Trump postponed a vape ban to some extent because he was worried about vaping voters. So I mean, I think what you’re seeing is a pretty clear political calculus by the Biden folks to push this off into the new year, but as activists and public health advocates will say, it’s at the expense of, potentially, Black lives.

Rovner: That’s right.

Weber: So banning menthol cigarettes would really… what it would do is statistically save Black Americans who die from, predominantly from smoking these types of cigarettes. So it’s a pretty weighty decision to put off with a political calculus.

Rovner: He’s taking incoming from both sides. I mean, obviously, there are members of the Black community who say, as you point out, this could lead to an unnecessary crackdown on African American smokers who use menthol more statistically than anybody else does. Although, there’s some young people who use it too. On the other hand, you have people representing public health for the Black community saying, “We want you to ban this” because, as you point out, people are dying from smoking-related illnesses by using this product. So it’s a win-win, lose-lose here that is continuing on. We’ll be interested to see what, if the lawsuit can produce anything.

Well, speaking of things that are controversial, we also have Medicare Advantage. The private plan alternative to traditional Medicare now enrolls more than half of those in the program, many who like the extra benefits that often come with the plans and others who feel that they can’t afford traditional Medicare’s premiums and other cost-sharing. Except one reason those extra benefits exist is because the government is overpaying those Medicare Advantage plans. That’s a vestige of Republican plans to discourage enrollment in original Medicare that date back to the early part of this century.

So now taxpayers are footing more of the Medicare bill than they should. This week’s news is that the federal government is effectively trimming back some of those overpayments. And investors in the insurance companies, who make money from the overpayments, are going crazy. This is the subhead on a story from the Wall Street Journal, “Managed care stocks are set to fall due to disappointment with the government’s decision not to revise the 2025 Medicare payment proposal.” How is this ever going to get sorted out? Somebody always is going to be a loser in this game, either the patients or the insurance companies or the taxpayers. Everybody cannot win here.

Luhby: Right. And Humana got hit really hard when the rule came out because it is really focused on Medicare Advantage. So yeah, the insurers were hit, but as everything with the market, it’s not forever.

Rovner: I’m continually puzzled by … if the payments were equivalent, which was what they were originally supposed to be. Originally, originally back in the 1980s, insurance companies came to Congress and said, “We can provide managed care and Medicare cheaper, so you can pay us 95% of the average that you pay for a fee for service patient. We can make a profit on that.”

Well, that is long since gone. The question is how much more they will make. And as I point out, when they get overpaid, they do have to rebate those back effectively to the patients in terms of higher benefits. And that’s why many of them offer dental coverage and eyeglasses coverage and other types of, quote-unquote, extra benefits that Medicare doesn’t offer.

But also you get this lack of choice, and so we see when people try to leave these plans and go back to traditional Medicare, they can’t, which is only one of the sort of things that I think a lot of people don’t know about how Medicare Advantage works. Another place with an awful lot of small print.

Weber: It’s a lot of small print under a very good marketing name. The name itself implies that you’re making a better choice, but that isn’t necessarily what the small print would say.

Kenen: And there are people who are very satisfied with it and who get great care. I mean, it’s not monolithic. I mean, it is popular. It is growing and growing and growing. It’s partly economic, and there’s some plans that patients like, and there’s word of mouth or that were negotiated as part of union agreements and are actually pretty strong benefits. But they’re also people who are really encountering a lot of trouble with prior authorization, and limited networks, and your doctor’s no longer in it, et cetera, et cetera.

I think that those things, I actually checked with somebody about the provider networks, what we know about who’s dropping out, and I don’t think there’s really up-to-date data, but there is a perception, and you’re hearing it and seeing it online. But they do an incredible amount of marketing, an incredible amount of marketing. And if you’re in it and you like it and you save money and you’re getting great health care, terrific. You’re going to stay in it.

If you’re in it and you don’t like it and you’re not getting great health care and a lot of hassles or you can’t see the right doctors, it’s hard to get out and get back into it depending on what state you’re living … It’s not monolithic. But I think we might be between the financial pressures from the government and some of the debates about some of these things they’re doing there may be some reconsideration. But they have strong backers in Congress and not just Republicans.

Rovner: Oh, yeah. I mean, and as you point out, more than half of the people in Medicare are now on Medicare Advantage. I did want to sort of highlight my colleague Susan Jaffe, who has a story this week about the fact that patients can’t change plans in the middle of the year, but plans can drop providers in the middle of the year, so people may sign up for a health plan because their doctor or their hospital is in it and then suddenly find out mid-year that their doctor and their hospital is no longer in it.

There are occasionally, if you’re in the middle of treatment, there are opportunities sometimes to change, but often there aren’t. People do end up in these plans, and they can be happy for, basically, until they’re not, that there are trade-offs when you do it. And I think, as we point out, there’s so much marketing, and the marketing somehow doesn’t ever talk about the trade-offs that you make when you go into Medicare Advantage.

Luhby: Well, one also thing is that this is the peak 65 year, where the most baby boomers, and where are they coming from? They’re coming from private commercial insurance, so they’re familiar with it, and they were like, “Oh, OK, that’s seemingly very much like my employer plan. Sure, that sounds great. I know how to deal with that.” So that’s one of the things. And one cudgel that the insurers have is they say, “Oh, government, you’re going reduce our payments. We’re going to reduce the benefits and increase the premiums because we’re not going to have all of that extra government funding.” And that can scare the government because they don’t want the insurers to tell their patients, who are older patients who vote, “Oh, because of the government, we can no longer offer you all of these benefits, or we’ve had to raise your premium because of that.” So we’ll see if they actually do that.

Kenen: Joe Biden took away your gym, right?

Luhby: Exactly.

Rovner: [inaudible 00:22:11].

Luhby: And your dental benefits. So that’s always the threat that the insurers roll out. That’s the first thing that they say often, but we’ll see what happens. We don’t know yet until the fall, when enrollment starts, what will actually happen?

Rovner: We saw exactly that in the late ’90s after Congress balanced the budget. They took a big whack out of the payments for what was then, I think, called Medicare Plus Choice. It was the previous version of Medicare Advantage, and a lot of the companies just completely dropped out of the program. And a lot of the people, who as Joanne said, had been in those plants had been very happy, threw a fit and came to Congress to complain, and lo and behold, a lot of those payments got increased again. In fact, that was what led to the big increase in payments in 2003 was the huge cut that they made to payments, which drove a lot of the insurers out of the program. So we do know that the insurers will pack up and leave if they’re not paid what they consider to be enough to stay in the program.

Moving on. One of the things that Jeff Goldsmith talks about in this week’s interview is that our health system has become one of deep distrust between patients, providers, and insurers. Speaking of Medicare Advantage. That is sad and dysfunctional, except that sometimes there are good reasons for that distrust. One example comes this week from my KFF Health News colleague Julie Appleby. It seems that unscrupulous insurance brokers are disenrolling people in Obamacare plans from their health plans and putting them in different plans, which is unbeknownst to them until they find their doctor is no longer in their network or their drug isn’t covered.

The brokers who are doing this can earn bigger commissions. But patients can end up not just having to pay for their own medical care but owing the government money because suddenly they’re in plans getting subsidies that don’t match their incomes. It is a big mess. And it seems that the obvious solution, which would be making it harder for agents to access people’s enrollment information so they can switch them, would delay legitimate enrollment. It has to be easy for agents to basically manipulate people’s applications. So how do you guard against bad actors without inconveniencing everyone? This seems to be the question here and the question for Medicare Advantage, Lauren.

Weber: I was going to say, I mean, I think that’s the question Medicare itself has been dealing with for years. I mean, there’s a reason that many federal prosecutors call this a pay-and-chase situation in which there is rampant Medicare fraud. They prioritize the ease of patients accessing care to the disadvantage of some folks, or in this case, the American taxpayer, in this case, actual patients, being swindled.

But I don’t have an answer. I don’t think anyone really has an answer, considering we’re seeing things like the $2 billion catheter fraud that we’ve talked about here. So I think again, this is one of these things where the government’s been left a little flat-footed in trying to protect against bad actors.

Rovner: Yeah, well, the health sector is what a fifth of the economy now, so I guess it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that you have not just bad actors, people who are making a lot of money from doing illegal things and find it to be worth their while and that some of them get caught, but presumably most of them don’t. I guess that’s what happens when you have that much money in one place, you need sort of better watchdogs. All right. Well, finally, this week in medical misinformation comes from PolitiFact in a story called “Four Years After Shelter-in-Place, Covid-19 Misinformation Persists.” That’s an understatement.

That last part was mine. At the top of the list says, “We have discussed before is growing resistance to vaccines in general, not just the covid vaccine,” which is not all that surprising considering how many people now believe fictitious stories about celebrities dropping dead immediately after receiving vaccines. There’s even a movie called “Died Suddenly.” Or that government leaders and the superrich orchestrated the pandemic. That’s another popular story that goes around. Or that Dr. Tony Fauci brought the virus to the United States a year before the pandemic. Lauren, health misinformation is your beat. Is it getting any better now that the pandemic is largely behind us, or is it just continuing unabated?

Weber: No, I would argue it’s possibly getting worse because the trust in institutions is at an all-time low. Social media has allowed for fire hose. I mean, it’s made everything … it’s made the public square that used to be more limited, all corners of the country.

I would say that misinformation has led to mistrust about basic medical things, including childhood vaccinations, but also other medical treatment and care. And I think you’re really seeing this kind of post-truth world post-covid, this distrust, this misinfo is going to continue for some time. And there’s too much to cover on my beat. There’s constantly stories around the bend, and I don’t expect that improving anytime soon.

Kenen: Every single time a celebrity, not just dies, because it’s always no matter what happens, it’s blamed on the covid vaccine, but also gets sick. I mean, Princess Kate. We don’t know everything about her health, but I mean, all of us know it wasn’t. Whatever it is, it’s not because the covid vaccine. But if you go online, you hear that that’s whatever she has it’s because she’s vaccinated.

And the other thing is it’s fed into this general vaccine mistrust. So when I wrote about the RSV vaccine, which we talked about a few weeks ago, it wasn’t so much that there’s a campaign against the RSV vaccine. There is somewhat of that. But it’s just this massive, “vaccines are bad.” So it’s spilling over into anything with a needle attached is part of this horrible plot to kill us all. So it’s just sort of this miasma of anti-vaccination that’s hovering over a lot of health care.

Rovner: Well, at the risk of getting a little too bleak, that will be the news for this week. Now, we will play my interview with Jeff Goldsmith, and then we’ll come back and do our extra credits. I am pleased to welcome back to the podcast Jeff Goldsmith, one of my favorite big-picture health system analysts. Jeff has been writing of late about the Change Healthcare hack and the growing size and influence of its owner, UnitedHealth Group, and what that means for the country’s entire health enterprise. Jeff, thanks for joining us again.

Jeff Goldsmith: You bet.

Rovner: So the lead of your latest piece gives a pretty vivid description of just how big United has become, and I just want to read it. “Years ago, the largest living thing in the world was thought to be the blue whale. Then someone discovered that the largest living thing in the world was actually the 106-acre, 47,000-tree Pando aspen grove in central Utah, which genetic testing revealed to be a single organism.

With its enormous network of underground roots and symbiotic relationship with a vast ecosystem of fungi, that aspen grove is a great metaphor for UnitedHealth Group. United, whose revenues amount to more than 8% of the U.S. health system, is the largest health care enterprise in the world.” Let’s pick up from there for people like me who haven’t been paying as much attention as maybe they should have, and still think that United is mainly a health insurance company. That is not true and hasn’t been for some time, has it?

Goldsmith: The difference between United and a health insurance company is that it also has $226 billion worth of care system revenues in it, some of which are services rendered to United and other, believe it or not, services rendered to United competitors. So, there isn’t anything remotely that size in the health insurance world. That $226 billion is more than double the size of Kaiser. Just to give you an idea of the scale.

Rovner: Which, of course, is the other companies that are both insurers and providers. That’s pretty much the only other really big one, right?

Goldsmith: Yes. I have a graphic in the piece that shows the Optum Health part, which is the care delivery part of Optum, is just about the same size as Kaiser, but it generates six and a half billion dollars in profit versus Kaiser’s $323 million. So it dwarfs Kaiser in terms of profitability even though it’s about the same size top line.

Rovner: So split it up for people who don’t know. What are sort of the main components that make up UnitedHealth Group?

Goldsmith: Well, there’s a very large health insurance business, $280 billion health insurance business. Then, there is a care system called Optum Health, which is about $95 billion. It has 90,000 affiliated or employed docs, a huge chain of MedExpress urgent care centers, surgery centers, a couple of very large home health care agencies. So that’s the care delivery part of United.

There’s Optum Insight, which is about $19 billion. That’s the part that Change Healthcare was inside of. It’s a business intelligence and corporate services business, and consulting business, that also manages care systems financials. And then, finally, there’s Optum Rx, which is about $116 billion, so a little bit more than half of Optum’s total, and that is a pharmacy benefit management company. Believe it or not, the third-largest one. So there are bigger pharmacy benefits management companies than Optum, but those are the three big pieces.

Rovner: I feel like this is almost as big as a lot of the government health programs, isn’t it?

Goldsmith: Yeah. I mean, I can’t remember top line how big the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] is these days, but it’s VA scale, but it’s in a bunch of little pieces scattered all over the United States. I mean, that’s the big part of all of this. The care system is in at least 30 states. I have a map showing where some of the locations are. That map took me months to find. There isn’t a real registry of what the company owns, but it is a vast enterprise. And they’re great assets, if you’ll pardon a financial term for them.

Some of the finest risk-bearing multispecialty group practices in the United States are a part of Optum: Healthcare Partners based in Los Angeles; The Everett Clinic; the former Fallon Clinic, and Atrius in New England, which are the two finest risk-bearing, multispecialty physician groups in the Northeast. They weren’t dredging the bottom here at all. They got a tremendous number of high-quality groups that they’ve pulled together in the organization. The issue is it really an organization or is it a collection of assets that have been acquired at a very rapid pace over a period of the last 15 years.

Rovner: One of the things that I think the Change Healthcare hack proved for a lot of people is that nobody realized what a significant percentage of claims processing could go through one company. You have to wonder, have regulators, either at the state or federal level, kind of fallen down on this and sort of let this happen so that when somebody hacks into it, half the system seems to go down?

Goldsmith: The federal government challenged the Change acquisition and basically lost in court. They were unable to make the case. They were arguing that Change controlling all of these transactions of not only United but a lot of other insurers gave them access to information that enabled United to have some type of unfair competitive advantage. It was a difficult argument to make that didn’t make it. But the result of the Change acquisition was that about a third of the U.S. health system’s money flowed through one company’s leaky pipes.

And what we’re sort of learning as we learn more about Change is that there were something like a hundred separate programs inside Change, all of which somehow were vulnerable to this hack. And I think that’s one of the things that I think when [Sen.] Ron Wyden and [Sen.] Mark Warner get around to getting some facts about this, they’re going to wonder how did that happen. How could you have that many applications, that loosely tied together, that they were vulnerable to something like this?

And what my spies tell me is that a hacker, and it could have been a single hacker, not a country, but one guy was able to drop down into all of those data silos, vacuum out the data, and then delete the backups, so that United was basically left with no claims trail, no provider directories, nothing, and has had to reconstruct them; panicky reconstruction here in the last six weeks.

Rovner: Which I imagine is what’s taking so long for some of these providers to get back online.

Goldsmith: Julie, the part I don’t understand, is if it is true that that Change was processing a trillion and a half dollars worth of claims a year, a month interruption is $125 billion. That’s $125 billion that didn’t get paid to providers of care after the fact of them rendering the care. So the extent of the damage done by this is difficult to comprehend.

I mean, I have a lot of provider contacts and friends. Some of them, believe it or not, had no Change exposure at all because their main payers didn’t use Change. Some of them, it was all their payers used, and cash flow just ceased, and they had to go to the bank and borrow money to make their payrolls. None of this, for some reason, has made it in its full glory out into the press, and it isn’t that there aren’t incredibly high-quality business reporters in this field. There are.

Rovner: I know. I live in Maryland. I’ve driven over the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. I know what it means. I mean, basically took apart the Baltimore Beltway. I mean, no longer goes in a circle. And I know how big the Port of Baltimore is, and I feel like everybody can understand that because it’s visceral. You can see it. There’s video of the bridge falling down. There isn’t video of somebody hacking into Change Healthcare and stopping a lot of the health system in its tracks.

Goldsmith: The metaphor that occurred to me, as you know, I’m a metaphor junkie, was actually Deepwater Horizon, and of course, we had a camera on that gushing well the whole time. This is like a gusher of red ink, a Deepwater Horizon-sized gusher of red ink that went on for a month. From what I’m able to understand, people are able to file the claims now. How many people have actually been paid for the month or six weeks’ worth of work they’ve done is elusive. And I still don’t have access to really good facts on how much of what they owed people they’ve actually paid.

I do know a lot of my investor analyst friends are waiting for United’s first-quarter financials to drop, which will probably show a four- or five-day drop in their medical loss ratio because of all the claims they were not able to pay, and therefore money was sitting in their coffers earning, what, 5% interest. That’s going to be kind of a festival when the first-quarter financials drop. And, of course, it isn’t just United, Humana, the Elevance, Cigna, all the rest of them. A lot of these folks use Change to process their claims. So there’s going to be a swollen offer here on the health insurance side from a month of not paying their bills.

Rovner: Well, is it the next Standard Oil? Is it going to have to be taken apart at some point?

Goldsmith: Yeah, but I mean, the question is, on what basis? Our health care system is so vast and fragmented, even a generous interpretation of antitrust laws, you’d have trouble finding a case. The Justice Department or FTC [Federal Trade Commission] is going to try again. But I’ll tell you, I think they’ve got their work cut out for them. I think the real issue isn’t anti-competitiveness, it’s a national security issue. If you have a third of the health systems dollars flowing through one company’s leaky pipes, that’s not an antitrust problem. It’s a national security problem, and I think there are some folks in the U.S. Senate that are righteously pissed about this.

There’s a lot of fact-finding that needs to happen here and a lot of work that needs to be done to make this system more secure. And I’ve also argued to make it simpler. Change was processing 15 billion transactions a year. That’s 44 transactions for every man, woman, and child in the country, and that was only a third of them. What are we doing with 100 billion transactions? What’s up with that? It beggars the imagination to believe that we to minutely manage every single one of those transactions. That is just an astonishing waste of money. It’s also an incredible insult to our care system. The assumption that there at any moment, every one of those folks could potentially be ripping us off, and we can’t have that.

Rovner: So we’re spending all of this money to try and not be ripped off for presumably less money.

Goldsmith: Hundreds of billions of dollars, but who’s counting?

Rovner: It’s kind of a depressing picture of what our health system is becoming, but I feel like it is kind of an apt picture for what our health system has become.

Goldsmith: It’s the level of mistrust. The idea that every one of his patients is trying to get a free lunch, and every doctor is trying to pad his income. We’ve built a system based on those twin assumptions. And when you think about them for a minute, they really are appalling assumptions. Most of what motivated me when I had cancer was fear.

I wasn’t trying to get stuff I wasn’t entitled to or didn’t need. I wanted to figure out a way to not be killed by the thing in my throat. And my doctors were motivated by a fear that if they let me go, maybe my heirs would sue them. I guess this idea that we are just helpless pawns of a behaviorist model of incentives, I think the economists ran wild with this thesis. And I think it’s given us a system that doesn’t work for anybody.

Rovner: Is there a way to fix it?

Goldsmith: I think we ought to cut the number of transactions in half. We ought to go and look at how many prior authorizations are really needed. Is this a model we really want to continue with, effectively universal surveillance of every clinical decision? We ought to be paying in bundles. We ought to pay our primary care physicians monthly for every patient that they see that’s a continuing patient and not chisel them over every single thing they do. We ought to pay for complex care in bundles where a cancer treatment is basically one transaction instead of hundreds.

