Experts call on Medicare to overhaul secretive panel that helps sets doctors’ pay

We all know health care is expensive and claims procedures are complicated. But think about how Medicare sets the prices it pays for 8,000 services: They’re calculated by how many minutes (or seconds) it takes, for example, to read an electrocardiogram or evaluate a skin lesion for cancer. Now a heavyweight group of former Medicare officials and payment experts is calling on the federal government to overhaul Medicare’s payment system, one they say has become “mind-numbingly complex and nontransparent.”

Currently, a group of 32 physicians on the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee, or RUC, meets behind closed doors a few times every year. Medicare and other health insurers follow most of the RUC’s recommendations on payment codes. “It’s all bull,” Robert Berenson, a longtime critic of the RUC, told STAT’s Bob Herman. Ezequiel Silva, chair of the AMA’s RUC, defended the group’s work. Read more.

Rise in polio-like condition among young kids could be coming, CDC warns

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The CDC is warning health providers the country may be about to see an uptick of cases of a polio-like condition called acute flaccid myelitis in young children. AFM is a rare consequence of infection with an enterovirus known as EV-D68, which in most infected children causes respiratory symptoms. In 2014, 2016, and 2018, the U.S. saw surges of such cases; in 2020, when pandemic mitigation measures meant children had limited contact with people outside their families, there was no spike in cases.

Experts worry this year could be a bad one for AFM cases, and the CDC health alert, issued Friday, suggests those concerns may be warranted, with confirmed cases of EV-D68 on the rise. Kevin Messacar, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital Colorado who has been studying AFM since 2014, said there is generally about a month between when EV-D68 cases start to increase and AFM cases peak. “So really, now is the time we want people on the lookout for cases of AFM,” Messacar told STAT. Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell have more.

Opinion: Don’t let acrimonious arguments keep you from your Covid booster

You might say there’s been a lot of noise about the new boosters, but STAT’s Matthew Herper offers some advice to see through it. “This social media-driven cacophony risks drowning out the most important message about the booster shots: quite simply, that most people should get one right now.” Even critics who point to incomplete data behind the FDA and CDC recommendations still say people need at least three shots of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to be fully protected. And we’re a long way off from full protection on a population level: Half of eligible people in the U.S. have not gotten a booster, while a quarter haven’t been vaccinated at all.

Matt takes us through the controversies, chiding some for their missteps and recalling William Butler Yeats’ despair. But “even if mistakes were made,” Matt writes, “we still need these vaccines.” Read more.

Closer look: Why people turn down social-risk assistance offered by their doctors

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If you’ve been catching up on missed doctors’ appointments, maybe you’ve noticed new questions about what medicine now recognizes as the social drivers of health: income, education, employment, food security, and neighborhood, among others. The goal is to link patients and caregivers to resources that might help resolve any problems they identify. But as Caroline Fichtenberg and Emilia De Marchis of UCSF write in a STAT First Opinion, patients aren’t necessarily availing themselves of the help offered through these screening efforts — puzzling their health care providers.

Through their work at Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network, the authors say they’ve learned some lessons. For one, “just because someone is facing issues related to food insecurity or housing doesn’t mean they want help with that issue,” they write. “It may not be the most important challenge facing them right then.” Read more for strategies they suggest.

White House picks former government scientist as first new ARPA-H director

President Joe Biden plans to appoint longtime biologist and former government scientist Renee Wegrzyn as the first director of the nascent Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The agency launched in March with $1 billion in initial funding, but the search for its inaugural director has taken months. Wegrzyn currently works at Boston-based Gingko Bioworks, a company focused on biological engineering, but has experience in the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

“I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to shape ARPA-H’s ambitious mission and foster a vision and approach that will improve health outcomes for the American people, including President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot,” Wegrzyn said in a statement. She’ll join Biden at a Boston event today to promote the Moonshot project (read more below). STAT’s Sarah Owermohle has more.

60 years after JFK’s moonshot bid, Biden to lay out cancer moonshot vision

In an echo of President John F. Kennedy committing on Sept. 12, 1962, to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the decade was out, President Biden will again issue his generation's challenge: the cancer moonshot. In a speech today at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, he will detail plans to cut the cancer death rate in half within 25 years and improve cancer patients’ quality of life.

As STAT’s Lev Facher has reported, when Biden relaunched the White House Cancer Moonshot in February, those two goals were more modest than the sweeping challenge to cure cancer he announced six years ago while vice president. As is true for many other Americans, cancer is personal for Biden, whose son Beau died of glioblastoma in 2015.

What to read around the web today

Damages: Johnson & Johnson and the new war on consumer protection, The New Yorker
Medical impact of Roe reversal goes well beyond abortion clinics, doctors say, New York Times
Exclusive: FDA funding negotiations heat up ahead of September deadline, STAT
How masking changed my experience of being deaf, The Atlantic
Cancer treatment devised in the 1980s has proven effective (again). Will it finally get approval? STAT
The battle over the Women’s Center at D.C.’s Sibley Hospital, Washington Post