- VA Announces Expansion of "Close to Me" Cancer Program as Part of the Cancer Moonshot, Bringing Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment Closer to Thousands of Veterans
- Biden-Harris Administration Releases National Strategy for Suicide Prevention and First-Ever Federal Action Plan
- Biden-Harris Administration Takes Historic Action to Increase Access to Quality Care, and Support to Families and Care Workers
- Biden Administration Sets Higher Staffing Mandates. Most Nursing Homes Don't Meet Them.
- Rural Jails Turn to Community Health Workers To Help the Newly Released Succeed
- Rural Communities Face Primary Care Physician Shortage
- Miles for Milk: How Student-Run Grocery Store Reshaped Rural Community's Food Access
- Native Americans Have Shorter Life Spans, and It's Not Just Due to Lack of Health Care
- Promotoras Play Essential Role in Connecting Farmworkers with Health Care in Rural NorCal
- Across the Country, Amish Populations Are on the Rise
- Using Medicaid to Address Young People's Mental Health Needs in School Settings
- Sunsets, Wildlife and Limited Care: Challenges of Aging in Place in Rural America
- City-Country Mortality Gap Widens amid Persistent Holes in Rural Health Care Access
- Tribal Environmental Impact Network
- Minnesota's Rural Ambulance Providers Look to State Capitol for Their Own Lifeline
Rural and Safety Net Hospitals Prepare for Cut in Federal Support
Daily Yonder, Michael Ollove
Absent action by Congress in the next couple of weeks, Dr. Michael Waldrum, CEO of Vidant Health, is going to have to figure out what medical services to deny hard-pressed communities in rural eastern North Carolina. “It runs the gamut,” Waldrum said in an interview last week. “Do we close hospitals? Do we close services within hospitals?”
With an operating margin of less than 0.5% — comparable to most other rural and safety net hospitals — and an expected loss of $7.7 million in federal money this year, which would double next year, Vidant, a multi-hospital safety net health system, could drop into the red.
Across the country, similar health systems face unwelcome choices about how to handle the coming funding cuts. They knew it was coming — the Affordable Care Act ordained a pullback in federal support for hospitals’ charitable care — and yet hospital leaders continue to hold out hope that Congress will protect the funding before the cuts go into effect in a few weeks.
“The consequences would be absolutely devastating,” said Beth Feldpush, a senior vice president for America’s Essential Hospitals, a trade association for safety net hospitals, which provide medical care for all comers, no matter their ability to pay.
Even without these prospective cuts, both safety net and rural hospitals, most of which have slim or negative operating margins, have been facing perilous economic times. At least 118 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and a number of safety net hospitals also have shuttered or merged with for-profit health systems.
Hospitals in the 14 states that did not expand Medicaid will be hurt the worst, because they already miss out on the extra federal money that comes with expansion. “How many punches can you take?” said John Henderson, president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals. Texas, which has not expanded Medicaid, leads the country in the number of closed rural hospitals with 23 since 2005.
The federal money reimburses hospitals for the care they provide to people who can’t afford to pay and offsets the cost of care that hospitals provide to Medicaid patients that Medicaid does not cover. The federal cuts amount to $4 billion this year and $44 billion through 2025.
The hospitals’ total loss of funding could be even more significant because the program includes state matching funds. If state cuts are commensurate with federal ones, the overall reduction would go from $4 billion to more than $7 billion in 2020. As one example, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in an email to Stateline that if the federal cuts go into effect this year, the state would reduce its contribution by $47 million in addition to the expected $98 million cut in federal money.
Access the full article here.
Report Assesses Children’s Drink Choices
A new report from the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity assesses the sales, nutrition, and marketing of children’s drinks. Their findings show that sweetened drinks with added sugars and often low-calorie sweeteners continue to dominate sales and advertising of drinks marketed for children’s consumption. Overconsumption of these drinks can have adverse effects on children’s oral and overall health.