I think we could get a long way to simplifying and reducing the absurd administrative overburden by doing those things. I also think that the idea that we have 1,100 health insurers. United’s the biggest, but it’s not by any means the only health insurer. There’s 1,100 rule sets that determine what data you need in order to pay a claim and whether a claim is justified or not. I think that’s a crazy level of variation. So I think we need to attack the variation. We’ve had health policy conversations about this for years and not done anything, and I think it’s really time to do it.

Rovner: Maybe this will give some incentive to some people to actually do something. Jeff Goldsmith, thank you so much.

Goldsmith: Julie. It’s good talking to you.

Rovner: OK. We are back, and time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Tami, you’ve already done yours this week. Lauren, why don’t you go next?

Weber: Yeah. I think we’re all keeping an eye on this in this podcast, but the title of this story is “Bird Flu Detected in Dairy Worker Who Had Contact With Infected Cattle in Texas,” which was written by my colleagues, Lena Sun and Rachel Roubein. Also, great pieces by Helen Branswell in the Texas Tribune on this as well.

But, essentially, just so listeners know, there has been a case of human bird flu detected, which is very concerning. As all of us on this podcast know, avian human flu is one of the worst-case scenarios in terms of a pathogen and infectiousness. As of right now, this is only one person. It seems to be isolated. We don’t know. We’ll see how this continues to mutate, but definitely something to keep an eye on for potential threat risk. TBD.

Rovner: Yeah. It is something I think that every health reporter is watching with some concern. Although, as you point out, we really don’t know very much yet. And so far, we have not seen. I think what the experts are watching for is human-to-human transmission, and we haven’t seen that yet.

Kenen: And this person seems to have a mild case, from the limited information we have, which is also a good sign for both that individual and everybody else in terms of spreadability.

Rovner: But we will continue to watch that space. Joanne.

Kenen: Well, you said enough bleak, but I’m afraid this is somewhat bleak. This is a piece by Kate Martin from APM Reports, which is part of American Public Media, and it was published in cooperation with The 19th, and the headline is “Survivors Sidelined: How Illinois’ Sexual Assault Survivor Law Allows Hospitals to Deny Care.” So there’s a very, very strong sort of everybody points to it as great law in Illinois saying that what kind of care hospitals have to provide to sexual assault victims and what kind of testing and counseling and everything. This whole series of services that legally they must do, and they’re not doing it. Even in cases of children being assaulted, they’re sending people 40 miles away, 80 miles away, 40 miles away. They’re not doing rape kits. They’re not connecting them to the counselors, et cetera. It is a pretty horrifying story. It begins with a story of a 4-year-old because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. The father was the suspected perpetrator, and because the hospital didn’t do what they should have done he still has joint custody of this little girl.

Rovner: My story this week is from our podcast colleague, Alice [Miranda] Ollstein, and her Politico colleague, Megan Messerly, and it’s called “Republicans Are Rushing to Defend IVF. The Anti-Abortion Movement Hopes to Change Their Minds.” And it’s about the fact that while maybe not trying to outlaw IVF entirely, the anti-abortion movement does want to dramatically change how it’s practiced in the U.S.

For example, they would like to decrease the number of embryos that can be created and transplanted, both of which would likely make the already expensive treatment even more expensive still. Anti-abortion activists also would like to ban pre-implantation genetic testing so that, “Defective embryos can’t be discarded.” Except that couples with genes for deadly diseases often turn to IVF exactly because they don’t want to pass those diseases on to their children, and they would like to test them before they are implanted.

In other words, the anti-abortion movement may or may not be coming for contraception, but it definitely is coming for IVF. OK, that is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks, as always, to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our editor Emmarie Huetteman. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me at X, @jrovner, or @julierovner at Bluesky and @julie.rovner at Threads. Tami, where can we find you?

Luhby: I’m at cnn.com.

Rovner: There you go. Joanne.

Kenen: @JoanneKenen on X, and @joannekenen1 on Threads. 

Rovner: Lauren.

Weber: @LaurenWeberHP on X

Rovner: We will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.

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Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

In its first abortion case since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Supreme Court this week looked unlikely to uphold an appeals court ruling that would dramatically restrict the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. But the court already has another abortion-related case teed up for April, and abortion opponents have several more challenges in mind to limit the procedure in states where it remains legal.

Meanwhile, Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, continue to take aim at popular health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act on the campaign trail — much to the delight of Democrats, who feel they have an advantage on the issue.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

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Sarah Karlin-Smith
Pink Sheet

@SarahKarlin

Read Sarah's stories.

Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politico

@AliceOllstein

Read Alice's stories.

Lauren Weber
The Washington Post

@LaurenWeberHP

Read Lauren's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• At least two conservative Supreme Court justices joined the three more progressive members of the bench during Tuesday’s oral arguments in expressing skepticism about the challenge to the abortion drug mifepristone. Their questions focused primarily on whether the doctors challenging the drug had proven they were harmed by its availability — as well as whether the best remedy was to broadly restrict access to the drug for everyone else.
• A ruling in favor of the doctors challenging mifepristone would have the potential to reduce the drug’s safety and efficacy: In particular, one FDA decision subject to reversal adjusted dosing, and switching to using only the second drug in the current two-drug abortion pill regimen would also slightly increase the risk of complications.
• Two conservative justices also raised the applicability of the Comstock Act, a long-dormant, 19th-century law that restricts mail distribution of abortion-related items. Their questions are notable as advisers to Trump explore reviving the unenforced law should he win this November.
• Meanwhile, a Democrat in Alabama flipped a state House seat campaigning on abortion-related issues, as Trump again discusses implementing a national abortion ban. The issue is continuing to prove thorny for Republicans.
• Even as Republicans try to avoid running on health care issues, the Heritage Foundation and a group of House Republicans have proposed plans that include changes to the health care system. Will the plans do more to rev up their base — or Democrats?
• This Week in Medical Misinformation: TikTok’s algorithm is boosting misleading information about hormonal birth control — and in some cases resulting in more unintended pregnancies.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF Health News’ Tony Leys, who wrote a KFF Health News-NPR “Bill of the Month” feature about Medicare and a very expensive air-ambulance ride. If you have a baffling or outrageous medical bill you’d like to share with us, you can do that here.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: KFF Health News’ “Overdosing on Chemo: A Common Gene Test Could Save Hundreds of Lives Each Year,” by Arthur Allen.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Stat’s “Fetal Tissue Research Gains in Importance as Roadblocks Multiply,” by Olivia Goldhill.

Sarah Karlin-Smith: The Washington Post’s “The Confusing, Stressful Ordeal of Flying With a Breast Pump,” by Hannah Sampson and Ben Brasch.

Lauren Weber: Stateline’s “Deadly Fires From Phone, Scooter Batteries Leave Lawmakers Playing Catch-Up on Safety,” by Robbie Sequeira.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

• The Washington Post’s “Nikki Haley Wants ‘Consensus’ on Contraception. It’s Not That Easy,” by Julie Rovner.
• Politico’s “Justices Were Skeptical of Abortion Pills Arguments. Anti-Abortion Groups Have Backup Plans,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein.
• Politico’s “Why Portland Failed Where Portugal Succeeded in Decriminalizing Drugs,” by Carmen Paun and Aitor Hernández-Morales.

click to open the transcript

Transcript: The Supreme Court and the Abortion Pill

KFF Health News’ ‘What the Health?’Episode Title: ‘The Supreme Court and the Abortion Pill’Episode Number: 340Published: March 28, 2024

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.]

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, March 28, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast and things might’ve changed by the time you hear this, so here we go.

We are joined today via video conference by Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Hello.

Rovner: Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet.

Sarah Karlin-Smith: Morning, everybody.

Rovner: And Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Lauren Weber: Hello, hello.

Rovner: Later in this episode, we’ll have my Bill of the Month interview with my KFF Health News colleague Tony Leys, about Medicare confusion and a really expensive air ambulance ride. But first, this week’s news.

So the big news of the week here in Washington were the oral arguments at the Supreme Court on a case that could seriously restrict the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. This was the first major abortion case to come before the justices since they overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and the buildup to this case was enormous. But judging from the oral arguments, it seems like this huge case might kind of fizzle away? Alice, you were there. What happened?

Ollstein: Yeah, Sarah and I were both there. We got to hang out in the obstructed-view section of the press section. Luckily, most of the justices’ voices are easily recognizable. So even from behind the curtain, we could tell what was going on. What was obviously expected was that the court’s three more-progressive justices would take a really skeptical and hard look at this case brought by anti-abortion doctors.

But what was somewhat more surprising is that several, at least two, arguably three, of the conservatives joined them in their skepticism. And they really went after two core pieces of this challenge to the FDA. One on “standing,” whether these doctors can prove that they have been harmed by the availability of these pills in the past and are likely to be in the future. There was a lot of talk about how the FDA doesn’t require these doctors to do or not do anything, and the case relies on this speculative chain of events, from the FDA approving these pills to someone seeking out one of these doctors, in particular, to treat them after taking one, and that being way too loose a connection to establish standing.

The other piece that the conservative justices were maybe not in favor of was the demand for this sweeping universal ruling, restricting access to the pills for everyone. They were saying, “Wouldn’t something more tailored to just these doctors make more sense instead of imposing this policy on everyone in the nation?” So that really undermines their case a lot. Although, caveat, you cannot tell how the court’s going to rule based on oral arguments. This is just us reading the tea leaves. Maybe they’re playing devil’s advocate, but it is telling.

Rovner: Yeah, somebody remind us what could happen if the justices do reach the merits of this case. Obviously from the oral argument, it looks like they’re going to say that these particular doctors don’t have standing and throw the case out on that basis. But if in case, as Alice says, they decide to do something else, what could happen here? Sarah, this is a big deal for drug companies, right?

Karlin-Smith: Right. So in terms of the actual abortion pill mifepristone itself, the approval of the drug is not on the line at this point. That was taken off the table, though a lower court did try and restrict the drug entirely. What’s on the table are changes FDA made to its safety programs for the drug since 2016 that have had the impact of making the drug more available to people later in pregnancy. It’s just easier to access. You no longer have to go to a health provider and take the drug there. You can pick it up at a pharmacy, it can be sent via mail-order pharmacy. It’s just a lot easier to take and has made it more accessible. So those restrictions could basically go back in time to 2016.

Rovner: And I know. I remember at some point, one of the people arguing the case was there for Danco, the company that makes the pill, or the brand-name company that makes the pill. And at some point, they were saying if they rolled back the restrictions to 2016, they’d have to go through the labeling process all over again because the current label would be no longer allowed. And that would delay things, right?

Karlin-Smith: Right. All of the drug that is currently out there would be then deemed misbranded and it’s not superfast to have to update it. The other thing, I don’t think this came up that much on arguments but it’s been raised before is that actually, you can make a strong case that going back to [the] 2016 state might be actually potentially more dangerous for people because they actually also adjusted the dosing of mifepristone a bit. So there’s actually been changes that people might actually say actually would create more potential. … If you believe these doctors might actually be injured in the sense of they would see more women in the ER because of adverse events from these drugs, there’s a case you can make that actually says it would be more unsafe if you go back to 2016 than if you operate under the current way the drug is administered today.

Ollstein: This also didn’t come up, but Sarah is exactly right. And, if this case did end up in the future going after the original FDA approval of mifepristone, providers around the country have said they would switch to a misoprostol-only regimen where people just take the second of the two pills that are usually taken together. And that brings up a very similar issue to what Sarah just mentioned because if that happens, there is a, not hugely, but slightly greater risk of complications if that happens. And so, exactly, the relief that these doctors are seeking could, in fact, lead to more people coming for treatment in the future.

Rovner: Well, it seemed like the one … the merits of this case that the justices did ask about was the idea of judges substituting their medical judgment for that of the FDA. That’s obviously a big piece of this. I was surprised to see even some of the conservative justices, particularly Amy Coney Barrett, wondering maybe if that was a great idea.

Ollstein: It was also just so notable how much talk there was of just the particulars of reproduction and abortion and women’s bodies. You just don’t hear that a lot in the Supreme Court, and I don’t know if that is a function of there being more women than before sitting on the Supreme Court. You heard about how to diagnose ectopic pregnancies without an ultrasound. You heard about pregnancies being dated by the person’s last menstrual period. I don’t know when I’ve heard the words “menstrual period” said in the Supreme Court before, but we heard them this week.

Rovner: And it was notable, and several people noted it, all three attorneys who argued this case were women. Both the attorney for the plaintiff, the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who is a woman, and the attorney for Danco were all women. And the women, the four, now four women on the court, were very active in the questioning and it was. I’ve sat through a lot of reproductive health arguments at the Supreme Court and it was, to me at least, really refreshing to hear actual specifics and not euphemisms, but that were to the point of what we were talking about here, which often these arguments are not.

So one of the things that came up that we did expect was some discussion of the 1873 Comstock Act, mostly brought up by Justices [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas. This is the long-dormant anti-vice law that could effectively impose a nationwide ban on abortion if it is resurrected and enforced, right?

Ollstein: Yes. So this was really interesting because this was not part of the core case arguments, but it’s something that the challengers really want to be part of the court arguments. And you had two of the court’s justices, arguably furthest to the right, really grilling the attorneys on whether the FDA should have taken Comstock into account when it approved mail delivery of abortion pills. And the solicitor general said, “Not only would that have been inappropriate, it would arguably have been illegal for the FDA to have done that.” She was saying, “The FDA is by statute only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of a drug when creating policies.” If it had said, “Oh, we’re not going to do this thing that the science indicates we should do,” which is allow mail delivery because of this long-dormant law that our own administration put out a memo saying it shouldn’t ban delivery of abortion pills, that would’ve been completely wrong.

Now, they asked the same of the attorney for the challengers and she obviously was in favor of taking the Comstock Act into account. And so I think it’s a sign that this is not the last we’re going to hear of this.

Karlin-Smith: I believe the solicitor general also did reference the fact that FDA did to some degree acknowledge the Comstock Act, but deferred to the Biden administration’s Justice Department’s determination that, first of all, not only has this law not really been enforced for years, but that it doesn’t actually ban the mail distribution of a legal, approved drug.

And the other thing, again, they went into this a little bit more in briefs, but FDA has its role and sometimes other agencies have other laws they operate on and you can operate on separate planes. So FDA and DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] often have to intersect when you’re talking about controlled substances like opioids and so forth. And what happens there is actually, FDA approves the drug and then DEA comes back in later and they do the scheduling of it and then the drug gets on the market. But FDA doesn’t have to take into account and say, “Oh, we can’t approve this drug because it’s not scheduled that they approve it.” Then DEA does the scheduling. So it seems like they’re twisting FDA’s role around Comstock a little bit.

Weber: Just to echo some of that, I think a lot of court watchers and a lot of abortion protectors were alarmed by the mention of the Comstock Act over and over again and are watching to see if there will be a fair amount of road-mapping laid out in the legal opinions that Alito and Thomas are expected to give, likely in dissent to the decision probably to dismiss this case. And I think it’s really interesting that this is coinciding with a lot of reporting that we’ve talked about on this podcast over and over again of Donald Trump talking about a 15- to 16-week abortion ban and his advisers, who are setting a roadmap for his presidency were he to win, talking explicitly about how they would revive the Comstock Act.

So all of these things taken together would seem to indicate that it would certainly play a role if the administration were to be a Trump administration.

Rovner: Perfect segue to my next question, which is that assuming this case goes away, Alice, you wrote a story about backup plans that the anti-abortion groups have. What are some of those backup plans here?

Ollstein: Yeah, I thought it was important for folks to remember that even though this is a huge deal that this case even got this far to the Supreme Court, it is far from the only way anti-abortion advocates and elected officials are working to try to cut off access to these pills. They see these pills as the future of abortion. Obviously, they’ve gained popularity over the recent years and now have jumped from just over half of abortions to more than two-thirds just recently. And so there are bills in Congress and in state legislatures. There are model draft bills that these anti-abortion groups are circulating. There are other lawsuits, and like you said, there are these policy plans trying to lay a groundwork for a future Trump administration to do these things through executive orders, going around Congress. There’s not a lot of confidence of winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, for instance. And so while congressional plans also include attempting to use the appropriations process, as happened unsuccessfully this year, to ban abortion, I think people see the executive branch route as a lot more fruitful.

In addition to all of that, there are also just pressure campaigns and protest campaigns. It’s the same playbook that the anti-abortion movement [used] to topple Roe. They are good at playing the long game, and so there are plans to pressure the pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS that have agreed to dispense abortion pills. I just think that you’re seeing a very throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks kind of strategy amongst these groups.

Rovner: Meanwhile, as Lauren already intimated, abortion is playing a major role in this year’s campaigns and elections. This week, a Democrat in deep-red Alabama flipped a Statehouse seat running on a reproductive freedom platform. She actually went out and campaigned on trying to reverse the state’s abortion ban. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who earlier hinted that he might favor some sort of national ban, with exceptions for rape and incest and threats to life, said the quiet part out loud last week, telling a radio show that “people are agreeing on a 15-week ban.” That’s exactly what Republicans running for reelection in the Senate don’t want to hear right now. This has not gone well for Republicans in discussions of abortion as we saw this week in Alabama.

Weber: Yeah. As someone who was born in Alabama — and I’ve talked about this on this podcast, there are a fair amount of influencers that are regular people that I follow that live in Alabama — the IVF ruling was a huge shock to the system for conservative Alabama, especially women, and I think this win by a Democrat in the Deep South like this is a real wake-up call. And probably why all the Republican senators don’t want to talk about abortion or any sort of ban, or really get close to this reproductive issue because it is a real weak spot as this race unfolds with two candidates that are arguably both unpopular with both of their parties.

So this could become a turnout game, and if one side is more activated due to feeling very strongly about IVF, abortion, et cetera, that really could play out in not only the presidential race but the trickle-down races that are involved.

Rovner: I was amused. There’s the story that The Hill had this week about Senate Republicans wincing at Trump actually coming out for a federal ban. And one of them was Josh Hawley, who is not only very avowedly pro-life but whose wife argued the case for the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court, and yet he was saying he doesn’t want to see this on a federal level because he’s up for reelection this year.

Karlin-Smith: It’s interesting because one thing we’ve seen is that when there’s been specific abortion measures that people got to vote for at the state or local level, abortion rights are very popular. But then people have always raised this question of, “Well, would this look the same if you were voting more for a candidate, a person, and you were thinking about their broader political positions, not just abortion?” And this case in Alabama, I think, is a good example when you see that that can carry the day and it’s people who care about abortion rights may be willing to sacrifice potentially other political positions where they might be more aligned with a candidate if that’s an issue that’s a top priority.

Rovner: Yeah. And I think a lot of people took away, the Democrat in Alabama won by 60%, she got 60% of the vote. And she’d run before and lost, I think they said by 7%. It was more than a fluke. She really won overwhelmingly, and I think that raised an awful lot of eyebrows. Speaking of health care and politics and Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee also reiterated his desire to, and again, I quote from his post, this time on Truth Social, “Make the ACA much, much, much better for far less money or cost to our grest,” I presume he meant great, “American citizens who have been decimated by Biden.” This harkens back to all the times when he as president repeatedly promised a replacement for the ACA coming within a few weeks and which never materialized.

Does anybody think he has anything specifically in mind now? I guess as we’ve talked about with abortion, but haven’t really said, there is this Heritage Foundation document that’s supposed to be the guiding force should he get back into office.

Ollstein: But if I’m correct, even that document — which is like a wish list, dreamland, they could do whatever they want, “This is what we would love to do” — even that doesn’t call for repealing Obamacare entirely. It calls for chipping away at it, allowing other alternatives for people to enroll in. But I think it’s telling that even in their wildest dreams, they are not touching that stove again after the experience of 2017.

