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Trump turns up the heat on GOP Senate: President Trump urged Republican senators to get together to pass healthcare quickly, amping up pressure on the Senate to act before the August recess. “Hopefully Republican Senators, good people all, can quickly get together and pass a new (repeal & replace) HEALTHCARE bill. Add saved $’s,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. The tweet comes a day after Trump said the Senate should nuke the legislative filibuster to get taxes and healthcare reform passed by only 51 votes in the chamber. However, the Senate already is seeking to pass both pieces of legislation by 51 votes via reconciliation, a move that lets budget bills be passed with a simple majority. The tweets put more pressure on the Senate to hold a vote by the August recess. Senate staffers are putting together legislative text this week, but it is being treated as draft to give senators a reference point during continuing negotiations.
Most Americans have a negative view of House healthcare bill: A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 55 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the American Health Care Act. Among Republicans, however, the bill had a favorability rating of 67 percent. Despite overall negative views of the bill, the public appeared divided on whether changes are needed to the healthcare system. According to the Kaiser tracking poll, 8 percent of the public thinks that the Senate should pass the bill as is, 26 percent think major changes are needed and 24 percent think that minor changes are needed. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they did not think that the bill should be passed at all.
But plurality supports Medicaid work requirements: Though most provisions of the Republican healthcare bill poll negatively, one idea is more popular than any other: giving states the ability to add work requirements to Medicaid. Asked by Kaiser about a provision that “allows states to require adults without disabilities to be working or looking for work in order to get health insurance through Medicaid,” 42 percent said that would make them more likely to support the legislation, as opposed to 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support it. Another 27 percent said it would not make much difference to them.
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White House offers little clarity on healthcare “dollars.” On Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere. ObamaCare is dead — the Republicans will do much better!” When pressed about whether that funding would be provided in the form of more money for high-risk pools, insurer payments or otherwise, White House press secretary Spicer would not specify, noting that the Obamacare repeal and replace bill was still being debated in the Senate.
Trump seeks major scaling back of birth control mandate: The Trump administration wants to let any employer opt out of paying for birth control for their employees, according to a leaked proposed regulation. The proposal, if enacted, would significantly roll back Obamacare’s mandate that all insurance plans cover contraception. Under the proposal, if an employer has a religious or moral objection to birth control, it wouldn’t have to include it in insurance plans. The proposal, first leaked by Vox, is a sharp turn from the original mandate, which let religious organizations such as churches be exempt from the mandate. The Obama administration had carved out a compromise called an accommodation that let closely held companies with few shareholders and religious nonprofits such as universities or charities to not pay for birth control. However, birth control still would be offered at no cost to employees and be paid for by the federal government.
Scalise says he expects Senate to wind up in similar place as the House: As Majority Whip, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was tasked with shepherding the healthcare bill through the House. Given that it passed by a razor thin-margin, the looming question in Washington is whether any bill that emerges from the Senate would be dead on arrival in the House. “All along the way, I heard all of these brilliant ideas from my colleagues in the Senate and I wish them well when they say that they are going to start over,” Scalise said when asked about this in a meeting at the Washington Examiner offices. “What I would predict is that they are going to grapple with the same issues we did and probably end up in a very similar place.” On the House side, he said they had to deal with the question of how to gut Obamacare over time while trying to stabilize markets in the interim, and the caucus was divided among those who wanted to go further and those who thought the bill went too far, before they patched together a fragile compromise. He said the Senate likely would pass a bill that could be accepted by the House, “as long as they focus on lowering premiums, putting patients back in charge of their healthcare decisions, and protecting people with pre-existing conditions.”
Don’t think of Sept. 30 as a healthcare reconciliation deadline, Scalise says: The Senate GOP has expressed hope of passing legislation before Congress leaves for August recess, but that wouldn’t give lawmakers that much time before coming up against the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. Because the reconciliation instructions allowing for the Senate to pass a healthcare bill with a simple majority vote are tied to the fiscal 2017 budget, it’s been a widely held view that this would have to be the deadline to get anything done, because once a budget is passed for the next year, the 2017 reconciliation bill would presumably expire. But this assumption is not necessarily accurate, Scalise argued. “More than likely it’s Sept. 30, but it’s not clearcut. People expect that if you go beyond Sept. 30, it’s a problem, but the law is not crystal clear there,” he said.