Pennsylvania Title V Needs and Capacity Assessment Survey
The Pennsylvania Department of Health’s Bureau of Family Health is completing its Title V Five-Year Needs and Capacity Assessment. The assessment provides the opportunity to evaluate the health status of women, infants, children, adolescents, and children and youth with special health care needs in Pennsylvania, to identify priority health needs, and to guide state and local public health work over the next five years. The survey is for those who were not able to attend the in-person prioritization events to share input on potential priorities. Consider including the importance of oral health in responses. Complete the survey by November 14, 2019.
ADA Guideline Advises Against Antibiotics for Dental Pain
A new ADA guideline indicates that “antibiotics are not needed to manage most dental pain and intraoral swelling associated with pulpal and periapical infections.” The guideline advises against using antibiotics for most pulpal and periapical conditions and instead recommends only the use of dental treatment and, if needed, over-the-counter pain relievers. This guideline is part of larger efforts across the globe to prevent antibiotics from becoming ineffective in treating bacterial infections. Click here for more information.
Dissemination of Rural Health Research: A Toolkit
The Rural Health Research Gateway released a Dissemination of Rural Health Research Toolkit to help researchers develop appropriate, timely, accessible, and applicable products as well as social media campaigns to get the word out about their work. The toolkit provides descriptions for multiple modes of dissemination, including: policy briefs, fact sheets, infographics, journal publications, poster presentations, chartbooks, PowerPoint presentations, working papers and reports, and promotional products. The toolkit, which is free and downloadable, also includes a brief discussion on the purpose of each product, which product is appropriate given the topic and intended audience, and how to format and design each product. Effective examples are provided.
Trump Announces Pick for FDA Commissioner
President Trump last week announced that he intends to nominate Stephen Hahn, CMO of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, to serve as FDA commissioner. In addition, Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at HHS, has replaced Ned Sharpless as FDA’s acting commissioner until a permanent commissioner is confirmed. (Source: Washington Post, 11/1)
CMS Delays Hospital Price Transparency Requirement
CMS has released a final rule to update Medicare’s Hospital Outpatient and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment Systems for calendar year (CY) 2020. CMS in the final rule said it will continue to implement site-neutral payments and payment cuts under Medicare’s 340B Drug Discount Program, despite separate court rulings striking down the policies. However, CMS did not finalize a proposal to require all hospitals to publicize their payer-negotiated rates for certain services because officials said they are working to expand the requirement to also include health insurers. (Sources: HealthLeaders Media, 11/2; Wall Street Journal, 11/1)
November Marks National COPD Awareness Month
The Technical Assistance and Services Center (TASC), a program of the National Rural Health Resource Center, is pleased to announce a collection of resources for rural hospitals and provider-based rural health clinics to address disparities in COPD related care. This project was supported by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy via the Fiscal Year 2018 Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Supplemental Project.
Resources, Resources, Resources!
All of the resources from this project can be found on the TASC website. They include:
- The Rural Hospital Guide to Improving COPD
- The Rural COPD Podcast series
- Three webinars relating to COPD
Access the COPD section of the website by clicking here.
2019’s Fattest States in America + Diabetes Facts & Statistics – WalletHub Reports
With November being National Diabetes Awareness Month and Americans collectively spending nearly $200 billion per year on obesity-related health costs, the personal-finance website WalletHub released its report on 2019’s Fattest States in America as well as accompanying videos, along with interesting stats about diabetes in its Facts & Statistics infographic.
To determine which states contribute the most to America’s overweight and obesity problem, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 29 key metrics. They range from share of overweight and obese population to sugary-beverage consumption among adolescents to obesity-related health care costs.
HHS Request for Information: PreventionX
Health care for preventable non-communicable diseases, including heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and obesity costs the overall US healthcare system over $580 billion annually. More than 30 million Americans are now living with diabetes, 75 million are hypertensive, and nearly 40% of American adults are obese. There is need to transform chronic disease prevention in the US by identifying and scaling effective and innovative community-wide prevention strategies and increase financial investment in prevention. To help the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) better understand the barriers to effective chronic disease prevention, email your responses to preventionx@hhs.gov, with the subject line “PreventionX RFI Comment” by December 13, 2019. Click here for more information..