Weber: Julie, I’m just sad you didn’t read that in all caps. I feel like you really missed an opportunity to accurately represent that tweet.

Rovner: I also didn’t read the whole thing. It’s longer than that. That was just the guts of it. Well, one group that is not afraid to shy away from the specifics is the Republican Study Committee in the U.S. House, which has released its own proposed budget for fiscal 2025. That’s the fiscal year that starts this Oct. 1. The RSC’s membership includes most but not all of Republicans in the U.S. House. And it used to be the most conservative caucus before there was a Freedom Caucus. So it’s now the more moderate of the conservative side of the House.

I should emphasize that this is not the proposed budget from House Republicans. There may or may not be one from the actual House Budget Committee. It’s due April 15, by the way, the budget process — even though the president just signed the last piece of spending legislation for fiscal 2024 — the 2025 budget process is supposed to start as soon as they get back.

In any case, the RSC budget, as usual, includes some pretty sweeping suggestions, including raising the retirement age, block-granting Medicaid, repealing most of the Affordable Care Act and Medicare’s drug price negotiation authority, and making Medicare a “premium support program,” which would give private plans much more say over what kind of benefits people get and how much they pay for them. Basically, it’s a wish list of every Republican health proposal for the last 25 years, none of which have been passed by Congress thus far.

The White House and Democrats, not surprisingly, have been all over it. Both the president and the vice president were on the road this week, talking up their health care accomplishments, part of their marking of the 14th anniversary of the ACA, and blasting the Republicans for all of these proposals that some of them may or may not support or may or may not even know about. Republicans desperately don’t want 2024 to become a health care election, but it seems like they’re doing it to themselves, aren’t they?

Ollstein: So putting out these kinds of policy plans before an election, it’s a real double-edged sword because you want to rev up your own supporters and give your base an idea of “Hey, if you put us in power, this is what we will deliver for you.” But it also can rev up the other side, and we’re seeing that happen for sure. Democrats very eagerly jumped on this to say, “This shows why you can’t elect Republicans and put them in control. They would go after Obamacare, go after Medicare, go after Medicaid, go after Social Security,” all of these very sensitive issues.

And so yeah, we are definitely seeing the backlash and the weaponization of this by Democrats. Are we seeing this inspire and excite the right? I haven’t really seen a ton of chatter on the right about the Republican Study Committee budget, but if you have, let me know.

Rovner: As the campaign goes on, we’ll see more people throwing things against the wall. I think you’re right. I think the Republicans want this election to be about inflation and the border, so, I’m sure we will also hear more about that. Well, moving on, I have a segment this week that I’m calling “This Week in Things That Didn’t Work Out as Planned.” First up was hard-drug decriminalization in Oregon. Longtime listeners will remember when we talked about Oregon voters approving a plan in 2020 to have law enforcement issue $100 citations to people caught using small amounts of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, along with information on where they can go to get drug treatment. But the drug treatment program basically failed to materialize, overdoses went up, and drug users gathered in public on the streets of Portland and other cities to shoot up.

Now the governor has signed a bill recriminalizing the drugs that had been decriminalized. I feel like this has echoes of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s when people with serious mental illness were supposed to be released from facilities and provided community-based care instead. Except the community-based care also never materialized, which basically created part of the homeless problem that we still have today.

So in fact, we don’t really know if drug decriminalization would work, at least not in the way it was designed. But Alice, you point to a story that one of your colleagues has written about a place where it actually did work, right?

Ollstein: Yeah, so they did a really interesting comparison between Oregon and the country Portugal, and made a pretty convincing case that Oregon did not give this experiment the time or the resources to have any chance of success. Basically, Oregon decriminalized drugs, they barely funded and stood up services to help people access treatment. And then after just a couple of years, politicians panicked at the backlash and are backpedaling instead of giving this, again, the time and resources to actually achieve what Portugal has achieved over decades, which is a huge drop in overdose deaths.

But in addition to more time and resources, you can’t really carve this out of just basic universal health care, which Portugal has, and we definitely do not. And so I think it’s a really interesting discussion of what is needed to actually have an impact on this front.

Rovner: Yeah, obviously it’s still a big problem, and states and the federal government and localities are still trying to figure out how best to grapple with it. Well, next in our things that didn’t work out as planned is arbitration for surprise medical bills. Remember when Congress outlawed passing the cost of insurer-provider billing disputes to patients? Those were these huge bills that suddenly were out-of-network. The solution to this was supposed to be a process to fairly determine what should be paid for those services. Well, researchers from the Brookings Institution have taken a deep dive into the first tranche of data on the program, which is from 2023, and found that at least early on the program is paying nearly four times more than Medicare would reimburse for the disputed services, and that it has the potential to raise both premiums and in-network service prices, which is not what lawmakers intended.

I feel like this was kind of the inevitable result of continuing compromises when they were writing this bill to overcome provider opposition. They were afraid they wouldn’t get paid enough, and so they kept pushing this process and now, surprise, they’re getting paid probably more than was intended. Is there some way to backpedal and fix this? Lauren, you look like you have feelings here.

Weber: I take us back to the name of this podcast, “What the Health?” I feel like this sums up everything in health care. Literally, legislators try to get a fix that it turns out could actually worsen the problem because the premiums and so on could continue to escalate in a never-ending war for patients to share more of the burden of the cost. So it’s good that we have this research and know that this is what’s happening, but yeah, again, this is the name of the podcast. How is this the health care system as we know it?

Karlin-Smith: Also, again, you start to understand why other countries just have these — as much as they’re politically unpopular in the U.S. — these systems where they just set the prices because trying to somehow do it in a more market-based way or these negotiating ways, you end up with these pushes and pulls and you never quite achieve that cost containment you want.

Rovner: Yeah, although we have gotten the patient out of the middle. So in that sense, this has worked, but certainly …

Karlin-Smith: Right, for the people actually getting the surprise bills, they’ve been helped. Again, assuming that down the line, as Lauren mentioned, it doesn’t just raise all of our inpatient bills and our premiums.

Rovner: Yes, we will all be employed forever trying to explain what goes on in the health care system. Finally, diabetes online tools, all those cool apps that are supposed to help people monitor their health more closely and control their disease more effectively. Well, according to a study from the Peterson Health Technology Institute, the apps don’t deliver better clinical benefits than “usual care,” and they increase health spending at the same time — the theme here.

This is the first analysis released by this new institute created to evaluate digital health technology. Although not surprisingly, makers of the apps in question are pushing back very hard on the research. Technology assessment has always been controversial, but it clearly seems necessary if we’re ever going to do something about health spending. So somebody’s going to have to do this, right?

Weber: As we move into this ever more digital health world where billions of dollars are being spent in this space, it’s really important that someone’s actually evaluating the claims of if these things work, because it’s a lot of Medicare money, which is taxpayer dollars, that get spent on some of these tools that are supposedly supposed to help patients. And I believe, in this case, they found a 0.4% improvement, which did not justify, I think it was several hundred dollars worth of investment every year, when other tactics could be used. So quite an interesting report, and I’m very curious, and I’m sure many other digital health creators, too, are curious to see who they’ll be targeting next.

Karlin-Smith: It’s an old story in U.S. health care, right? That the tech people are going to come in and save us all, and then what happens when they come into it and realize that there’s root problems in our system that are not easily solved just by throwing more complicated money and technology at it. So these are certainly not the first people that thought that some innovative technological system would work.

Rovner: So in drug news this week, Medicare has announced it will cover the weight loss drug Wegovy, which is the weight loss version of the drug Ozempic. But not for weight loss, rather for the prevention of heart disease and stroke, which a new clinical trial says it can actually help with. Sarah, is this a distinction without a difference and might it pave the way for broader coverage of these drugs in Medicare?

Karlin-Smith: Distinction does matter. CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] has been pretty clear in guidance. This does not yet open the door for somebody who is just overweight to have the drug in Medicare. And health plans will have a lot of leeway, I think, to determine who gets this drug through prior authorization, and so forth. Some people have speculated they might only be willing to provide it to people that have already had some kind of serious heart event and are overweight. So not just somebody who seems high risk of a heart attack.

So I think at least initially, there’s going to be a lot of tight control over at AHIP. The biggest insurance trade group has indicated that already, so I don’t think it’s going to be as easy to access as people want it to be.

Rovner: Meanwhile, a separate study has both good and bad news about these diabetes/weight loss medications. Medicare is already spending so much money on them because it does cover them for diabetes, that the drugs could soon be eligible for price negotiations. Could that help bring the price down for everyone? Or is it possible that if Medicare cuts a better deal on these drugs everybody else is going to have to pay more?

Karlin-Smith: You mean outside of Medicare or just …?

Rovner: Yeah, I mean outside of Medicare. If Medicare negotiates the price of Ozempic because they’re already covering it so much for diabetes, is that going to make them raise the price for people who are not on Medicare? I guess that’s the big question about Medicare drug price negotiation anyway.

Karlin-Smith: Yeah. Certainly, people have talked about that a little bit. I think the sense that you can raise prices a lot in the private market. People are skeptical of that. There’s also these drugs because they’re actually old enough that they’re getting to the point of Medicare drug price negotiation under the new law. They’re actually more heavily rebated than people realize. The sense is that both private payers and Medicare are actually getting decent rebate levels on them already. Again, they’re still expensive. The rebates are very secretive. They don’t always go to the patients. But there’s some element of these drugs being slightly more affordable than is clearly transparent.

Rovner: There’s a reason that so many people on Ozempic for diabetes can be on Ozempic for diabetes, in other words. Finally, “This Week in Medical Misinformation”: Lauren, you have a wild story about birth control misinformation on TikTok. So we’re going from the Medicare to the younger cohort. Tell us about it.

Weber: Yeah. As everyone on this podcast is aware, we live in a very fractured health care system that does not invest in women’s health care, that is underfunded for years, and a lot of women feel disenfranchised by it. So it’s no surprise that physicians told myself and my reporting [colleague] Sabrina Malhi to some extent that misinformation is festering in that kind of gray area where women feel like they’re sometimes not listened to by their physician or they’re not getting all their information. And instead, they’re turning to their phone, and they’re seeing these videos that loop over and over and over again, which either incorrectly or without context, state misinformation about birth control. And the way that algorithms work on social media is that once you engage with one, you see them repeatedly. And so it’s leaving a lot of younger women in particular, physicians told us, with the impression that hormonal birth control is really terrible for them and looking to get onto natural birth control.

But, what these influencers and conservative commentators often fail to stress, which your physician would stress if you had this conversation with them, is that natural forms of birth control, like timing your sex to menstrual cycles to prevent pregnancy, can be way less effective. They can have an up to 23% failure rate, whereas the pill is 91% effective, the IUD is over 99% effective. And so physicians we talked to said they’re seeing women come in looking for abortions because they believe this misinformation and chose to switch birth controls or do something that impacted how they were monitoring preventing pregnancy. And they’re seeing the end result of this.

Rovner: And obviously there are side effects to various forms of hormonal birth control.

Weber: Yes. Yes.

Rovner: That’s why there are lots of different kinds of them because if you have side effects with one, you might be able to use another. I think the part that stuck out to me was the whole “without context,” because this is a conversation that if you have with a doctor, they’re going to talk about, it’s like, “Well, if you’re having bad side effects with this, you could try this instead. Or you could try that, or this one has a better chance of having these kinds of side effects. And here’s the effectiveness rate of all of these.” Because there actually is scientific evidence about birth control. It’s been used for a very long time.

Ollstein: Oh, yeah. And I think it’s important to remember that this is not just random influencers on TikTok promoting this message. You’re hearing this from pretty high-level folks on the right as well, raising skepticism and even outright opposition to different forms of birth control. The hormonal pills, devices like IUDs that are really effective. They are saying that they are abortifacients in some circumstances when that is not accurate according to medical professionals. And there was just this really interesting backlash recently. I interviewed Kellyanne Conway and she said her polling found that if Republican politicians came out in favor of access to birth control, that would help them. And then she got this wave of criticism after that, accusing her of promoting promiscuity. And so there’s a big fight over contraception on the right, and it’s, Lauren found in her great story, trickling down to regular folks who are trying to figure out how to use it or not use it.

Rovner: I will link to a story that I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how contraception has always been controversial among Republicans. And it still is. Lauren, you want to say one last thing before we move on?

Weber: No, I think Julie, your point that you mentioned, birth control side effects are real and it is important for patients to speak with their physicians. And what physicians told me is that over the years, their guidance and their training has changed to better involve patients in that decision-making. So women many years ago may not have gotten that same walking-through. And also, birth control is often stigmatized, especially for younger populations. And so all of this feeds into, as Alice has pointed out, and as this piece walks through, how some of these influencers with more holistic paths that they’re possibly selling you, and conservative commentators are getting in these women’s phones and they’re trusting them because they don’t necessarily have a relationship with their physician.

Rovner: They don’t necessarily have a physician to have a relationship with. All right, well, that is the news for this week. Now we will play my Bill of the Month interview with Tony Leys, and then we’ll be back with our extra credits.

I am pleased to welcome to the podcast my colleague Tony Leys, who reported and wrote the latest KFF Health News-NPR Bill of the Month installment. Thank you for joining us, Tony.

Tony Leys: Thanks for having me.

Rovner: So this month’s patient passed away from her ailment, but her daughter is still dealing with the bill. Tell us who this story is about and what kind of medical procedure was involved here.

Leys: Debra Prichard was from rural Tennessee. She was in generally good health until last year when she suffered a stroke and several aneurysms. She twice was rushed to a medical center in Nashville, including once by helicopter ambulance. She later died at age 70 from complications of a brain bleed.

Rovner: Then, as we say, the bill came. I think people by now generally know that air ambulances can be expensive, but how big is this bill?

Leys: It was $81,739 for a 79-mile flight.

Rovner: Wow. A lot of people think that when someone dies, that’s it for their bills. But that’s not necessarily the case here, right?

Leys: No, it’s on the estate then.

Rovner: So they have been pursuing this?

Leys: Right. That would amount to about a third of the estate’s value.

Rovner: Now, Debra Prichard had Medicare, and Medicare caps how much patients can be charged for air ambulance rides. So why didn’t this cap apply to this ride?

Leys: Yeah, if she’d had full Medicare coverage, the air ambulance company would’ve only been able to collect a total of less than $10,000. But unbeknownst to her family, Prichard had only signed up for Medicare Part A, which is free to most seniors and covers inpatient hospital care. She did not sign up for Medicare Part B, which covers many other services including ambulance rides, and it generally costs about $175 a month in premiums.

Rovner: I know. Medicare Part B used to be “de minimis” in premium, so everybody signed up for it, but now, Medicare Part B can be more expensive than an Affordable Care Act plan. So I imagine that there are people who find that $175 a month [is] more than their budget can handle.

Leys: Right. And there is assistance available for people of moderate incomes. It’s not super well publicized, but she may very well have been eligible for that if she’d looked into it.

Rovner: So what eventually happened with this bill?

Leys: Well, her estate faced the full charge. The family’s lawyer is negotiating with the company and they’re making some progress, last we heard.

Rovner: But as of now, the air ambulance company still wants the entire amount from the estate?

Leys: They put in a filing against the estate to that effect, but they apparently are negotiating it.

Rovner: So what’s the takeaway here for people who think they have Medicare or think, no, they don’t have Part B, but think it might cost too much?

Leys: Well, the takeaway is Medicare coverage sure is complicated. There’s free help available for seniors trying to sort it out. Every state has a program called the State Health Insurance Assistance Programs, and they have free expert advice and they can point you to programs that help pay for that premium if you can’t afford it. I don’t know about you, Julie, but I plan to check in with those programs before I sign up for Medicare someday.

Rovner: Even I plan to check in with those programs, and I know a lot about this.

Leys: If Julie Rovner wants assistance, everyone should get it.

Rovner: Everyone should get assistance. Yes, that’s my takeaway, too. Medicare is really complicated. Tony Leys, thank you very much.

Leys: Thanks for having me.

Rovner: OK, we are back. It’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Sarah, you were first up this week. Why don’t you go first?

Karlin-Smith: I’ve looked at a Washington Post story, “The Confusing, Stressful Ordeal of Flying With a Breast Pump,” by Hannah Sampson and Ben Broch, and it’s essentially about how there’s no federal rule that protects people flying with a breast pump and being able to bring it on the plane as a carry-on, not a checked bag, and the problems this could cause. If you are pumping breast milk and need to pump it, you often need to pump it as often as every three hours, sometimes even less. And there are medical consequences that can happen if you do not. And the current system in place is just left to each airline to have its own policy. And it seems like flying is the luck of the draw of whether these staff members even understand this policy. And a lot of this seems to date back to basically when the laws that were put in place that protect people with various sorts of medical needs to be able to bring their devices on planes, the kinds of breast pumps people use today really didn’t exist.

But some of this is just an undercurrent of a lack of appreciation for the challenges of being a young parent and trying to feed your kid and what that entails.

Rovner: Maybe we should send it to the Supreme Court. They could have a real discussion about it. People would learn something. Sorry. Alice, why don’t you go next?

Ollstein: Sure. So I have a piece from Stat by Olivia Goldhill called “Fetal Tissue Research Gains in Importance as Roadblocks Multiply.” And it’s about how the people in the U.S. right now doing research that uses fetal tissue — this is tissue that’s donated from people who’ve had abortions, and it’s used in all kinds of things, HIV research, different cancers — it could be really, really important. And the piece is about how that research has not really recovered in the U.S. from the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.

Not only that, the fear that those restrictions would come back if Trump is reelected is making people hesitant to really invest in this kind of research. And already they’re having to source fetal tissue from other countries at great expense. And so just a fascinating window into what’s going on there.

Rovner: Yeah, it is. People think that these policies that flip and flip back it’s like a switch, and it’s not. It really does affect these policies and what happens. Lauren?

Weber: So I picked a story from Stateline, which by the way, I just want to fan girl about how much I love Stateline all the time. Anyways, the title is “Deadly Fires From Phone, Scooter Batteries Leave Lawmakers Playing Catch-Up on Safety,” written by Robbie Sequeira. And I just have anecdotal bias because my sister’s apartment next to her caught on fire due to one of these scooter batteries. But, in general, as the story very clearly lays out, this is a real threat. Lithium batteries, which are proliferating throughout our society, whether they’re scooter batteries or other different types of technology, are harder to fight when they light on fire and they are more likely to light on fire accidentally. And there’s really not a good answer. As lawmakers are trying to get more funding or try to combat this or limit the amount of lithium batteries you can have in a place, people are dying.

There was a 27-year-old journalist, Fazil Khan, who passed away from a fire of this sort. You’re seeing other folks across the country face the consequences. And it’s really quite frightening to see that modern firefighting has made so many strides but this is a different type of blaze, and I think we’ll see this play out for the next couple of years.

Rovner: I think this is a real public health story because this is one of those things where if people knew a lot more about it, there are things you can do, like don’t store your lithium-ion battery in your apartment, or don’t leave it charging overnight. Take it out of the actual object. There are a lot of things that you could do to prevent fires, but the point of this story is that these fires are really dangerous. It’s really scary.

All right, well, my story this week is from my KFF Health News colleague Arthur Allen. It’s called “Overdosing on Chemo: A Common Gene Test Could Save Hundreds of Lives Each Year,” and it’s about a particular chemotherapy drug that works well for most people, but for a small subset with a certain genetic trait can be deadly. There’s a blood test for it, but in the U.S., it’s not required or even recommended in some cases. It’s a really distressing story about how the FDA, medical specialists, cancer organizations can’t seem to reach an agreement about something that could save some cancer patients from a terrible death.

All right, that is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks as always to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our editor, Emmarie Huetteman. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me at X, @jrovner, or @julierovner at Bluesky or @julie.rovner at Threads. Lauren, where are you these days?

Weber: Just on X, @LaurenWeberHP

Rovner: Sarah?

