Several Important Health Care Provisions in Omnibus Federal Funding Bill

The Senate passed a $1.5 trillion Omnibus spending package to fund the federal government for the current fiscal year, after Democrats and Republicans resolved disagreements to quickly send $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine.

Several anticipated healthcare features were cut from the draft. For example, $15 billion in health care COVID-19 relief funding was pulled out with reports that it will be run as a standalone to, among other things, continue and fund the federal government’s supply of coronavirus therapeutics.

The bill is also missing continued relief from the 2% Medicare sequestration payment cuts. This means that beginning April 1, 2002, and through June 30, 2022, there will be a 1% across-the-board reduction in Medicare payments. The full 2% cuts would begin July, 2022.

On a positive note, hospice several telehealth waivers will be extended for 5 months after the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE), allowing hospices to perform the face-to-face (F2F) recertification visit via telehealth; use audio-only; and allow patients to receive telehealth servings in their own homes and in non-rural parts of the country. The flexibility for hospices to deliver routine home care using telehealth and telephone technology would not be extended by the bill. Neither would certain telehealth CPT codes that have been used by palliative care providers during the pandemic be continued for that purpose.

A summary of the House’s Labor-Health and Human Services portion of the bill, where most of the health care provisions can be found, can be accessed HERE.

Additional summary and explanatory documents related to the House's bill can be found on the House Appropriation Committee’s press release page HERE. Full text of the Senate's bill was not available at the writing of this article.  

To Accelerate Hospice Growth, It’s Time to Embrace ‘The Social Determinants of Death’

Hospice News | By Jim Parker 

As U.S. hospices care for the dying and compete for referrals, a vast contingent of terminally ill Americans die in places they don’t want to be, receiving treatments that will not save them.

Turning this tide will require more than effective marketing. At some point, we as a society need to reconsider how we think about death – and hospices will have a critical role in that discussion.

A commission convened by the United Kingdom-based research journal The Lancet has called on the global medical community and the public to reconsider societal attitudes about death and the care that precedes it. Among the recommendations is a rethink of the over-medicalization of death and greater emphasis on hospice and palliative care.

The commission of Lancet editors and academic scholars outlined principles to guide this process, including what they call “the social determinants of death,” as well as reassessment of cultural attitudes about the end of life and strengthening networks of care for the dying and the bereaved.

A key obstacle to this kind of change is simple to name but difficult to overcome: We don’t want to talk about it.

“Conversations about death and dying can be difficult. Doctors, patients, or family members may find it easier to avoid them altogether and continue treatment, leading to inappropriate treatment at the end of life,” the commission wrote. “Palliative care can provide better outcomes for patients and careers at the end of life, leading to improved quality of life, often at a lower cost, but attempts to influence mainstream health-care services have had limited success and palliative care broadly remains a service-based response to this social concern.”

These are the questions that the Lancet Commission seeks to unravel.

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What is Long Covid? Current Understanding About Risks, Symptoms and Recovery

Washington Post | By Allyson Chiu

The condition known as long covid continues to frustrate its sufferers, baffle scientists and alarm people who are concerned about being infected by the coronavirus. The term, a widely used catchall phrase for persistent symptoms that can range from mild to debilitating and last for weeks, months or longer, is technically known as Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC. But scientists say much remains unknown about long covid, which is also referred to colloquially as “long-haul covid,” “long-term covid,” “post-covid conditions” and “post-covid syndrome,” among other names.

“This is a condition that we don’t even have an agreed upon name for yet, and we don’t have any understanding really of what’s going on down at a chemical level,” said Greg Vanichkachorn, medical director of Mayo Clinic’s COVID-19 Activity Rehabilitation Program. “So, until we have that kind of understanding, it’s really important that we not make quick decisions about what long covid can or can’t be.”

Read more @ Washington Post

CDC Peels Off Mask Recommendations for Most U.S. Counties

MedPage Today | By Molly Walker

After much speculation, CDC unveiled its new criteria on Friday [February 25, 2022] for masking throughout communities based on healthcare indicators, where only 30% of the country would currently be recommended to wear a mask.

These metrics are a combination of new hospital admissions, hospital bed utilization for COVID patients, as well as incidence of cases in a community, combined to indicate either a low risk (green), medium risk (yellow), or high risk (orange) of severe disease in a particular county.

By the most current CDC data, this means that only 28.2% of the population lives in a high-risk county, though 37.3% of U.S. counties would be classified as high-risk. About 40% of counties are classified as medium risk (containing 42% of the nation's population), while 23% are classified as low risk (29.5% of the population).

Read more @ MedPage Today