| | | | |  | | By Krista Mahr and Sarah Owermohle | | | Editor's Note: POLITICO Pulse is a free version of POLITICO Pro Health Care's morning newsletter, which is delivered to our subscribers each morning at 6 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day's biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.
| | | — Blue states and abortion advocates are looking for creative ways to defend abortion access should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. — Older adults have seen the greatest increase of drug overdose deaths among any age group in the U.S. in the last decade. — Abbott and the FDA reach a deal to reopen a high-volume infant formula plant, potentially easing the national shortage. WELCOME TO TUESDAY PULSE — Starbucks becomes the latest company to add abortion travel coverage to its employee health care benefits, joining Amazon and Microsoft. Send news and tips to kmahr@politico.com and sowermohle@politico.com.
| | | | A message from PhRMA: Nearly half of insured Americans who take prescription medicines encounter barriers that delay or limit their access to medicines. In a new report, learn more about the abusive insurance practices that can stand between patients and the care they need. | | | | | | | 
Some states want to train health care workers like nurses and midwives to perform the simplest and earliest abortions, such as medication abortions. | AP | BLUE STATES, ABORTION ADVOCATES ARE GETTING CREATIVE — Blue states expecting a flood of out-of-state patients seeking abortions in a post-Roe landscape plan to increase the number of practitioners who can perform the procedure, POLITICO's Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly report. Several states are changing their laws to allow nurses, midwives and other nonphysician health care workers to provide abortions and setting aside millions to train them. Critics say the approach puts pregnant women at risk and sidelines doctors, but its proponents say allowing nonphysicians to handle the simplest and earliest abortions — particularly those involving prescribing a pill — would free up the small pool of trained doctors to handle more complex procedures. At the same time, abortion advocates are exploring a range of new legal tactics to stop half the country from becoming an abortion-access desert if the Supreme Court overturns the landmark decision. The Biden administration said it plans to wait for the Supreme Court's final opinion before unveiling any executive actions to protect abortion access, leading reproductive rights groups and their lawyers to fast-track their game plans for bringing lawsuits against abortion bans with no exemptions for rape or incest. Some states have already sued towns that passed ordinances outlawing abortion and declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for the unborn. Others are readying for legal fights with states that attempt to ban travel across state lines for the procedure. DRUG OVERDOSE DEATHS AMONG OLDER ADULTS SKYROCKET — Deaths due to drugs in adults over 65 increased 100 percent between 2008 and 2010 and 2018 and 2020, according to a new report released today by the United Health Foundation. For adults aged 65 to 74, drug deaths rose 147 percent — the highest increase of any age group in the country. The report, which includes deaths caused by unintentional drug injury, suicide, and homicide or those of undetermined drug-related causes, found that deaths were two times higher among men over 65 than among women and 10.4 times higher among Black Americans than among Asian Americans. Older adults' death rate increased in 35 states, with particularly striking spikes in Connecticut (352 percent), Maryland (323 percent) and New Jersey (222 percent). The news comes on the back of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that a record number of Americans died from drug overdoses last year. Researchers cited several reasons that account for older adults' vulnerability to drug overdoses, including accidentally misusing prescriptions, being more socially isolated and having a reduced ability to metabolize medication because of age-related liver changes.
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The FDA is easing import restrictions on baby formula and working with Abbott Nutrition to reopen its infant formula plant. | AP | ABBOTT, FDA REACH AGREEMENT ON FORMULA — On Monday, Abbott Nutrition said it had reached a deal with the Food and Drug Administration on how it can reopen a shuttered processing plant contributing to the nationwide infant formula shortage, POLITICO's Meredith Lee reports. Abbott said it could restart production within two weeks at the plant in Michigan, where the FDA has been investigating a link to contaminated baby food that sickened four infants. Meanwhile, the Biden administration said Monday that the FDA would issue new guidance to ease longstanding import restrictions on infant formula products. The U.S. has essentially banned infant formula imports from Europe over concerns about food labeling and FDA food safety rules.
| | | | A message from PhRMA:   | | | | | | FIRST IN PULSE: INSURERS PUSH WASHINGTON TO IMPROVE COMPETITION — Health insurance providers are pressing the Biden administration and lawmakers to increase competition across the health care system, a move they say would make health insurance more affordable for more Americans. "Americans continue to see health care prices continue to escalate year after year," Matthew Eyles, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, wrote in a letter sent today to President Joe Biden and congressional leaders. "This challenge can be tied directly to consolidated health care markets, and it calls for a comprehensive effort to spur the robust competition that is essential to providing Americans with more choices, better quality, and lower costs." Eyles outlines a "roadmap" to improve competition in the sector through a series of commitments, including:
- Improving patient choice through expanding access to services like telehealth, home-based care and biosimilar drugs
- Improving transparency across the health care marketplace, including private equity firms
- Protecting patients, consumers and businesses from overpaying
- Stopping the "drug pricing games," in which patent schemes distort the marketplace and drug companies "abuse charitable structures and prescription drug coupons to protect monopolies"
Read the letters here.
| | | TURNS OUT … MANDATES WORK — Nursing home staff vaccination rates shot up 25 percent under the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for health workers, according to a new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. In August 2021, CMS deemed that staff must be vaccinated at health care facilities that participated in Medicaid and Medicare. Vaccination rates of nursing home staff went from 63 percent then to 88 percent in March 2022, when states passed vaccination deadlines. The analysis included 14,700 nursing facilities, or about 97 percent of all nursing facilities in the country. At the same time, 28 percent of those nursing facilities reported persistent staffing shortages as of March 2022, ranging from a high of 63 percent in Arkansas to a low of 3 percent in California. ADAMS 'STRONGLY RECOMMENDS' NEW YORKERS MASK UP AGAIN — New York City Mayor Eric Adams strongly advises residents to wear their masks indoors again as the city is on the cusp of returning to a "high-risk" level because of rising Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations, POLITICO's Amanda Eisenberg reports. According to its own system dictated by the rate of new cases per borough, the city has been at a medium-risk level for the past few weeks. Moving into a high-risk category means there's "substantial pressure on the health care system," according to the city health department. The city's health commissioner issued an advisory Monday that suggests New Yorkers wear a mask at all times when indoors and in public settings, such as offices, stores and shared spaces like elevators and meeting rooms.
| | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president's ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | Bakul Patel joins Google as senior director of Global Regulatory and Strategy. Most recently, Patel was the FDA's first chief digital health officer for Global Strategy and Innovation.
| | | | A message from PhRMA: According to data just released, insurance isn't working for too many patients. Despite paying premiums each month, Americans continue to face insurmountable affordability and access issues:
- Roughly half (49%) of insured patients who take prescription medicines report facing insurance barriers like prior authorization and "fail first" when trying to access their medicines.
- More than a third (35%) of insured Americans report spending more in out-of-pocket costs in the last 30 days than they could afford.
Americans need better coverage that puts patients first. Read more in PhRMA's latest Patient Experience Survey. | | | | | | During the pandemic, doctors increasingly began using expensive, long-lasting injectable drugs for mental illness and addiction, The Wall Street Journal reports. States aren't spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars aimed at battling health disparities, reports Kaiser Health News . | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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