Karlin-Smith: @SarahKarlin or @sarahkarlin-smith, depending on the various social media platform.

Rovner: Alice?

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OAKLAND, California – El Medi-Cal llegó a Antonio Abundis cuando el conserje más lo necesitaba.

Poco después que Abundis pasara de tener cobertura limitada a una cobertura completa en 2022, bajo la expansión del Medi-Cal de California para adultos mayores sin papeles, fue diagnosticado con leucemia, un tipo de cáncer que afecta las células de la sangre.

El padre de tres hijos, de voz suave, tomó la noticia con calma cuando su médico le dijo que sus análisis de sangre sugerían que su cáncer no estaba en una etapa avanzada. Sus siguientes pasos fueron hacerse más pruebas y tener un plan de tratamiento con un equipo de cáncer en Epic Care, en Emeryville.

Pero todo eso se fue por la borda cuando se presentó en julio pasado para hacerse un análisis de sangre en La Clínica de La Raza en Oakland, y le dijeron que ya no era beneficiario de Medi-Cal.

“Nunca mandaron una carta ni nada de que a mí me la había negado”, dijo Abundis, ahora de 63 años, sobre la pérdida de su cobertura.

Abundis es uno de los cientos de miles de latinos de California que han sido expulsados de Medi-Cal —el programa estatal de Medicaid para personas de bajos ingresos— a medida que los estados reanudaban las verificaciones de elegibilidad, que se habían suspendido en el punto más álgido de la pandemia de covid-19.

El proceso de redeterminación ha afectado de forma desproporcionada a los latinos, que constituyen la mayoría de los beneficiarios de Medi-Cal.

Según el Departamento de Servicios de Salud de California (DHCS), más de 613,000 de los 1,24 millones de residentes que fueron dados de baja se identifican como latinos. Algunos, incluido Abundis, habían obtenido la cobertura poco tiempo antes, cuando el estado comenzó a expandir Medi-Cal para ofrecer cobertura a inmigrantes indocumentados.

El choque entre las políticas estatales y las federales no sólo ha significado un duro golpe para los beneficiarios: también disparó la demanda de asistencia para realizar los trámites de inscripción.

Esto ocurre porque muchas personas son excluidas de Medi-Cal por cuestiones administrativas.

Los grupos de salud que trabajan con las comunidades latinas informan que están inundados de solicitudes de ayuda. Al mismo tiempo, una encuesta patrocinada por el estado sugiere que los hogares hispanos tienen más probabilidades que otros grupos étnicos o raciales de perder la cobertura porque tienen menos información sobre el proceso de renovación.

También pueden tener dificultades para defenderse por sí solos.

Algunos defensores de salud están presionando para que haya una pausa en este proceso. Advierten que las desafiliaciones no solo socavarán los esfuerzos del estado para reducir el número de personas sin seguro, sino que podrían exacerbar las disparidades en salud, especialmente para un grupo étnico que sufrió fuerte el peso de la pandemia.

Un estudio nacional encontró que los latinos en el país tuvieron tres veces más probabilidades de desarrollar covid y el doble de probabilidades de morir a causa de la enfermedad que la población en general, en parte porque tienden a vivir en hogares más hacinados o multigeneracionales y tienen trabajos en servicios, de cara al público.

“Estas dificultades nos colocan a todos como comunidad en un estatus más frágil, en el cual la red de seguridad es aún más significativa”, dijo Seciah Aquino, directora ejecutiva de la Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, una organización de defensa de salud.

La asambleísta Tasha Boerner (demócrata de Encinitas) ha presentado un proyecto de ley que desaceleraría las bajas permitiendo que las personas de 19 años o más mantengan automáticamente su cobertura durante 12 meses, y extendiendo las políticas flexibles de la era pandémica, como no requerir prueba de ingresos para renovar la cobertura en ciertos casos. Esto beneficiaría a los hispanos, que representan casi el 51% de la población de Medi-Cal en comparación con el 40% de la población total del estado.

La oficina del gobernador dijo que no comenta sobre proyectos legislativos que están aún en proceso.

Tony Cava, vocero del Departamento de Servicios de Atención Médica (DHCS), dijo en un correo electrónico que la agencia ha tomado medidas para aumentar el número de personas reinscritas automáticamente en Medi-Cal y no cree que sea necesaria una pausa. La tasa de desafiliación disminuyó un 10% de noviembre a diciembre, apuntó Cava.

Sin embargo, funcionarios estatales reconocen que se podría hacer más para ayudar a las personas a completar sus solicitudes. “Todavía no estamos llegando a ciertos sectores”, dijo Yingjia Huang, subdirectora adjunta de beneficios de atención médica y elegibilidad del DHCS.

California fue el primer estado en ampliar la elegibilidad de Medicaid a todos los inmigrantes que calificaran, sin importar su estatus migratorio, implementándolo gradualmente durante varios años: niños en 2016, adultos jóvenes de 19 a 26 años en 2020, personas de 50 años en adelante en 2022, y todos los adultos restantes este año.

Pero California, como otros estados, reanudó las verificaciones de elegibilidad en abril pasado, y se espera que el proceso continúe hasta mayo. El estado ahora está viendo que las tasas de desafiliación vuelven a los niveles previos a la pandemia, o el 19%-20% de la población de Medi-Cal cada año, según el DHCS.

Jane García, directora ejecutiva de La Clínica de La Raza, testificó ante el Comité de Salud de la Junta de Supervisores del condado de Alameda que las desafiliaciones siguen siendo un desafío, justo cuando su equipo intenta inscribir a residentes recién elegibles. “Es una carga enorme para nuestro personal”, les dijo a los supervisores en enero.

Aunque muchos beneficiarios ya no califican porque sus ingresos aumentaron, muchos más han sido eliminados de los registros por no responder a avisos o devolver documentos. En muchos casos, los paquetes de documentos para renovar la cobertura se enviaron a direcciones antiguas. Muchos se enteran de que perdieron la cobertura recién cuando van al médico.

“Sabían que algo estaba pasando”, dijo Janet Anwar, gerenta de elegibilidad en el Tiburcio Vásquez Health Center, en East Bay. “No sabían exactamente qué era, cómo los iba a afectar hasta que llegó el día y fueron desafiliados. Y estaban haciéndose un chequeo, o programando una cita, y luego… ‘Oye, perdiste tu cobertura'”.

Y la reinscripción es un desafío. Una encuesta patrocinada por el estado publicada el 12 de febrero por la California Health Care Foundation halló que el 30% de los hogares hispanos intentaron completar un formulario de renovación sin suerte, en comparación con el 19% de los hogares blancos no hispanos. Y el 43% de los hispanos informaron que les gustaría volver a comenzar con Medi-Cal, pero no sabían cómo, en comparación con el 32% de las personas en hogares blancos no hispanos.

La familia Abundis está entre las que no saben dónde obtener respuestas a sus preguntas. Aunque la esposa de Abundis envió la documentación de renovación de Medi-Cal para toda la familia en octubre, ella y dos hijos que aún viven con ellos pudieron mantener la cobertura; Abundis fue el único que la perdió.

No ha recibido una explicación de por qué lo sacaron de Medi-Cal ni ha sido notificado de cómo apelar o volver a solicitarlo.

Ahora se preocupa de que tal vez no califique por sí solo según sus ingresos anuales de aproximadamente $36,000, ya que el límite es de $20,121 para un individuo, pero de $41,400 para una familia de cuatro.

Es probable que un navegador pueda verificar si él y su familia califican como hogar para Medi-Cal. Covered California, el mercado de seguros de salud estatal, ofrece planes privados que pueden costar menos de $10 al mes en primas y permite una inscripción especial cuando las personas pierden Medi-Cal o la cobertura del empleador. Pero los inmigrantes que no viven legalmente en el estado no califican para los subsidios de Covered California. Abundis supone que no podrá pagar las primas ni los copagos, por lo que no presentó la solicitud.

Pero Abundis supone que no podrá pagar primas o copagos, así que no ha presentado una solicitud.

Abundis, quien visitó a un médico por primera vez en mayo de 2022 debido a una fatiga sin causa aparente, dolor constante en la espalda y las rodillas, falta de aliento y pérdida de peso inexplicable, teme no poder pagar la atención médica. La Clínica de La Raza, el centro de salud comunitario en donde le hicieron análisis de sangre, lo ayudó ese día a que no tuviera que pagar por adelantado, pero desde entonces dejó de buscar atención médica.

Más de un año después de su diagnóstico, todavía no sabe en qué etapa del cáncer se encuentra ni cuál debería ser su plan de tratamiento. Aunque la detección temprana del cáncer puede aumentar las posibilidades de supervivencia, algunos tipos de leucemia avanzan rápidamente. Sin más pruebas, Abundis no conoce su pronóstico.

Yo estoy mentalizado”, dijo Abundis sobre su cáncer. “Lo que pase, pase”.

Incluso aquellos que buscan ayuda se topan con desafíos. Marisol, una inmigrante mexicana sin papeles, de 53 años, que vive en Richmond, California, intentó restablecer la cobertura durante meses. Aunque el estado experimentó una caída del 26% en las bajas de diciembre a enero, la proporción de latinos a los que se les canceló la cobertura durante ese período permaneció casi igual, lo que sugiere que enfrentan más barreras para la renovación.

Marisol, quien pidió que se usara su nombre de pila por temor a la deportación, también calificó para la cobertura completa de Medi-Cal durante la expansión estatal a todos los inmigrantes de 50 años en adelante.

En diciembre, recibió un paquete informándole que los ingresos de su hogar excedían el umbral de Medi-Cal, algo que ella creyó que era un error. El esposo de Marisol está sin trabajo debido a una lesión en la espalda, dijo, y sus dos hijos mantienen a su familia principalmente con trabajos de medio tiempo en Ross Dress for Less.

Ese mes, Marisol visitó una sucursal de Richmond del Departamento de Empleo y Servicios Humanos del condado de Contra Costa, con la esperanza de hablar con un navegador. En cambio, le dijeron que dejara su documentación y que llamara a un número de teléfono para verificar el estatus de su solicitud.

Desde entonces, llamó muchas veces y pasó horas en espera, pero no ha podido hablar con nadie. Los funcionarios del condado reconocieron tiempos de espera más prolongados debido al aumento de llamadas, y dijeron que el tiempo promedio es de 30 minutos.

“Entendemos la frustración de los miembros de la comunidad cuando a veces tienen dificultades para comunicarse”, escribió la vocera Tish Gallegos en un correo electrónico. Gallegos señaló que el centro de llamadas aumenta la dotación de personal durante las horas pico.

Después que El Tímpano contactara al condado para hacer comentarios, Marisol dijo que un trabajador de elegibilidad la contactó, y le explicó que su familia fue dada de baja porque sus hijos habían presentado impuestos por separado, por lo que el sistema de Medi-Cal determinó su elegibilidad individualmente en lugar de como familia.

El condado reintegró a Marisol y a su familia el 15 de marzo. Marisol dijo que recuperar Medi-Cal fue un final alegre pero agridulce para una lucha de meses, especialmente sabiendo que otras personas son desafiliadas por cuestiones de procedimiento. “Tristemente, tiene que haber presión para que arreglen algo”, dijo.

Jasmine Aguilera de El Tímpano está participando de la Journalism & Women Symposium’s Health Journalism Fellowship, apoyada por The Commonwealth Fund. Vanessa Flores, Katherine Nagasawa e Hiram Alejandro Durán de El Tímpano colaboraron con este artículo.

[Corrección: este artículo se actualizó a la 1:30 pm (ET), el 26 de marzo de 2024, para corregir los detalles sobre la elegibilidad para recibir asistencia financiera para pagar las primas de los seguros. Los inmigrantes que no viven legalmente en California no califican para los subsidios de Covered California].

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

Así que Barton condujo 50 millas desde Osawatomie, Kansas, hasta el centro de Kansas City, Missouri, con su esposa Bridget, Gabriella, su hija de 13 años, y una amiga del colegio de la niña. Cuando por fin regresaron esa noche a casa, tuvieron que limpiar sangre de las zapatillas de Gabriella y encontraron una bala en la mochila de Bridget.

Gabriella tenía quemaduras en las piernas por los chispazos de una bala que rebotó cerca de ella, Bridget había sido pisoteada mientras protegía a su hija en medio del caos, y Jason le había practicado masajes cardíacos a un hombre herido de bala: cree que era Lyndell Mays, uno de los dos acusados de asesinato.

“Se supone que San Valentín es un día en el que nos divertimos y celebramos a nuestros afectos. Pero ya nunca habrá un San Valentín en el que no me acuerde de esto”, dijo Gabriella.

Un mes después del desfile —en el que esa crisis de salud pública que es la violencia armada en el país se transmitió por televisión en vivo— los Barton siguen impactados por el papel que les tocó en el epicentro de los acontecimientos.

Se encontraban a escasos metros de Lisa López-Galván, de 43 años, que fue asesinada. Otras 24 personas resultaron heridas. Los Barton no están incluidos en el número oficial de víctimas, sin embargo, quedaron traumatizados, física y emocionalmente, y el dolor impregna sus vidas.

Ahora, Bridget y Jason prefieren quedarse juntos en casa y siguen cancelando planes para salir; Gabriella cambió de proyecto y en vez de tomar clases de baile se anotó en un club de boxeo.

Durante el primer mes, los líderes comunitarios de Kansas City han discutido cómo atender a las personas que quedaron atrapadas bajo el fuego cruzado y cómo distribuir los más de $2 millones donados a los fondos públicos para las víctimas bajo el doloroso impacto inicial.

Hay muchas preguntas: ¿cómo compensar a las personas por los gastos en atención médica y psicológica, por los tratamientos de recuperación, por los salarios perdidos? ¿Qué ocurre con quienes padecen síntomas de estrés post traumático (TEPT), que pueden durar años? ¿Cómo hace una comunidad para identificar y atender a los heridos, que son las víctimas que a menudo se pasan por alto en los primeros informes sobre un tiroteo masivo?

Y la lista de heridos podría aumentar. Mientras investigan a cuatro de los sospechosos del tiroteo, la fiscalía y la policía de Kansas City convocan a otras víctimas a presentarse.

“En concreto, buscamos personas que hayan sufrido heridas cuando intentaban escapar y se produjo la estampida”, explicó la fiscal del condado de Jackson, Jean Peters Baker. Alguien que, “mientras huía, se cayó, se torció un tobillo, se rompió un hueso o lo pisotearon”.

Mientras tanto, las personas que se encargaron de recaudar dinero y facilitar la atención de los heridos debaten los criterios para distribuirlo. Gracias a las cuantiosas donaciones de famosos como Taylor Swift y Travis Kelce, algunas víctimas o sus familias dispondrán de cientos de miles de dólares para gastos médicos. A otras es posible que solo se les cubra la terapia.

Una investigación reciente de la Facultad de Medicina de Harvard calcula que el costo económico global de las lesiones causadas por armas de fuego en Estados Unidos asciende a $557,000 millones anuales. El 88% de ese monto se explica por la pérdida de calidad de vida de las personas heridas y sus familias. El estudio revela que, solo en el primer año, cada lesión no mortal por arma de fuego genera unos $30,000 de gastos de salud directos por superviviente.

Inmediatamente después de los tiroteos, mientras aparecían páginas como GoFundMe para ayudar a las víctimas, los ejecutivos de United Way of Greater Kansas City se reunieron para idear una respuesta colectiva de donación. Se les ocurrieron “tres círculos concéntricos de víctimas”, explicó Jessica Blubaugh, directora de Filantropía de United Way, y lanzaron la campaña #KCStrong.

“Obviamente, en el primer círculo estás las personas que sufrieron directamente el impacto de los disparos. En el siguiente círculo se encuentran los que sufrieron un impacto físico —no necesariamente de los disparos—, por ejemplo, personas que fueron pisoteadas o se rompieron un ligamento cuando estaban huyendo”, dijo Blubaugh. “Luego, en tercer lugar, están las personas que se encontraban en las inmediaciones y los transeúntes, que quedaron psicológicamente muy afectados”.

Estrés post traumático, pánico y el eco de los disparos

Bridget Barton regresó a Kansas City al día siguiente del tiroteo para entregar la bala que había encontrado en su mochila y declarar en la comisaría.

Ella no lo sabía, pero el alcalde Quinton Lucas y los jefes de policía y bomberos acababan de terminar una rueda de prensa fuera del edificio. Bridget fue acosada por los periodistas allí reunidos, entrevistas que ahora le resultan borrosas. “No sé cómo hacen esto todos los días”, recuerda que le dijo a un detective cuando por fin pudo entrar.

Mientras atraviesan el trauma, los Barton se han visto abrumados, al punto del agotamiento, por las buenas intenciones de amigos y familiares. Bridget usó las redes sociales para explicar que no ignoraba los mensajes pero que los iba respondiendo en la medida que podía. Algunos días apenas puedo mirar el teléfono, contó.

Una amiga de la familia compró nuevas mantas de Barbie para Gabriella y su amiga; las que llevaron al desfile se perdieron o estropearon. Bridget había intentado reemplazar ella misma las mantas en Walmart. Pero alguien la empujó accidentalmente y le dio un ataque de pánico. Así que abandonó el carrito y condujo de vuelta a casa.

“Estoy intentando controlar mi ansiedad”, cuenta Bridget. Eso significa que necesita terapia. Antes del desfile ya consultaba a un terapeuta y planeaba empezar la desensibilización y reprocesamiento por movimientos oculares, un método asociado al tratamiento del TEPT. Ahora, de lo primero que quiere hablar en terapia es del tiroteo.

Desde que Gabriella, alumna de 8vo grado, volvió a la escuela, tiene que lidiar con la inmadurez propia de la adolescencia: compañeros que la instan a superar lo ocurrido, que la señalan con el dedo o que incluso le dicen que debería haber sido ella la asesinada. Pero sus amigos la contienen y le preguntan cómo está. Le gustaría que más gente hiciera lo mismo con su amiga, que salió corriendo cuando empezó el tiroteo y así evitó que la hirieran. Gabriella se siente culpable por haberla llevado a lo que se convirtió en una experiencia aterradora.

“Podemos decirle todo el día: ‘No fue culpa tuya. No es tu responsabilidad’, lo mismo que yo me digo: ‘No fue culpa mía, ni mi responsabilidad'”, explica Bridget. “Pero igualmente lloré en el hombro de la madre de la otra niña diciéndole lo mucho que sentía haber agarrado primero a mi hija”.

Desde el tiroteo, las dos niñas han pasado mucho tiempo hablando. Según Gabriella, eso la ayuda a aliviar su propio estrés. También la alivia pasar tiempo con su perro y con su lagartija, maquillarse y escuchar música: la actuación del rapero Tech N9ne fue para ella un momento culminante de la celebración del Super Bowl.

Además de que las chispas le quemaron las piernas, en la estampida Gabriella cayó sobre el cemento y eso le reabrió una quemadura que tenía en el abdomen, causada por una plancha de pelo. “Cuando veo eso, me imagino a mi madre intentando protegerme y a todo el mundo corriendo”, dijo Gabriella.

Es difícil no sentirse olvidada por la gente, opina Bridget. El tiroteo, y especialmente sus sobrevivientes, han desaparecido en gran medida de los titulares excepto en las fechas de los juicios. Desde el desfile hubo otros dos tiroteos de gran repercusión en la zona. Y se pregunta si a la comunidad no le importa que ella y su familia sigan viviendo con las secuelas a diario.

“Voy a decirlo de la forma más clara posible. Estoy muy, pero muy enojada porque mi familia haya tenido que pasar por algo traumático”, se desahogaba Bridget en una reciente publicación en las redes sociales. “En realidad no quiero otra cosa [que]: ‘Tu historia también importa y queremos saber cómo te va’. ¿Lo hemos conseguido? Absolutamente no.”

¿Qué se necesita?