Ex-Molina CEO blames Republicans and Trump for Obamacare’s problems. J. Mario Molina, who was fired this month from the company his father founded, wrote a U.S. News & World Report editorial blaming Republican sabotage and uncertainty created by the Trump administration on rate hikes and insurer exits. “The administration and Republicans in Congress want you to believe that insurers raising premiums for their plans or exiting the marketplaces all together are consequences of the design of the Affordable Care Act instead of the direct results of their own actions to sabotage the law,” he wrote. “Don’t let them fool you.”
Patients Rights Action Fund, a group that opposes the expansion of aid-in-dying laws, started a video campaign Wednesday that encourages viewers to oppose laws that allow terminally ill patients to obtain a prescription for life-ending medications. The video features Dr. Brian Callister, an internist and medical professor at the University of Nevada Medical School, who said that insurers said they wouldn’t cover a life-saving procedure for two out-of-state patients who were not terminally ill, but offered instead to cover medication for aid-in-dying.
Opinion: Sean Spicer’s non-answer confirms ignorance: The White House has no idea what Trump is thinking. Spicer was wrong to imply that Trump has a final healthcare product in mind. He more than likely doesn’t, as is evident by his wildly varying statements where he praises the free market one day before publicly admiring socialized healthcare systems the next,” writes Philip Wegmann.
Opinion: Sorry, President Trump: Abolishing the filibuster will not Make America Great Again. “While his frustration is understandable given the lack of progress Congress has made on reforming healthcare and taxes, heeding the president’s call will not move these two important initiatives any closer to becoming law. Instead, it will only make the Senate’s current dysfunction worse,” writes James Wallner.
Opinion: The Orwellian term Planned Parenthood will use to describe abortion after it’s illegal. “Planned Parenthood added an entirely new subcategory under “Other Women’s Health Services” called ‘Miscarriage Care.’ Students for Life and other pro-life organizations have no intentions or will ever shame a woman who miscarries, but this stood out for a specific reason. A former Planned Parenthood director talked about a similar term that would be used when abortion was eventually made illegal: ‘’miscarriage management,’” writes Kristan Hawkins.
RUNDOWN
Associated Press Iowa’s GOP senators cast doubt on healthcare law repeal
Washington Post Trump’s window for scoring early legislative victories is shrinking
Politico Ryan appoints controversial cancer care doctor to HHS committee
LA Times Being transgender in America could be hazardous to your health: study
Reuters Maryland joins California in battling antibiotic overuse in farms
Kaiser Health News California’s new single-payer proposal embraces some costly old ways
NPR Are state rules for treating sepsis really saving lives?
MedCityNews Analysis finds 8,000+ security flaws in pacemakers
Wall Street Journal How the Molina brothers got bounced from the family healthcare firm
Calendar
WEDNESDAY | MAY 31
FDA Science Forum. Details.
Noon. The Big Cities Health Coalition, the National Association of County and City Health Officials and the March of Dimes will host a webinar for reporters to discuss the threat posed by the Zika virus this summer.
2:15 p.m. CST (3:15 EST). Guthrie County Courthouse. 200 North 5th Street, Iowa. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa to hold town hall. Details.
3:30 p.m. Video panel discussion on “Two years of ‘stepping up’ to reduce mental illness in jails,” hosted by the National Association of Counties. Livestream.
FRIDAY | JUNE 2
June 2-6. Baltimore Convention Center. American Society of Echocardiography will host its 28th Annual Scientific Sessions. Program.
9:45 a.m. EST. Adair County Courthouse. 400 Public Square, Iowa. Grassley holds town hall. Details.
MONDAY | JUNE 5
Senate back in session.
TUESDAY | JUNE 6
House back in session.
Tuesday, June 6, to Friday, June 9. New York. Jefferies 2017 Global Healthcare Conference. Details.
Facebook hosting a Health Summit for drug companies. Details.
9 a.m. American Enterprise Institute. 1789 Massachusetts Ave. NW. Discussion on report from AEI and the Brookings Institution on the “Project on Paid Family Leave.” Details.
10 a.m. 2226 Rayburn. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discussion on “Speeding Cures for Patients: How Congress Can Update the Prescription Drug User Fee Act to Spur Biopharmaceutical Innovation.” Details.
WEDNESDAY | JUNE 7
8 a.m. Newseum. Atlantic event on “The Next Drugs: An Atlantic Policy Update on Biosimilars.” Details.