Ayudados en parte por famosos como Swift y Kelce, las donaciones para la familia de López-Galván, la única víctima mortal, y para otras víctimas llegaron en masa inmediatamente después del tiroteo. Swift y Kelce donaron $100,000 cada uno. Con la ayuda de un aporte inicial de $200,000 de los Kansas City Chiefs, la campaña #KCStrong de United Way alcanzó el millón de dólares en las dos primeras semanas y ahora llega a los $1,2 millones.

Se crearon seis fondos GoFundMe verificados. Uno, destinado exclusivamente a la familia López-Galván, ha recaudado más de $406,000. Otros más pequeños fueron creados por un estudiante universitario local y por fans de Swift. Las iglesias también se comprometieron y una coalición local recaudó $183,000, dinero destinado al funeral de López-Galván, a solventar la terapia para cinco víctimas y a pagar facturas médicas del hospital Children’s Mercy Kansas City, según dijo Ray Jarrett, director ejecutivo de Unite KC.

Los líderes de esta iniciativa encontraron modelos en otras ciudades. Blubaugh, de United Way, consultó a funcionarios e instituciones que habían tenido que dar respuesta a las víctimas de sus propios tiroteos masivos en Orlando (Florida), Buffalo (Nueva York) y Newtown (Connecticut).

“La desafortunada realidad es que en todo el país existen comunidades que ya se han enfrentado a tragedias como ésta, explicó Blubaugh. Así que lamentablemente hay un protocolo que, en cierto modo, ya está en marcha”.

A partir de que Blubaugh informó que el dinero de #KCStrong podría empezar a pagarse a finales de marzo, cientos de personas llamaron a la línea 211 de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro. United Way está consultando con los hospitales y las fuerzas del orden para identificar a las víctimas, y ofrecerles los servicios que puedan necesitar.

El abanico de necesidades es asombroso: varias personas siguen recuperándose en su casa, y otras necesitan apoyo emocional y psicológico. Muchas, al principio, ni siquiera fueron contabilizadas. Por ejemplo, un agente de policía que ese día vestía de civil y resultó herido. Según el jefe de policía Stacey Graves, ya se encuentra bien.

Determinar quién es elegible para recibir asistencia fue una de las primeras conversaciones que tuvieron los funcionarios de United Way cuando crearon el fondo. Y decidieron priorizar tres áreas: primero a los heridos y sus familias; segundo a servicios de salud mental y a organizaciones que ya estuvieran ayudando a las víctimas en prevención de la violencia, y en tercer lugar a los socorristas.

En concreto, los fondos se destinarán a cubrir los costos médicos o los salarios perdidos de quienes no hayan podido trabajar desde los tiroteos, explicó Blubaugh. Y agregó que si bien el objetivo es ayudar rápidamente a la gente también se debe utilizar el dinero de una manera juiciosa y estratégica.

“No tenemos una visión clara del panorama al que nos enfrentamos”, dijo Blubaugh. “No sólo no sabemos de cuánto dinero disponemos sino cuál es el panorama de las necesidades. Hacen falta ambas cosas para tomar decisiones”.

Experiencia de la violencia cotidiana en Kansas City

Jason utilizó el único día de licencia que le quedaba para quedarse en casa con Bridget y Gabriella. Como técnico de automatización nocturna, es el principal sostén de la familia. “No puedo faltar al trabajo, explicó.  Sucedió. Fue una porquería. Pero es hora de seguir adelante.”

“Es un hombre de verdad”, afirma Bridget.

La primera noche que Jason fue al trabajo, el ruido repentino de los platos al caer sobresaltó a Bridget y Gabriella, que se abrazaron llorando. “Son esos recuerdos los que nos están atormentando”, dijo Bridget, enojada.

En cierto modo, el tiroteo ha unido más a la familia que había pasado por muchas cosas recientemente: Jason sobrevivió a un ataque al corazón y a un cáncer el año pasado; y criar a un adolescente nunca es fácil.

Bridget agradece que la bala se alojara en su mochila y no la alcanzara, y que las chispas le hayan quemado las piernas a Gabriella pero que no le dispararan.

Jason está agradecido por otra razón: no ha sido un atentado terrorista, como temía al principio. En cambio, se trata del tipo de violencia armada a la que estaba acostumbrado porque creció en Kansas City, una ciudad que alcanzó su pico de muertes el año pasado. Aunque Jason nunca le había tocado tan de cerca.

“Esta basura ocurre todos los días, dijo. La única diferencia es que nosotros estábamos ahí para verlo”.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The Host

Julie Rovner
KFF Health News

@jrovner

Read Julie's stories.

Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law 14 years ago this week, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra joined KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner on this week’s “What the Health?” podcast to discuss its accomplishments so far — and the challenges that remain for the health law.

Meanwhile, Congress appears on its way to, finally, finishing the fiscal 2024 spending bills, including funding for HHS — without many of the reproductive or gender-affirming health care restrictions Republicans had sought.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Mary Agnes Carey of KFF Health News, Tami Luhby of CNN, and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Panelists

Mary Agnes Carey
KFF Health News

@maryagnescarey

Read Mary Agnes' stories.

Tami Luhby
CNN

@Luhby

Read Tami's stories.

Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politico

@AliceOllstein

Read Alice's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next week in a case that could decide whether the abortion pill mifepristone will remain easily accessible. The case itself deals with national restrictions rather than an outright ban. But, depending on how the court rules, it could have far-reaching results — for instance, preventing people from getting the pills in the mail and limiting how far into pregnancy the treatment can be used.
• The case is about more than abortion. Drug companies and medical groups are concerned about the precedent it would set for courts to substitute their judgment for that of the FDA regarding drug approvals.
• Abortion-related ballot questions are in play in several states. The total number ultimately depends on the success of citizen-led efforts to collect signatures to gain a spot. Such efforts face opposition from anti-abortion groups and elected officials who don’t want the questions to reach the ballot box. Their fear, based on precedents, is that abortion protections tend to pass.
• The Biden administration issued an executive order this week to improve research on women’s health across the federal government. It has multiple components, including provisions intended to increase research on illnesses and diseases associated with postmenopausal women. It also aims to increase the number of women participating in clinical trials.
• This Week in Medical Misinformation: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Murthy v. Missouri. At issue is whether Biden administration officials overstepped their authority when asking companies like Meta, Google, and X to remove or downgrade content flagged as covid-19 misinformation.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The Washington Post’s “Arizona Lawmaker Tells Her Abortion Story to Show ‘Reality’ of Restrictions,” by Praveena Somasundaram. (Full speech here.)

Alice Miranda Ollstein: CNN’s “Why Your Doctor’s Office Is Spamming You With Appointment Reminders,” by Nathaniel Meyersohn.

Tami Luhby: KFF Health News’ “Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement Costing Taxpayers Millions Despite Low Enrollment,” by Andy Miller and Renuka Rayasam.

Mary Agnes Carey: The New York Times’ “When Medicaid Comes After the Family Home,” by Paula Span, and The AP’s “State Medicaid Offices Target Dead People’s Homes to Recoup Their Health Care Costs,” by Amanda Seitz.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

• NPR’s “Standard Pregnancy Care Is Now Dangerously Disrupted in Louisiana, Report Reveals,” by Rosemary Westwood.
• The Washington Post’s “As the Cost of Storing Frozen Eggs Rises, Some Families Opt to Destroy Them,” by Amber Ferguson.

Click to open the transcript

Transcript: The ACA Turns 14

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.]

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, March 21, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast and things might have changed by the time you hear this. So here we go.

We are joined today via video conference by Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico.

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Hello.

Rovner: Tami Luhby of CNN.

Tami Luhby: Hello.

Rovner: And my KFF Health News colleague Mary Agnes Carey.

Mary Agnes Carey: It’s great to be here.

Rovner: Later in this episode to mark the 14th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, we’ll have my interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, but first, this week’s news. So it appears our long national nightmare following the progress of the fiscal 2024 spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services is nearly over, nearly halfway through the fiscal year. The White House, House, and Senate have, as far as we can tell, reached a compromise on the last tranche of spending bills, which is a good thing because the latest temporary spending bill runs out at midnight Friday. Funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, from what I’ve seen so far, is basically flat, which is a win for the Democrats because the Republicans had fought for a cut of something in the neighborhood of 22%.

Now, assuming this all happens, the House is scheduled to vote, as we speak now, on Friday at 11 a.m., leaving the Senate not very much time to avert a possible partial shutdown. Democrats seem also to have avoided adding all manner of new restrictions on reproductive and gender-affirming health care to the HHS part of the bill. It’s the last big train leaving the station likely until after the election. So Alice, we’ll get to the add-ons in a minute, but have you seen anything in the HHS funding worthy of note or did they manage to fend off everything that would’ve been significantly newsworthy?

Ollstein: Like you said, it is basically flat. It’s a small increase, less than 1% overall for HHS, and then a lot of individual programs are just completely flat, which advocacy groups argue is really a cut when you factor in inflation. The cost of providing services and buying medications and running programs and whatnot goes up. So flat funding is a cut in practice. I’m hearing that particularly from the Title X family planning folks that have had flat funding for a decade now even as demand for services and costs have gone up.

So I think that in the current environment, Democrats are ready to vote for this. They don’t want to see a shutdown. And in the House, the bill passage will depend on those Democratic votes because they are likely to lose a lot of Republicans. Republicans are mad that there weren’t deeper cuts to spending and, as you alluded to, they’re mad that they didn’t get these policy rider wins they were banking on.

Rovner: As I’ve mentioned, since this is a must-pass bill, there are always the efforts to add non-spending things to it. And on health care, apparently, the effort to add the PBM, pharmacy benefit regulation bill we’ve talked about so much failed, but lawmakers did finally get a one-year deal to extend PEPFAR, the international AIDS/HIV program. Alice, you’ve been dutifully following this since it expired last year. Remind us why it got held up and what they finally get.

Ollstein: What happened in the end is it is a one-year reauthorization that’s a so-called clean reauthorization, meaning they are not adding new anti-abortion restrictions and provisions that the Republicans wanted. So what we reported this week is, like any compromise, no one’s happy. So Republicans are upset that they didn’t get the anti-abortion restrictions they wanted, and I’ll explain more on that in a second, and Democrats are upset that this is just a one-year reauthorization. It’s the first reauthorization that’s this sort of short-term stopgap length. In the program’s decades of history, it’s always been a full five-year reauthorization up until now. But the fight over abortion and accusations that program funds were flowing to abortion providers really split Congress on this.

Even though you had mainstream leadership Republicans who were saying, “Look, we just want to reauthorize this as-is,” you had a small but very vocal contingent of hard-line anti-abortion lawmakers backed by some really influential groups like the Heritage Foundation and SBA [Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America] who were saying, “No, we have to insist on a shorter-term reauthorization,” so that they hope Trump will be in office next year and can impose these exact same anti-abortion restrictions through executive action. So they’re basically trying to punt control of the program into what they hope is a more favorable environment, where either they’ll have the votes in Congress to make these changes and restrictions to the program or they can do it through the White House.

Rovner: So basically, the fight over PEPFAR, not over. So as I already mentioned, Saturday is the 14th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, which you’ll hear more about in my interview with HHS Secretary Becerra, but I wanted to pose to you guys one of the questions that I posed to him. As Nancy Pelosi famously predicted, at least according to public opinion polls, the more people learned about the health law, indeed, the more they are liking it. But it still lacks the popularity and branding of big government health programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, and I think lots of people still don’t know that lots of the provisions that they like, things like letting your adult children stay on your health plan until they’re 26 or banning preexisting condition exclusions, those were things that came from the Affordable Care Act. Any theories as to why it is still so polarizing? Republicans didn’t love Medicare and Medicaid at the beginning either, so I don’t think it’s just that Republicans still talk about it.

Luhby: Part of it I think is because there are so many provisions and they’re not labeled the Affordable Care Act like Medicare is. Actually to some extent, Medicaid may not be as well known in some states because states have different Medicaid programs and different names and so do the ACA exchanges. So that’s part of it, but also, things like why do you get a free mammogram and why you get to go for a routine checkup every year; that’s not labeled as an Affordable Care Act provision, that’s just the preventive services. So I think that it would be difficult now after 14 years to bring all of that into the everyday branding by doctors and health providers. But that’s certainly what the administration and advocates are trying to do by sending out a lot of messages that list all of the benefits of the ACA.

Rovner: I will say this is the biggest full-court press I’ve seen an administration do on the ACA in quite a while. Obviously, it’s a presidential election year and it’s something that the Biden administration is proud of, but at least I would think that maybe just all the publicity might be part of their strategy. Mac, you wanted to say something.

Carey: No, absolutely. It’s going to be part of the Biden reelection campaign. They’re going to be pushing it, talking a lot about it. We have to remember we’ve had this ringside seat to all the Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act. All the conversation about we’re going to repeal it and put something better in, former President Trump is still sending that message out to the electorate. I don’t know how much confusion, if any confusion, it creates, but to Tami’s point, you’ve got millions of people that have gotten coverage under the Affordable Care Act but millions more have benefited by all these provisions we’re talking about: the preventive care provisions, leaving adult kids up to 26 on your health insurance plan, that kind of thing.

Also, give it time. Fourteen years is a long time, but it’s not the time of Medicare, which was created in 1965, and Medicaid. So I think over time, the Affordable Care Act is part of the fabric and it will continue to be. But absolutely, for sure, President Biden is going to run on this, like you said, Julie, full-court press, talk extensively about it in the reelection campaign.

Ollstein: It makes sense that they’re leaning really hard on Obamacare as a message because, even if everyone isn’t familiar with it, a lot more people are familiar with it and like it than, polling shows, on the Biden administration’s other big health care accomplishment, which is drug price negotiation, which polling shows that most people, and even most seniors, who are the ones who are set to benefit the most, aren’t aware that it exists. And that makes sense because they’re not feeling the impact of the lower prices yet because this whole thing just started and it won’t be until 2026 that they’ll really actually experience cheaper medications. But people are already feeling the direct impact of Obamacare on their lives, and so it does make sense that they’re going to lean really hard on this.

Rovner: Of course, we went through the same thing with Obamacare, which also didn’t take full effect until, really, this is really the 10th anniversary of the full effect of the Affordable Care Act because it didn’t take effect until 2014. Tami, you wanted to add something.

Luhby: No, I was going to say it’s also the seventh anniversary of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans trying to tear apart the Affordable Care Act and repeal and replace it, which is the messaging that you’re seeing now is very similar to what you saw in 2017. It’s just surprising to me that with very intensive messaging on both sides at that time about what the Republicans saying what the problems are and the Democrats saying what all of the benefits are, — including the protections for people with preexisting conditions and the other things we’ve mentioned — that more people don’t associate those provisions with the ACA now. But the Biden administration is trying to revive all of that and remind people, as they did in 2018 in the successful midterm elections for the Democrats, that the ACA does provide a lot of the benefits that they are taking advantage of and appreciate.

Rovner: I think, in some ways, the 2017 fight was one of the best things that ever happened to the ACA in terms of helping people understand what actually was in it, because the Democrats managed to frighten people about things that they liked being taken away. Here we go again. All right, let us turn to abortion. There’s a new report out from the Guttmacher Institute that finds a dramatic jump in the use of medication abortion in 2023, the first full year since the Supreme Court reversed the nationwide right to abortion in the Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] case, more than 60% of abortions use medication rather than a procedure last year. This news comes as the Supreme Court next week prepares to hear oral arguments in a case that could dramatically restrict availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. Alice, remind us what’s at stake in this case. It’s no longer whether they’re going to just outright cancel the approval.

Ollstein: That’s right. So the Supreme Court is taking up the narrowed version of this from the 5th Circuit. So what’s at stake are national restrictions on abortion pills, but not a national outright ban like you mentioned. But those restrictions could be really sweeping and really impactful. It would prevent people from getting the pills through the mail like they currently do. It would prevent people from potentially getting them in any other way other than directly from a doctor. So this would apply to red states and blue states alike. It would override abortion rights provisions in blue states that have done a lot to increase access to the pills. And it would also restrict their use back to the first seven weeks of pregnancy instead of 10, which is a big deal because people don’t often find out they’re pregnant until getting close to that line or beyond.

So this is a really big deal, and I think you can really see, especially from the flurry of amicus briefs have been filed, that anxiety about this case in the medical community and the pharmaceutical community, the scientific community, it goes way beyond the impact just on abortion. People are really worried about setting a precedent where the FDA’s scientific judgment is second-guessed by courts, and they worry that a win for the anti-abortion groups in this case would open the door to people challenging all kinds of other medications that they have an issue with: contraception, covid vaccines, HIV drugs, the list goes on and on, gender-affirming care medications, all sorts of things. So there are the bucket of potential impacts on abortion specifically, which are certainly significant, and then there’s the bigger slippery slope fears as well.

Rovner: Also, this is obviously still way political. More than just the abortion pill. It’s been a while since we’ve talked about state ballot measures. We, I think, feel like we spent all of last year talking about abortion state ballot measures. Alice, catch us up real quick on where we are. How many states have them? And what is this campaign against, by the anti-abortion people, to try to prevent them from getting on the ballot?

Ollstein: Check me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe we know for sure about, especially the states that have citizen-led ballot initiatives where people are gathering signatures. So Florida had one of the earliest deadlines and they did meet their signature threshold. But they are now waiting on the state Supreme Court to say whether or not they have a green light to go forward this fall. A lot of other states are still collecting signatures. I think the only states we know for sure are the ones where the state legislature is the one that is ordering it to be put on the ballot, not regular citizens gathering signatures.

We still don’t know, but things are moving forward. I was just in Arizona reporting on their efforts. Things are moving forward there. Things are moving forward in Montana. They just got a court ruling in their favor to put something on the ballot. And things are moving forward in Missouri, a lot of places. So this could be really huge. Of course, like you mentioned, anti-abortion groups and anti-abortion elected officials are doing a lot of different things to try to prevent this from going on the ballot.

It’s interesting, you heard arguments over the last couple years against this being more along the lines of, “Oh, this is allowing these out-of-state big-money groups to swoop in and mislead and tell us what to do,” and those were the anti-abortion arguments against allowing people to vote on this directly. Now, you’re hearing, I’m hearing, more arguments along the lines of, “This shouldn’t be something subject to a popular vote at all. We shouldn’t put this up for a vote at all.” They consider this a human rights issue, and so I think that’s a really interesting evolution as well, particularly when the fall of Roe [v. Wade] was celebrated for returning the question of abortion access to the people, but maybe not these people specifically.

Rovner: I’ve been interested in seeing some of these anti-abortion groups trying to launch campaigns to get people not to put signatures on petitions. That’s moving it back a step I don’t think I’d ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a campaign to say, “Don’t sign the petition that would put this on the ballot to let people vote on it.” But that’s what we’re seeing, right?

Ollstein: Well, that’s what I went to Arizona to see firsthand is how that’s working, and it’s fascinating. They really worry that if it gets on the ballot, it’ll pass. It has in every state so far, so it’s reasonable for them to assume that. So they’re trying to prevent it from getting on the ballot. The way they’re doing that is they’re tracking the locations of signature gatherers and trying to go where they are and trying to intervene and hold up signs. I saw this firsthand. I saw it at a street fair. People were gathering signatures and several anti-abortion demonstrators were standing right in front of them with big signs and trying to argue with people and deter them from signing. It was not working, from what I observed. And from the overall signature count statewide, it was not working in Arizona. But it’s fascinating that they’re trying this.

Carey: I was going to say just our reporting from our KFF Health News colleagues found that 13 states are weighing abortion-related ballot measures, most of which would protect abortion rights. To your point, the scope is pretty extensive. And for all the reasons Alice just discussed, it’s quite the issue.

Rovner: Yeah, and we will obviously talk more about this as the election gets closer. I know we talk about Texas a lot on this podcast, but this week, I want to highlight a study from next door in Louisiana, also a very strong anti-abortion state. A new report from three groups, all of which support abortion rights, charges that, as in Texas, women with pregnancy complications are being forced to wait for care until their conditions become critical. And in some cases, women with nonviable pregnancies are being forced to have C-section surgery because their doctors don’t dare use medication or other less-risky procedures in case they could be accused of performing an abortion.

At some point, you have to think that somebody is going to have a malpractice case. Having a C-section because your doctor is afraid to terminate a nonviable pregnancy seems like pretty dangerous and rather aggressive way to go. This is the first I’ve ever heard of this. Alice, have you heard anything about this?

Ollstein: Not the C-section statistics specifically, but definitely the delays in care and some of the other impacts described in that report have absolutely been reported in other states and in legal challenges that have come up in Texas, in Oklahoma, in Tennessee, in Idaho by people who were denied abortions and experienced medical harms because of it. So I think that fits into the broader pattern. And it’s just more evidence about how this is having a chilling effect on doctors. And the exact letter of the law may be one thing, and you have elected officials pointing to exemptions and provisions in the law, but the chilling effect, the fear and the confusion in the medical community, is something in addition to that.

Rovner: As we put it out before, doctors have legitimate fears even if they don’t want to get dragged into court and have to hire lawyers and take time off — even if they’re innocent, even if they have what they consider to be pretty strong evidence that whatever it was that they did was legitimate under the law in terms of taking care of pregnant women. A lot of them, they don’t want to come under scrutiny, let’s put it that way, and it is hard to blame them about that.

Meanwhile, the backlash over the Alabama Supreme Court decision that fertilized embryos for IVF have legal rights is continuing as blue states that made themselves safe spaces for those seeking abortion are now trying to welcome those seeking IVF. Anybody think this is going to be as big a voting issue as abortion this fall? It’s certainly looking like those who support IVF, including some Republicans, are trying to push it.

Carey: I would think yes, it absolutely will be because it has been brought into the abortion debate. The actual Alabama issue is about an Alabama law and whether or not this particular, the litigants who sued were … it was germane and covered by the law, but it’s been brought into the abortion issue. The whole IVF thing is so compelling, about storage of the embryos and what people have to pay and all the restrictions around it and some of the choices they’re making. I guess that you could say more people have been touched by IVF perhaps than the actual abortion issue. So now, it’s very personal to them and it’s been elevated, and Republicans have tried to get around it by saying they support it, but then there’s arguments that whether or not that’s a toothless protection of IVF. It came out of nowhere I think for a lot of politicians and they’ve been scrambling and trying to figure it out. But to your point, Julie, I do wonder if it will be elevated in the election. And it was something they didn’t think they’d have to contend with, rather, and now they do.

Rovner: Obviously, it’s an issue that splits the anti-abortion community because now we’ve had all these very strong pro-lifers like Mike Pence saying, “I created my family using IVF.” Nikki Haley. There are a lot of very strong anti-abortion Republicans who have used IVF. So you’ve got some on the far … saying, “No, no, no, you can’t create embryos and then destroy them,” and then you’ve got those who are saying, “But we need to make sure that IVF is still available to people. If we’re going to call ourselves pro-life, we should be in favor of people getting pregnant and having babies, which is what IVF is for.” Alice, I see you nodding your head.

Ollstein: Yeah. So we’re having sort of a frustrating discourse around this right now because Democrats are saying, “Republicans want to ban IVF.” And Republicans are saying, “No, we don’t. We support IVF. We love IVF. IVF is awesome.” And neither is totally accurate. It’s just missing a lot of nuance. Republicans who say they support IVF also support a lot of different kinds of restrictions on the way it’s currently practiced. So they might correctly argue that they don’t want to ban it entirely, but they do want it practiced in a different way than it is now, such as the production of many embryos, some of which are discarded. So I think people are just not being asked the right questions right now. I think you got to get beyond, “Do you support IVF?” That gives people a way to dodge. I think you really have to drill into, “OK. How specifically do you want this regulated and what would that mean for people?”

Carey: Right, and the whole debate with some of the abortion rights opponents, some of them want the federal government to regulate it. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, has come out and said, “No, no, that can be done at the state level.” So they’ve got this whole split internally in the party that is, again, a fight they didn’t anticipate.

Rovner: Well, Mac, something that you alluded to that I was struck by was a piece in The Washington Post this week about couples facing increasing costs to store their IVF embryos, often hundreds of dollars a year, which is forcing them to choose between letting the embryos go or losing a chance to possibly have another child. It’s obviously a big issue. I’m wondering what the anti-IVF forces think about that. As we’ve seen in Alabama, it’s not like you can just pick your embryos up in a cooler and move them someplace else. Moving them is actually a very big deal.

I don’t wish to minimize this, but I remember you have storage units for things, not obviously for embryos. One of the ways that they make money is that they just keep raising the cost because they think you won’t bother to move your things, so that you’ll just keep paying the increased cost. It feels like that’s a little bit of what’s happening here with these stored embryos, and at some point, it just gets prohibitively expensive for people to keep them in storage. I didn’t realize how expensive it was.

Carey: They’re all over the place. In preparing for this discussion, I’ve read things about people are paying $600 a year, other people are paying $1,200 a year. There’s big jumps from year to year. It can be an extremely expensive proposition. Oh, my goodness.

Rovner: IVF itself, I think as we’ve mentioned, is also extremely expensive and time-consuming, and emotionally expensive. It is not something that people enter into lightly. So I think we will definitely see more as we go. There’s also women’s health news this week that doesn’t have to do with reproduction. That’s new. Earlier this week, President Biden issued an executive order attempting to ensure that women are better represented in medical research. Tami, what does this order do and why was it needed?

Luhby: Well, it’s another attempt by the Biden administration, as we’ve discussed, to focus on reproductive health and reproductive rights. During the State of the Union address earlier this month, Biden asked Congress to invest $12 billion in new funding for women’s health research. And there are actually multiple components to the executive order, but the big ones are that it calls for supporting research into health and diseases that are more likely to occur midlife for women after menopause, such as rheumatoid arthritis, heart attacks, osteoporosis, and as well as ways to improve the management of menopause-related issues.

We are definitely seeing that menopause care is of increasing focus in a multitude of areas including employer health insurance, but the executive order also aims to increase the number of women participating in clinical trials since they’re poorly represented now. We know that certain medications and certain treatments have different effects on women than men, but we don’t really know that that well because they’re not as represented in these clinical trials. Then it also directs agencies to develop and strengthen research and data standards on women’s health across all of the relevant research and funding opportunities in the government.

Rovner: I’ll say that this is an issue I have very strong feelings about because I covered the debate in 1992 about including women in medical research. At the time, doctors didn’t want to have women in clinical trials because they were worried about hormones, and they might get pregnant, and we wouldn’t really know what that meant for whatever it was that we were testing. Someone suggested that “If you’re going to use these treatments and drugs on women, maybe you should test them on women too.” Then I won an award in 2015 for a story about how they still weren’t doing it, even though it was required by laws.

Carey: And here we are, 2024.

Rovner: Yeah, here we are. It just continues, but at least they’re trying. All right, finally, this week in medical misinformation, we travel to the Supreme Court, where the justices heard oral arguments in a case brought by two Republican state attorneys general charging that the Biden administration, quote, “coerced” social media platforms, Google, Meta, and X, into downgrading or taking down what public health officials deemed covid disinformation. I didn’t listen to the arguments, but all the coverage I saw suggested that the justices were not buying what the attorneys general were selling.

Yet another public-health-adjacent case to watch for a decision later this spring, but I think this is really going to be an important one in terms of what public officials can and cannot do using their authority as public health officials. We’re obviously in a bit of a public health trust crisis, so we will see how that goes.

All right, that is the news for this week. Now, we will play my interview with HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, then we will be back with our extra credits.

I am so pleased to welcome back to the podcast Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. I’ve asked him to join us to talk about the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law 14 years ago this weekend. Mr. Secretary, thanks so much for coming back.

Xavier Becerra: Julie, great to be with you on a great week.

Rovner: So the Affordable Care Act has come a long way, not just in the 14 years since President Obama signed it into law, but in the 10 years since the healthcare.gov website so spectacularly failed to launch, but this year’s enrollment setting a record, right?

Becerra: That’s right, and you should have said, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Rovner: So what do we know about this year’s enrollment numbers?

Becerra: Another record breaker. Julie, every year that President Biden has been in office, we have broken records. Today, more Americans have health insurance than ever in the history of the country. More than 300 million people can now go to a doctor, leave their child in a hospital and know they won’t go bankrupt because they have their own health insurance. That’s the kind of peace of mind you can’t buy. Some 21.5 million Americans today look to the marketplace on the Affordable Care Act to get their coverage. By the way, the Affordable Care Act overall, some 45 million Americans today count on the ACA for their health care insurance, whether it’s through the marketplace, through Medicaid, or some of these basic plans that were also permitted under the ACA.

Rovner: Obviously, one of the reasons for such a big uptake is the expanded subsidies that were extended by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, but those expire at the end of next year, the end of 2025. What do you think would happen to enrollment if they’re not renewed?

Becerra: Well, and that’s the big question. The fact that the president made health care affordable was the big news. Because having the Affordable Care Act was great, but if people still felt it was unaffordable, they wouldn’t sign on. They now know that this is the best deal in town and people are signing up. When you can get health insurance coverage for $10 or less a month in your premiums, that’s a great deal. You can’t even go see a movie at a theater today for under $10. Now, you can get health care coverage for a full month, Julie. Again, as I always tell people, that doesn’t even include the popcorn and the refreshment at the movie theater, and so it’s a big deal. But without the subsidies, some people would still say, “Ah, it’s still too expensive.” So that’s why the president in his budget calls for extending those subsidies permanently.

Rovner: So there are still 10 states that haven’t taken up the federal government’s offer to pay 90% of the costs to expand Medicaid to all low-income adults in their states. I know Mississippi is considering a bill right now. Are there other states that you expect could join them sometime in the near future? Or are any of those 10 states likely to join the other 40?

Becerra: We’re hoping that the other 10 states join the 40 that have come on board where millions of Americans today have coverage. They are forsaking quite a bit of money. I was in North Carolina recently where Gov. [Roy] Cooper successfully navigated the passage of expansion for Medicaid. Not only was he able to help some 600,000-plus North Carolinians get health coverage, but he also got a check for $1.6 billion as a bonus. Not bad.

Rovner: No, not bad at all. So many years into this law, I feel like people now understand a lot of what it did: let adult children stay on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26; banning most preexisting condition exclusions in health coverage. Yet most people still don’t know that those provisions that they support were actually created by Obamacare or even that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing. Medicare has had such great branding success over the years. Why hasn’t the ACA?

Becerra: Actually, Julie, I think that’s changing. Today, about two-thirds of Americans tell you that they support the marketplaces in the Affordable Care Act. I think we’re actually now beginning an era where it’s no longer the big three, where you had Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and everyone protects those. Today, I think it’s the big four, the cleanup hitter being marketplace. Today, you would find tens of millions of Americans who would say, “Keep your dirty, stinking hands off of my marketplace.”

Rovner: Well, we will see as that goes forward. Obviously, President Biden was heavily involved in the development of the Affordable Care Act as vice president, as were you as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee at the time. What do you hope is this administration’s biggest legacy to leave to the health law?

Becerra: Julie, I think it’s making it affordable. The president made a commitment when he was first running to be president. He said on health care he was going to make it more affordable for more Americans with better benefits, and that’s what he’s done. The ACA is perfect proof. And Americans are signing up and signaling they agree by the millions. To go from 12 million people on the Affordable Care Act marketplace to 21.5 million in three years, that’s big news.

Rovner: So if I may, one question on another topic. Next week, the Supreme Court’s oral arguments occur in the case it could substantially restrict the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. Obviously, this is something that’s being handled by the Justice Department, but what is it about this case that worries you most as HHS secretary, about the potential impact if the court rolls back FDA approval to the 2016 regulations?

Becerra: Well, Julie, as you well know from your years of covering health care, today there are Americans who have less protection, fewer rights, than many of us growing up. My daughters, my three daughters today, have fewer protections and access to health care than my wife had when she was their age. That’s not the America most of us know. To see another case where, now, medication abortion, which is used by millions of Americans — in fact, it’s the most common form of care that is received by a woman who needs to have abortion services — that is now at stake. But we believe that if the Supreme Court believes in science and it believes in the facts, because mifepristone has been used safely and effectively publicly for more than 20 years, that we’re going to be fine.

The thing that worries me as much, not just in the reduction of access to care for women in America, is the fact that mifepristone went through a process at the FDA similar to scores and scores of other medications that Americans rely on, that have nothing to do with abortion. And if the process is shut down by the Supreme Court for mifepristone, then it’s probably now at risk for all those other drugs, and therefore those other drugs that Americans rely on for diabetes, for cancer, who knows what, might also be challenged as not having gone through the right process.

Rovner: I know the drug industry is very, very worried about this case and watching it closely, and so will we. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for joining us.

Becerra: Always good to be with you, Julie.

Rovner: OK, we are back. It’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Tami, why don’t you go first this week?

Luhby: OK, my extra credit this week is an article about Georgia’s unique Medicaid program from KFF Health News’ Andy Miller and Renuka Rayasam. It’s titled “Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement Costing Taxpayers Millions Despite Low Enrollment.” And I’m really glad they did this story. I and many others wrote about Georgia launching this program initially but haven’t done follow-up. So I was very happy to see this story.

As many of our listeners probably know, the Trump administration allowed multiple states to impose work requirements in Medicaid for the first time in the program’s history in 2018. But the efforts were eventually stopped by the courts in all states except Georgia. Georgia was allowed to proceed with adding its work requirement to Medicaid because it was actually going to expand coverage to allowing adults with incomes up to 100% of the poverty line to qualify. So the Georgia Pathways to Coverage initiative began last June.

Andy and Renuka took a look at how it’s faring, and the answer is actually not so well. Only about 3,500 people have signed up, far short of the 25,000 that the state projected for the first year. What’s more, the program has cost taxpayers at least $26 million so far, with more than 90% of that going towards administrative and consulting costs rather than actual medical care for low-income people.

By contrast, expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to people with 138% of the poverty line would make at least 359,000 uninsured Georgia residents newly eligible for coverage and reduce state spending by $710 million over two years. That’s what the advocates are pushing. So we’ll see what happens in coming months. One thing that’s also noted in the story is that about 45% of Pathways applications were still waiting to be processed.

Rovner: I will point out that we did talk a couple of weeks ago about the low enrollment in the Georgia program. What we had not seen was how much it’s actually costing the states per enrollee. So it is really good story. Alice, why don’t you go next?

Ollstein: Yeah, so I have some very relatable news from CNN. It’s called “Why Your Doctor’s Office Is Spamming You With Appointment Reminders.” It’s about why we all get so many obnoxious repeat reminders for every medical appointment. It both explains why medical practices that operate on such a tiny profit margin are so anxious about no-shows and last-minute cancellations, and so that’s part of it. But also part of it is that there are all these different systems that don’t communicate with one another. So the prescription drug system and the electronic medical records system and the doctor’s office’s own system are all operating in parallel and not coordinating with one another, and that’s why you get all these annoying multiple reminders. The medical community is becoming aware that it’s backfiring because the more you get, the more you start tuning them out and you don’t pay attention to which ones might be important. So they are working on it. So a somewhat hopeful piece of news.

Rovner: Raise your hand if you have multiple patient portals that you have to deal with for your multiple …

Ollstein: Oh, my God, yes.

Rovner: I will note that everybody’s hands go up. Mac?

Carey: I have not one but two stories on a very important issue: Medicaid estate recovery. The first is from Paula Span at The New York Times. The headline says it all, “When Medicaid Comes After the Family Home.” And the second story is an AP piece by Amanda Seitz, and that’s titled “State Medicaid Offices Target Dead People’s Homes to Recoup Their Health Care Costs.” Now, these stories are both about a program that’s been around since 1993. That’s when Congress mandated Medicaid beneficiaries over the age of 55 that have used long-term care services, and I’m talking about nursing homes or home care, that states must try to recover those expenses from the beneficiaries’ estates after their deaths.

As you can imagine, this might be a problem for the beneficiaries. They might have to sell a family home, try to find other ways to pay a big bill from Medicaid. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, she’s a Democrat of Illinois, has reintroduced her bill. It’s called the Stop Unfair Medicaid Recoveries Act. She’s trying to end the practice. She thinks it’s cruel and harmful, and her argument is, in fact, the federal and state governments spend way more than what they collect, and these collections often go after low-income families that can’t afford the bill anyway.

So even though it’s been around, it’s important to read up on this. A critical point in the stories was do states properly warn people that assets were going to be recovered if they enroll a loved one in Medicaid for long-term care and so on. So great reading, people should bone up on that.

Rovner: This is one of those issues that just keeps resurfacing and doesn’t ever seem to get dealt with. Well, my story this week is from The Washington Post, although I will say it was covered widely in dozens of outlets. It’s called “Arizona Lawmaker Tells Her Abortion Story to Show ‘Reality’ of Restrictions.” On Monday, Arizona State Sen. Eva Birch stood up on the Senate floor and gave a speech unlike anything I have ever seen. She’s a former nurse at a women’s health clinic. She’s also had fertility issues of her own for at least a decade, having both had a miscarriage and an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy in between successfully delivering her two sons.

Now, she’s pregnant again, but with another nonviable pregnancy, which she plans to terminate. Her point in telling her story in public on the Senate floor, she said, was to underscore how cruel — her words — Arizona’s abortion restrictions are. She’s been subject to a waiting period, required to undergo an invasive transvaginal ultrasound to obtain information she and her doctor already knew about her pregnancy, and to listen to a lecture on abortion, quote, “alternatives,” like adoption, which clearly don’t apply in her case.

While she gave the speech on the floor, several of her Democratic colleagues stood in the camera shot behind her, while many of the Republicans reportedly walked out of the chamber. I will link to the story, but I will also link to the entire speech for those who want to hear it.

OK, that is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks as always to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our fill-in editor for today, Stephanie Stapleton. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me at X, @jrovner, or @julierovner at Bluesky and @julie.rovner at Threads. Mary Agnes, where are you hanging out these days?

Carey: I’m hanging out on X, @MaryAgnesCarey.

Rovner: Alice?

Ollstein: @AliceOllstein on X, and @alicemiranda on Bluesky.

Rovner: Tami?

Luhby: The best place to find me is at cnn.com.

Rovner: There you go. We will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.

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Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

The general election campaign for president is (unofficially) on, as President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have each apparently secured enough delegates to become his respective party’s nominee. And health care is turning out to be an unexpectedly front-and-center campaign issue, as Trump in recent weeks has suggested he may be interested in cutting Medicare and taking another swing at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, the February cyberattack of Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, continues to roil the health industry, as thousands of hospitals, doctors, nursing homes, and other providers are unable to process claims and get paid.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Joanne Kenen of Johns Hopkins University and Politico Magazine, and Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times.

Panelists

Anna Edney
Bloomberg

@annaedney

Read Anna's stories.

Joanne Kenen
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico

@JoanneKenen

Read Joanne's articles.

Margot Sanger-Katz
The New York Times

@sangerkatz

Read Margot's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• It is unclear exactly what Trump meant in his recent remarks about possible cuts to Medicare and Social Security, though his comments provided an opening for Biden to pounce. By running as the candidate who would protect entitlements, Biden could position himself well, particularly with older voters, as the general election begins.
• Health care is shaping up to be the sleeper issue in this election, with high stakes for coverage. The Biden administration’s expanded subsidies for ACA plans are scheduled to expire at the end of next year, and the president’s latest budget request highlights his interest in expanding coverage, especially for postpartum women and for children. Plus, Republicans are eyeing what changes they could make should Trump reclaim the presidency.
• Meanwhile, Republicans are grappling with an internal party divide over access to in vitro fertilization, and Trump’s mixed messaging on abortion may not be helping him with his base. Could a running mate with more moderate perspectives help soften his image with voters who oppose abortion bans?
• A federal appeals court ruled that a Texas law requiring teenagers to obtain parental consent for birth control outweighs federal rules allowing teens to access prescription contraceptives confidentially. But concerns that if the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case a conservative-majority ruling would broaden the law’s impact to other states may dampen the chances of further appeals, leaving the law in effect. Also, the federal courts are making it harder to file cases in jurisdictions with friendly judges, a tactic known as judge-shopping, which conservative groups have used recently in reproductive health challenges.
• And weeks later, the Change Healthcare hack continues to cause widespread issues with medical billing. Some small providers fear continued payment delays could force them to close, and it is possible that the hack’s repercussions could soon block some patients from accessing care at all.

Also this week, Rovner interviews Kelly Henning of Bloomberg Philanthropies about a new, four-part documentary series on the history of public health, “The Invisible Shield.”

Plus, for “extra credit” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: The Washington Post’s “Navy Demoted Ronny Jackson After Probe Into White House Behavior,” by Dan Diamond and Alex Horton.

Joanne Kenen: The Atlantic’s “Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity,” by Olga Khazan.

Margot Sanger-Katz: Stat’s “Rigid Rules at Methadone Clinics Are Jeopardizing Patients’ Path to Recover From Opioid Addiction,” by Lev Facher.

Anna Edney: Scientific American’s “How Hospitals Are Going Green Under Biden’s Climate Legislation,” by Ariel Wittenberg and E&E News.

Also mentioned on this week’s podcast:

• KFF Health News’ “Energy-Hog Hospitals: When They Start Thinking Green, They See Green,” by Julie Appleby.
• Stat’s “The War on Recovery: How the U.S. Is Sabotaging Its Best Tools to Prevent Deaths in the Opioid Epidemic,” by Lev Facher.

Click to open the transcript

Transcript: Maybe It’s a Health Care Election After All

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.]

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, March 14, at 10 a.m. Happy Pi Day, everyone. As always, news happens fast and things might have changed by the time you hear this, so here we go. We are joined today via video conference by Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times.

Margot Sanger-Katz: Good morning, everybody.

Rovner: Anna Edney of Bloomberg News.

Anna Edney: Hi there.

Rovner: And Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins University and Politico Magazine.

Joanne Kenen: Hey, everyone.

Rovner: Later in this episode we’ll have my interview with Dr. Kelly Henning, head of the public health program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. She’ll give us a preview of the new four-part documentary series on the history of public health called “The Invisible Shield;” It premieres on PBS March 26. But first this week’s news. We’re going to start here in Washington with the annual State of the Union / budget dance, which this year coincides with the formal launch of the general election campaign, with both President Biden and former President Donald Trump having clinched their respective nominations this week.

Despite earlier claims that this year’s campaign would mostly ignore health issues, that’s turning out not so much to be the case. Biden in his speech highlighted reproductive health, which we’ll talk about in a minute, as well as prescription drug prices and the Affordable Care Act expansions. His proposed budget released on Monday includes suggestions of how to operationalize some of those proposals, including expanding Medicare’s drug negotiating powers. Did anything in particular in the speech or the budget jump out at any of you? Anything we weren’t expecting.

Edney: I wouldn’t say there was anything that I wasn’t expecting. There were things that I was told I should not expect and that I feel like I’ve been proven right, and so I’m happy about that, and that was the Medicare drug price negotiation. I thought that that was a win that he was going to take a lap on during the State of the Union, and certainly he did. And he’s also talking about trying to expand it, although that seems to face an extremely uphill battle, but it’s a good talking point.

Rovner: Well, and of course the expanded subsidies from the ACA expire at the end of next year. I imagine there’s going to be enough of a fight just to keep those going, right?

Edney: Yeah, certainly. I think people really appreciate the subsidies. If those were to go away, then the uninsured rate could go up. It’s probably an odd place in a way for Republicans, too, who are talking about, again, still in some circles, in some ways, getting rid of Obamacare. We’re back at that place even though I don’t think anyone thinks that’s entirely realistic.

Rovner: Oh, you are anticipating my next question, which is that former President Trump, who is known for being all over the place on a lot of issues, has been pretty steadfast all along about protecting Medicare and Social Security, but he’s now backing away from even that. In an interview on CNBC this week, Trump said, and I’m quoting, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting” — which his staff said was referring to waste and fraud, but which appears to open that up as a general election campaign issue. Yes, the Biden people seem to be already jumping on it.

Sanger-Katz: Yes. They could not be more excited about this. I think this has been an issue that Biden has really wanted to run on as the protector of these programs for the elderly. He had this confrontation with Congress in the State of the Union last year, as you may remember, in which he tried to get them to promise not to touch these programs. And I think his goal of weaponizing this issue has been very much hindered by Trump’s reluctance to take it on. I think there are Republicans, certainly in Congress, and I think that we saw during the presidential primary some other candidates for president who were more interested in rethinking these programs and concerned about the long-term trajectory of the federal deficit. Trump has historically not been one of them. What Trump meant exactly, I think, is sort of TBD, but I think it does provide this opening. I’m sure that we’ll see Biden talking about this a lot more as the campaign wears on and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see this clip in television ads and featured again and again.

Kenen: So it’s both, I mean, it’s basically, he’s talked about reopening the repeal fight as Julie just mentioned, which did not go too well for the Republicans last time, and there’s plenty to cut in Medicare. If you read the whole quote, he does then talk about fraud and abuse and mismanagement, but the soundbite is the soundbite. Those are the words that came out of his mouth, whether he meant it that way or not, and we will see that campaign ad a lot, some version of it.

Rovner: My theory is that he was, and this is something that Trump does, he was on CNBC, he knew he was talking to a business audience, and he liked to say what he thinks the audience wants to hear without — you would think by now he would know that speaking to one audience doesn’t mean that you’re only speaking to that one audience. I think that’s why he’s all over the place on a lot of issues because he tends to tailor his remarks to what he thinks the people he is speaking directly to want to hear. But meanwhile, Anna, as you mentioned, he’s also raised the specter of the Affordable Care Act repeal again.

Sanger-Katz: I do think the juxtaposition of the Biden budget and State of the Union and these remarks from Trump, who now is officially the presumptive nominee for president, I think it really does highlight that there are pretty high stakes in health care for this election. I think it’s not been a focus of our discussion of this election so far. But Julie, you’ve mentioned the expiration of these subsidies that have made Affordable Care Act plans substantially more affordable for Americans and substantially more appealing, nearly doubling the number of people who are enrolled in these plans.

That is a policy that is going to expire at the end of next year. And so you could imagine a scenario, even if Trump did not want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which he does occasionally continue to make noises about, where that could just go away through pure inertia if you didn’t have an administration that was actively trying to extend that policy and you could see a real retrenchment: increases in prices, people leaving the market, potentially some instability in the marketplace itself, where you might see insurers exiting or other kinds of problems and a situation much more akin to what we saw in the Trump administration where those markets were “OK, but were a little bit rocky and not that popular.”

I think similarly for Medicare and Medicaid, these big federal health programs, Biden has really been committed to, as he says, not cutting them. The Medicare price negotiation for drugs has provided a little bit more savings for the program. So it’s on a little bit of a better fiscal trajectory, and he has these additional proposals, again, I think long shots politically to try to shore up Medicare’s finances more. So you see this commitment to these programs and certainly this commitment to — there were multiple things in the budget to try to liberalize and expand Medicaid coverage to make postpartum coverage for women after they give birth, permanently one year after birth, people would have coverage.

Right now, that’s an option for states, but it’s not required for every state. And additionally to try to, in an optional basis, make it a little easier to keep kids enrolled in Medicaid for longer, to just allow states to keep kids in for the first six years of life and then three years at a time after that. So again, that’s an option, but I think you see the Biden administration making a commitment to expand and shore up these programs, and I do think a Trump administration and a Republican Congress might be coming at these programs with a bit more of a scalpel.

Rovner: And also, I mean, one of the things we haven’t talked about very much since we’re on the subject of the campaign is that this year Trump is ready in a way that he was not, certainly not in 2016 and not even in 2020. He’s got the Heritage Foundation behind him with this whole 2025 blueprint, people with actual expertise in knowing what to turn, what to do, actually, how to manipulate the bureaucracy in a way that the first Trump administration didn’t have to. So I think we could see, in fact, a lot more on health care that Republicans writ large would like to do if Trump is reelected. Joanne, you wanted to add something.

Kenen: Yeah, I mean, we all didn’t see this year as a health care election, and I still think that larger existential issues about democracy, it’s a reprise. It’s 2020 all over again in many ways, but abortion yes, abortion is a health care issue, and that was still going …

Rovner: We’re getting to that next.

Kenen: I know, but I mean we all knew that was still going to be a ballot driver, a voter driver. But Trump, with two remarks, however, well, there’s a difference between the people at the Heritage Foundation writing detailed policy plans about how they’re going to dismantle the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] as we currently know it versus what Trump says off the cuff. I mean, if you say to a normal person on the street, we want to divide the CDC in two, that’s not going to trigger anything for a voter. But when you start talking about we want to take away your health care subsidies and cut Medicare, so these are sort of, some observers have called them unforced errors, but basically right now, yeah, we’re in another health care election. Not the top issue — and also depending on what else goes on in the world, because it’s a pretty shaky place at the moment. By September, will it be a top three issue? None of us know, but right now it’s more of a health care election than it was shaping up to be even just a few weeks ago.

Rovner: Yeah. Well, one thing, as you said, that we all know will be a big campaign issue this fall is abortion. We saw that in the State of the Union with the gallery full of women who’d been denied abortion, IVF services, and other forms of reproductive health care and the dozens of Democratic women on the floor of the House wearing white from head to toe as a statement of support for reproductive health care. While Democrats do have some divides over how strongly to embrace abortion rights, a big one is whether restoring Roe [v. Wade] is enough or they need to go even further in assuring access to basically all manner of reproductive health care.

It’s actually the Republicans who are most on the defensive, particularly over IVF and other state efforts that would restrict birth control by declaring personhood from the moment of fertilization. Along those lines, one of the more interesting stories I saw this week suggested that Donald Trump, who has fretted aloud about how unpopular the anti-abortion position is among the public, seems less likely to choose a strong pro-lifer as his running mate this time. Remember Mike Pence came along with that big anti-abortion background. What would this mean? It’s not like he’s going to choose Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski or some Republican that we know actually supports abortion rights. I’m not sure I see what this could do for him and who might fit this category.

Kenen: Well, I think there’s a good chance he’ll choose a woman, and we all have names at the tip of our tongues, but we don’t know yet. But yeah, I mean they need to soften some of this stuff. But Trump’s own attempt right now bragging about appointing the justices that killed Roe, at the same time, he’s apparently talking about a 15-week ban or a 16-week ban, which is very different than zero. So he’s giving a mixed message. That’s not what his base wants to hear from him, obviously. I mean, Julie, you’ll probably get to this, but the IVF thing is also pitting anti-abortion Republican against anti-abortion Republican, with Mike Pence, again, being a very good example where Mike Pence’s anti-abortion bona fides are pretty clear, but he has been public about his kids are IVF babies? I’m not sure if all of them are, but at least some of them are. So he does not think that two cells in a freezer or eight cells or 16 cells is the same to child. In his view, it’s a potential child. So yeah.

Edney: I think you can do a lot with a vice president. We see Biden has his own issues with the abortion issue and, as people have pointed out, he demurred from saying that word in the State of the Union and we see just it was recently announced that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to visit an abortion clinic. So you can appease maybe the other side, and that might be what Trump is looking to do. I think, as Joanne mentioned, his base wants him to be anti-abortion, but now you’re getting all of these fractures in the Republican Party and you need someone that maybe can massage that and help with the crowd that’s been voting on the state level, voting on more of a personal level, to keep reproductive rights, even though his base doesn’t seem to be that that’s what they want. So I feel like he may be looking to choose someone who’s very different or has some differences that he can, not acknowledge, but that they can go out and please the other side.

Rovner: Of course, the only person who really fits that bill is Nikki Haley, who is very, very strongly anti-abortion, but at least tried, not very well, but tried to say that there are other people around and they believe other things and we should embrace them, too. I can’t think of another Republican except for Nikki Haley who’s really tried to do that. Margot, you wanted to say something?

Sanger-Katz: Oh, I was just going to say that if this reporting is correct, I think it does really reflect the political moment that Trump finds himself in. I think when he was running the last time, I think he really had to convince the anti-abortion voter, the evangelical voter, to come along with him. I think they had reservations about his character, about his commitment to their cause. He was seen as someone who maybe wasn’t really a true believer in these issues. And so I think he had to do these things, like choosing Mike Pence, choosing someone who was one of them. Pre-publishing a list of judges that he would consider for the Supreme Court who were seen as rock solid on abortion. He had to convince these voters that he was the real deal and that he was going to be on their side, and I just don’t think he really has that problem to the same degree right now.

I think he’s consolidated support among that segment of the electorate and his bigger concern going into the general election, and also the primaries are over, and so his bigger concern going into the general election is how to deal with more moderate swing voters, suburban women, and other groups who I think are a little bit concerned about the extreme anti-abortion policies that have been pursued in some of these states. And I think they might be reluctant to vote for Trump if they see him as being associated with those policies. So you see him maybe thinking about how to soften his image on this issue.

Rovner: I should point out the primaries aren’t actually over, most of states still haven’t had their primaries, but the primaries are effectively over for president because both candidates have now amassed enough delegates to have the nomination.

Sanger-Katz: Yes, that’s right. And it’s not over until the convention, although I think the way that the Republicans have arranged their convention, it’s very hard to imagine anyone other than Trump being president no matter what happens.

Rovner: Yes.

Sanger-Katz: Or not being president. Sorry, being the nominee.

Rovner: Being the nominee, yes, indeed. Well, we are only two weeks away from the Supreme Court oral arguments in the abortion pill case and a little over a month from another set of Supreme Court oral arguments surrounding whether doctors have to provide abortions in medical emergencies. And the cases just keep on coming in court this week. A three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in part a lower court ruling that held that Texas’ law requiring parents to provide consent before their teenage daughters may obtain prescription birth control, Trump’s federal rules requiring patient confidentiality even for minors at federally funded Title X clinics.

Two things about this case. First, it’s a fight that goes all the way back to the Reagan administration and something called the “Squeal Rule,” which I did not cover, I only read about, but it’s something that the courts have repeatedly ruled against, that Title X is in fact allowed to maintain patient privacy even for teenagers. And the second thing is that the lower court ruling came from Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who also wrote the decision attempting to overturn the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. This one, though, we might not expect to get to the Supreme Court.

Kenen: But we’re often wrong on these kinds of things.

Rovner: Yeah, that’s true.

Kenen: I mean, things that seem based on the historical pathway that shouldn’t have gotten to the court are getting to the court and the whole debate has shifted so far to the right. An interesting aside, there is a move, and I read this yesterday, but now I’m forgetting the details, so one of you can clarify for me. I can’t remember whether they’re considering doing this or the way they’ve actually put into place steps to prevent judge-shopping.

Rovner: That’s next.

Kenen: OK, I’m sorry, I’m doing such a good job of reading your mind.

Rovner: You are such a good job, Joanne.

Kenen: But I mean so many in these cases go back to one. If there was a bingo card for reproductive lawsuits, there might be one face in it.

Rovner: Two, Judge [Reed] O’Connor, remember the guy with the Affordable Care Act.

Kenen: Right. But so much of this is going back to judge-shopping or district-shopping for the judge. So a lot of these things that we thought wouldn’t get to the court have gotten to the court.

Rovner: Yeah, well, no, I was going to say in this case, though, there seems to be some suggestion that those who support the confidentiality and the Title X rules might not want to appeal this to the Supreme Court because they’re afraid they’ll lose. That this is the Supreme Court that overturned Roe, it would almost certainly be a Supreme Court that would rule against Title X confidentiality for birth control, that perhaps they want to just let this lie. I think as it stands now it only applies to the 5th Circuit. So Texas, Louisiana, and I forget what else is in the 5th Circuit, but it wouldn’t apply around the country and in this case, I guess it’s just Texas because it’s Texas’ law that conflicts with the rules.

Kenen: Except when one state does something, it doesn’t mean that it’s only Texas’ law six months from now.

Rovner: Right. What starts in Texas doesn’t necessarily stay in Texas.

Kenen: Right, it could go to Nevada. They may decide that they have a losing case and they want to wait 20 years, but other people end up taking things — I mean, it is very unpredictable and a huge amount of the docket is reproductive health right now.

Rovner: I would say the one thing we know is that Justice Alito, when he said that the Supreme Court was going to stop having to deal with this issue was either disingenuous or just very wrong because that is certainly not what’s happened. Well, as Joanne already jumped ahead a little bit, I mentioned Judge Kacsmaryk for a specific reason. Also this week, the Judicial Conference of the United States, which makes rules for how the federal courts work, voted to make it harder to judge-shop by filing cases in specific places like Amarillo, Texas, where there’s only one sitting federal judge. This is why Judge Kacsmaryk has gotten so many of those hot-button cases. Not because kookie stuff happens all the time in Amarillo, but because plaintiffs have specifically filed suit there to get their cases in front of him. The change by the judicial conference basically sets things back to the way they used to be, right, where it was at least partly random, which judge you got when you filed a case.

Kenen: But there are also some organizations that have intentionally based themselves in Amarillo so that they’re there. I mean, we may also see, if the rules go back to the old days, we may also still say you have a better case for filing in where you actually operate. So everybody just keeps hopping around and playing the field to their advantage.

Rovner: Yeah. And I imagine in some places there’s only a couple of judges, I think it was mostly Texas that had these one-judge districts where you knew if you filed there, you were going to get that judge, so — the people who watch these things and who worry about judge-shopping seem to be heartened by this decision by the judicial conference. So I’m not someone who is an expert in that sort of thing, but they seem to think that this will deter it, if not stop it entirely.

Moving on, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said that the hack of UnitedHealth [Group] subsidiary Change Healthcare was the most undercovered story in health? Clearly, I had no idea how true that was going to become. That processes 15 billion — with a B — claims every year handles one of every three patient records is still down, meaning hospitals, doctor’s offices, nursing homes, and all other manner of health providers still mostly aren’t getting paid. Some are worrying they soon won’t be able to pay their employees. How big could this whole mess ultimately become? I don’t think anybody anticipated it would be as big as it already is.

Sanger-Katz: I think it’s affecting a number of federal programs, too, that rely on this data, like quality measurement. And it really is a reflection, first of all, obviously of the consolidation of all of this, which I know that you guys have talked about on the podcast before, but also just the digitization and interconnectedness of everything. All of these programs are relying on this billing information, and we use that not just to pay people, but also to evaluate what kind of health care is being delivered, and what quality it is, and how much we should pay people in Medicare Advantage, and on all kinds of other things. So it’s this really complex, interconnected web of information that has been disrupted by this hack, and I think there’s going to be quite a lot of fallout.

Edney: And the coverage that I’ve read we’re potentially, and not in an alarmist way, but weeks away from maybe some patients not getting care because of this, particularly at the small providers. Some of my colleagues did a story yesterday on the small cancer providers who are really struggling and aren’t sure how long they’re going to be able to keep the lights on because they just aren’t getting paid. And there are programs now that have been set up but maybe aren’t offering enough money in these no-interest loans and things like that. So it seems like a really precarious situation for a lot of them. And now we see that HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] is looking into this other side of it. They’re going to investigate whether there were some HIPAA violations. So not looking exactly at the money exchange, but what happened in this hack, which is interesting because I haven’t seen a lot about that, and I did wonder, “Oh, what happened with these patients’ information that was stolen?” And UnitedHealth has taken a huge hit. I mean, it’s a huge company and it’s just taken a huge hit to its reputation and I think …

Rovner: And to its stock price.

Edney: And it’s stock price. That is very true. And they don’t know when they’re actually going to be able to resolve all of this. I mean, it’s just a huge mess.

Rovner: And not to forget they paid $22 million in ransom two weeks ago. When I saw that, I assumed that this was going to be almost over because usually I know when a hospital gets hacked, everybody says, don’t pay ransom, but they pay the ransom, they get their material back, they unlock what was locked away. And often that ends it, although it then encourages other people to do it because hey, if you do it, you can get paid ransom. Frankly, for UnitedHealthcare, I thought $22 million was a fairly low sum, but it does not appear — I think this has become such a mess that they’re going to have to rebuild the entire operation in order to make it work. At least, not a computer expert here. But that’s the way I understand this is going on.

Kenen: But I also think this, I mean none of us are cyber experts, but I’m also wondering if this is going to lead to some kind of rethinking about alternative ways of paying people. If this created such chaos, and not just chaos, damage, real damage, the incentive to do something similar to another, intermediate, even if it’s not quite this big. It’s like, “Wait, no one wants to be the next one.” So what kind of push is there going to be, not just for greater cybersecurity, but for Plan B when there is a crisis? And I don’t know if that’s something that the cyberexperts can put together in what kind of timeline — if HHS was to require that or whether the industry just decides they need it without requirements that this is not OK. It’s going to keep happening if it’s profitable for whoever’s doing it.

Rovner: I remember, ruefully, Joanne and I were there together covering HIPAA when they were passing it, which of course had nothing whatsoever to do with medical privacy at the time, but what it did do was give that first big push to start digitizing medical information. And there was all this talk about how wonderful it was going to be when we had all this digitally and researchers could do so much with it, and patients would be able to have all of their records in one place and …

Kenen: You get to have 19 passwords for 19 different forums now.

Rovner: Yes. But in 1995 it all seemed like a great, wonderful new world of everything being way more efficient. And I don’t remember ever hearing somebody talking about hacking this information, although as I point out the part of HIPAA that we all know, the patient medical records privacy, was added on literally at the last minute because someone said, “Uh-oh, if we’re going to digitize all this information, maybe we better be sure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.” So at least somebody had some idea that we could be here. What are we 20, 30 … are we 30 years later? It’s been a long time. Anyway, that’s my two cents. All right, next up, Mississippi is flirting with actually expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It’s one of only 10 remaining states that has not extended the program to people who have very low incomes but don’t meet the so-called categorical eligibility requirements like being a pregnant woman or child or person with a disability.

The Mississippi House passed an expansion bill including a fairly stringent work requirement by a veto-proof majority last week, week before.

Kenen: I think two weeks ago.

Rovner: But even if it passed the Senate and gets signed by the governor, which is still a pretty big if, the governor is reportedly lobbying hard against it. The plan would require a waiver from the Biden administration, which is not a big fan of work requirements. On the other hand, even if it doesn’t happen, and I would probably put my money at this point that it’s not going to happen this year, does it signal that some of the most strident, holdout states might be seeing the attraction of a 90% federal match and some of the pleas of their hospital associations? Anna, I see you nodding.

Edney: Yeah, I mean it was a little surprising, but this is also why I love statehouses. They just do these unexpected things that maybe make sense for their constituents sometimes, and it’s not all the time. I thought that it seemed like they had come around to the fact that this is a lot of money for Mississippi and it can help a lot of people. I think I’ve seen numbers like maybe adding 200,000 or so to the rolls, and so that’s a huge boost for people living there. And with the work requirement, is it true that even if the Biden administration rejects it, this plan can still go into place, right?

Kenen: The House version.

Edney: The House version.

Kenen: Yes.

Edney: Yeah.

Rovner: My guess is that’s why the governor is lobbying so hard against it. But yeah.

Kenen: I mean, I think that we had been watching a couple of states, we keep hearing Alabama was one of the states that has been talking about it but not doing anything about it. Wyoming, which surprised me when they had a little spurt of activity, which I think has subsided. I mean, what we’ve been saying ever since the Supreme Court made this optional for states more than 10 years ago now. Was it 2012? We’ve been saying eventually they’ll all do it. Keeping in mind that original Medicaid in [19]65, it took until 1982, which neither Julie nor I covered, until the last state, which was Arizona, took regular Medicare, Medicaid, the big — forget the ACA stuff. I mean, Medicaid was not in all states for almost 20 years. So I think we’ve all said eventually they’re going to do it. I don’t think that we are about to see a domino effect that North Carolina, which is a purple state, they did it a few months ago, maybe a year by now.

There was talk then that, “Oh, all the rest will do it.” No, all the rest will probably do it eventually, but not tomorrow. Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the country. It has one of the lowest health statuses of their population, obesity, diabetes, other chronic diseases. It has a very small Medicaid program. The eligibility levels are even for very, very, very poor childless adults, you can’t get on their plan. But have we heard rural hospitals pushing for this for a decade? Yes. Have we heard chambers of commerce in some of these states wanting it because communities without hospitals or communities without robust health systems are not economically attractive? We’ve been hearing the business community push for this for a long time. But the holdouts are still holdouts and I do think they will all take it. I don’t think it’s imminent.

Rovner: Yeah, I think that’s probably a fair assessment.

Kenen: It makes good economic sense, I mean, you’re getting all this money from the federal government to cover poor people and keep your hospitals open. But it’s a political fight. It’s not just a …

Rovner: It’s ideology.

Kenen: Yes, it’s not a [inaudible]. And it’s called Obamacare.

Edney: And sometimes things just have to fall into place. Mississippi got a new speaker of the House in their state government, so that’s his decision to push this as something that the House was going to take up. So whether that happens in other places, whether all those cards fall into places can take more time.

Kenen: Well, the last thing is we also know it’s popular with voters because we’ve seen it on the ballot in what, seven states, eight states, I forgot. And it won, and it won pretty big in really conservative states like Idaho and Utah. So as Julie said, this is ideology, it’s state lawmakers, it’s governors, it’s not voters, it’s not hospitals, it’s not chambers of commerce. It’s not particularly rural hospitals. A lot of people think this makes sense, but their own governments don’t think it makes sense.

Rovner: Yes. Well, another of those stories that moves very, very slowly. Finally, “This Week in Medical Misinformation”: I want to call out those who are fighting back against those who are accusing them of spreading false or misleading claims. I know this sounds confusing. Specifically, 16 conservative state attorneys general have called on YouTube to correct a, quote, “context disclaimer” that it put on videos posted by the anti-abortion Alliance Defending Freedom claiming serious and scientifically unproven harms that can be caused by the abortion pill mifepristone.

Unfortunately, for YouTube, their context disclaimer was a little clunky and conflated medication and surgical abortion, which still doesn’t make the original ADF videos more accurate, just means that the disclaimer wasn’t quite right. Meanwhile, more anti-abortion states are having legal rather than medical experts try to “explain” — and I put explain in air quotes — when an abortion to save the life of a woman is or isn’t legal, which isn’t really helping clarify the situation much if you are a doctor worried about having your license pulled or, at best, ending up having to defend yourself in court. It feels like misinformation is now being used as a weapon as well as a way to mislead people. Or am I reading this wrong?

Edney: I mean, I had to read that disclaimer a few times. Just the whole back-and-forth was confusing enough. And so it does feel like we’re getting into this new era of, if you say one wrong thing against the disinformation, that’s going to be used against you. So everybody has to be really careful. And the disclaimer, it was odd because I thought it said the procedure is [inaudible]. So that made me think, oh, they’re just talking about the actual surgical abortion. But it was clunky. I think clunky is a good word that you used for it. So yeah.

Rovner: Yeah, it worries me. I think I see all of this — people who want to put out misinformation. I’m not accusing ADF of saying, “We’re going to put out misinformation.” I think this is what they’ve been saying all along, but people who do want to put out misinformation for misinformation’s sake are then going to hit back at the people who point out that it’s misinformation, which of course there’s no way for the public to then know who the heck is right. And it undercuts the idea of trying to point out some of this misinformation. People ask me wherever I go, “What are we going to do about this misinformation?” My answer is, “I don’t know, but I hope somebody thinks of something.”

Kenen: I mean, if you word something poorly, you got to fix it. I mean, that’s just the bottom line. Just like we as journalists have to come clean when we make a mistake. And it feels bad to have to write a correction, but we do it. So Google has been working on — there’s a group convened by the Institute of Medicine [National Academy of Medicine] and the World Health Organization and some others that have come out with guidelines and credible communicators, like who can you trust? I mean, we talked about the RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] story I did a few weeks ago, and if you Google RSV vaccine on and you look on YouTube or Google, it’s not that there’s zero misinformation, but there’s a lot less than there used to be. And what comes up first is the reliable stuff: CDC, Mayo Clinic, things like that. So YouTube has been really working on weeding out the disinformation, but again, for their own credibility, if they want to be seen as clean arbiters of going with credibility, if they get something mushy, they’ve got to de-mush it at the end.

Rovner: And I will say that Twitter of all places — or X, whatever you want to call it, the place that everybody now is like, “Don’t go there. It’s just a mess” — has these community notes that get attached to some of the posts that I actually find fairly helpful and it lets you rate it.

Kenen: Some of them, I mean overall, there’s actually research on that. We’ll talk about my book when it comes out next year, but we have stuff. I’m in the final stages of co-authoring a book that … it goes into misinformation, which is why I’ve learned a lot about this. Community Notes has been really uneven and …

Rovner: I guess when it pops up in my feed, I have found it surprisingly helpful and I thought, “This is not what I expect to see on this site.”

Kenen: And it hasn’t stopped [Elon] Musk himself from tweeting misinformation about drugs …

Rovner: That’s certainly true.

Kenen: … drugs he doesn’t like, including the birth control pill he tells people not to use because it promotes suicide. So basically, yeah, Julie, you’re right that we need tools to fight it, and none of the tools we currently have are particularly effective yet. And absolutely everything gets politicized.

Sanger-Katz: And it’s a real challenge I think for these social media platforms. You know what I mean? They don’t really want to be in the editorial business. I think they don’t really want to be in the moderation business in large part. And so you can see them grappling with the problem of the most egregious forms of misinformation on their platforms, but doing it clumsily and anxiously and maybe making mistakes along the way. I think it’s not a natural function for these companies, and I think it’s not a comfortable function for the people that run these companies, who I think are much more committed to free discourse and algorithmic sharing of information and trying to boost engagement as opposed to trying to operate the way a newspaper editor might be in selecting the most useful and true information and foregrounding that.

Kenen: Yeah, I mean that’s what the Supreme Court has been grappling with too, is another [inaudible] … what are the rules of the game? What should be legally enforced? What is their responsibility, that the social media company’s responsibilities, to moderate versus what is just people get to post? I mean, Google’s trying to use algorithms to promote credible communicators. It’s not that nothing wrong is there, but it’s not what you see first.

Rovner: I think it’s definitely the issue of the 2020s. It is not going away anytime soon.

Kenen: And it’s not just about health.

Rovner: Oh, absolutely. I know. Well, that is the news for this week. Now, we will play my interview with Dr. Kelly Henning of Bloomberg Philanthropies, and then we’ll come back with our extra credits.

I am so pleased to welcome to the podcast Dr. Kelly Henning, who heads the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Health program. She’s here to tell us about a new documentary series about the past, present, and future of public health called “The Invisible Shield.” It premieres on PBS on March 26. Dr. Henning, thank you so much for joining us.

Kelly Henning: Thank you for having me.

Rovner: So the tagline for this series is, “Public health saved your life today, and you don’t even know it.” You’ve worked in public health in a lot of capacities for a lot of years, so have I. Why has public health been so invisible for most of the time?

Henning: It’s a really interesting phenomenon, and I think, Julie, we all take public health for granted on some level. It is what really protects people across the country and across the world, but it is quite invisible. So usually if things are working really well in public health, you don’t think about it at all. Things like excellent vaccination programs, clean water, clean air, these are all public health programs. But I think most people don’t really give them a lot of thought every day.

Rovner: Until we need them, and then they get completely controversial.

Henning: So to that point, covid-19 and the recent pandemic really was a moment when public health was in the spotlight very much no longer behind an invisible shield, but quite out in front. And so this seemed like a moment when we really wanted to unpack a little bit more around public health and talk about how it works, why it’s so important, and what some of the opportunities are to continue to support it.

Rovner: I feel like even before the pandemic, though, the perceptions of public health were changing. I guess it had something to do with a general anti-science, anti-authority rising trend. Were there warning signs that public health was about to explode in people’s consciousness in not necessarily a good way?

Henning: Well, I think those are all good points, but I also think that there are young generations of students who have become very interested in public health. It’s one of the leading undergraduate majors nowadays. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has more applications than ever before, and that was occurring before the pandemic and even more so throughout. So I think it’s a bit of a mixed situation. I do think public health in the United States has had some really difficult times in terms of life expectancy. So we started to see declines in life expectancy way back in 2017. So we have had challenges on the program side, but I think this film is an opportunity for us to talk more deeply about public health.

Rovner: Remind people what are some of the things that public health has brought us besides, we talk about vaccines and clean water and clean air, but there’s a lot more to public health than the big headlines.

Henning: Yeah, I mean, for example, seat belts. Every day we get into our vehicle, we put a seat belt on, but I think most people don’t realize that was initially extremely controversial and actually not so easy to get that policy in place. And yet it saved literally tens of hundreds of thousands of lives across the U.S. and now across the world. So seat belts are something that often come to mind. Similar to that are things like child restraints, what we would call car seats in the U.S. That’s another similar strategy that’s been very much promoted and the evidence has been created through public health initiatives. There are other things like window guards. In cities, there are window guards that help children not fall out of windows from high buildings. Again, those are public health initiatives that many people are quite unaware of.

Rovner: How can this documentary help change the perception of public health? Right now I think when people think of public health, they think of people fighting over mask mandates and people fighting over covid vaccines.

Henning: Yeah, I really hope that this documentary will give people some perspective around all the ways in which public health has been working behind the scenes over decades. Also, I hope that this documentary will allow the public to see some of those workers and what they face, those public health front-line workers. And those are not just physicians, but scientists, activists, reformers, engineers, government officials, all kinds of people from all disciplines working in public health. It’s a moment to shine a light on that. And then lastly, I hope it’s hopeful. I hope it shows us that there are opportunities still to come in the space of public health and many, many more things we can do together.

Rovner: Longtime listeners to the podcast will know that I’ve been exploring the question of why it has been so difficult to communicate the benefits of public health to the public, as I’ve talked to lots of people, including experts in messaging and communication. What is your solution for how we can better communicate to the public all of the things that public health has done for them?

Henning: Well, Julie, I don’t have one solution, but I do think that public health has to take this issue of communication more seriously. So we have to really develop strategies and meet people where they are, make sure that we are bringing those messages to communities, and the messengers are people that the community feels are trustworthy and that are really appropriate spokespeople for them. I also think that this issue of communications is evolving. People are getting their information in different ways, so public health has to move with the times and be prepared for that. And lastly, I think this “Invisible Shield” documentary is an opportunity for people to hear and learn and understand more about the history of public health and where it’s going.

Rovner: Dr. Kelly Henning, thank you so much for joining us. I really look forward to watching the entire series. OK, we are back. It’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s when we each recommend a story we read this week we think you should read, too. As always, don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links on the podcast page at kffhealthnews.org and in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Joanne, you have everybody’s favorite story this week. Why don’t you go first?

Kenen: I demanded the right to do this one, and it’s Olga, I think her last name is pronounced Khazan. I actually know her and I don’t know how to pronounce her name, but Olga Khazan, apologies if I’ve got it wrong, from The Atlantic, has a story that says “Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity.” Well, from all of us who are cold, I’m not sure I would want to use the word “frigid,” but of all of us who are cold in the office and sitting there with blankets. I used to have a contraband, very small space heater hidden behind a trash basket under my desk. We freeze because men like colder temperatures and they’re wearing suits. So we’ve been complaining about being cold, but there’s actually a study now that shows that it actually hurts our actual cognitive performance. And this is one study, there’s more to come, but it may also be one explanation for why high school girls do worse than high school boys on math SATs.

Rovner: Did not read that part.

Kenen: It’s not just comfort in the battle over the thermostat, it’s actually how do our brains function and can we do our best if we’re really cold?

Rovner: True. Anna.

Edney: This is a departure from my normal doom and gloom. So I’m happy to say this is in Scientific American, “How Hospitals Are Going Green Under Biden’s Climate Legislation.” I thought it was interesting. Apparently if you’re a not-for-profit, there were tax credits that you were not able to use, but the Inflation Reduction Act changed that so that there are some hospitals, and they talked to this Valley Children’s in California, that there had been rolling blackouts after some fires and things like that, and they wanted to put in a micro-grid and a solar farm. And so they’ve been able to do that.

And health care contributes a decent amount. I think it’s like 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And Biden had established this Office of Climate Change [and Health Equity] a few years ago and within the health department. So this is something that they’re trying to do to battle those things. And I thought that it was just interesting that we’re talking about this on the day that the top story, Margot, in The New York Times is, not by you, but is about how there’s this huge surge in energy demand. And so this is a way people are trying to do it on their own and not be so reliant on that overpowered grid.

Rovner: KFF Health News has done a bunch of stories about contribution to climate change from the health sector, which I had no idea, but it’s big. Margot.

Sanger-Katz: I wanted to highlight the second story in this Lev Facher series on treatment for opioid addiction in Stat called “Rigid Rules at Methadone Clinics Are Jeopardizing Patients’ Path to Recovery From Opioid Addiction,” which is a nice long title that tells you a lot about what is in the story. But I think methadone treatment is a really evidence-based treatment that can be really helpful for a lot of people who have opioid addiction. And I think what this story highlights is that the mechanics of how a lot of these programs work are really hard. They’re punitive, they’re difficult to navigate, they make it really hard for people to have normal lives while they’re undergoing methadone treatment and then, in some cases, arbitrarily so. And so I think it just points out that there are opportunities to potentially do this better in a way that better supports recovery and it supports the lives of people who are in recovery.

Rovner: Yeah, it used the phrase “liquid handcuffs,” which I had not seen before, which was pretty vivid. For those of you who weren’t listening, the Part One of this series was an extra credit last week, so I’ll post links to both of them. My story’s from our friend Dan Diamond at The Washington Post. It’s called “Navy Demoted Ronnie Jackson After Probe Into White House Behavior.” Ronnie Jackson, in case you don’t remember, was the White House physician under Presidents [Barack] Obama and Trump and a 2021 inspector general’s report found, and I’m reading from the story here, quote, “that Jackson berated subordinates in the White House medical unit, made sexual and denigrating statements about a female subordinate, consumed alcohol inappropriately with subordinates, and consumed the sleep drug Ambien while on duty as the president’s physician.” In response to the report, the Navy demoted Jackson retroactively — he’s retired —from a rear admiral down to a captain.

Now, why is any of this important? Well, mainly because Jackson is now a member of Congress and because he still incorrectly refers to himself as a retired admiral. It’s a pretty vivid story, you should really read it.

OK. That is our show. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review; that helps other people find us, too. Special thanks as always to our technical guru, Francis Ying, and our editor, Emmarie Huetteman. As always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me at X, @jrovner. Margot, where are you these days?

Sanger-Katz: I’m at all the places @Sanger-Katz, although not particularly active on any of them.

Rovner: Anna.

Edney: On X, it’s @annaedney and on Threads it’s @anna_edneyreports.

Rovner: Joanne.

Kenen: I’m Threads @joannekenen1, and I’ve been using LinkedIn more. I think some of the other panelists have said that people are beginning to treat that as a place to post, and I think many of us are seeing a little bit more traction there.

Rovner: Great. Well, we will be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy.

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