policy
Paying hospitals more to address drug shortages
To try and address the ongoing generic drug shortage affecting the U.S., which includes some essential chemotherapy drugs, the Senate Finance Committee shared a few proposals in a paper released on Thursday. There is a unifying theme among many of them, writes John Wilkerson: Tie hospital compensation to the way they maintain drug supplies and whether they purchase from drugmakers that are actively addressing the shortages.
Hospitals could receive Medicare bonuses, for instance, for having successful plans to avoid shortages; conversely, they would see pay cuts if they didn't perform well in terms of drug availability. This is all meant to address what experts see as a root cause of the shortages: The way Medicare pays hospitals and doctors contributes to forcing generic drugmakers to cut prices to a level that makes it hard to guarantee a steady supply. Read more.
Public health
Getting closer to eradicating Guinea worm disease
There were only 13 reported cases of Guinea worm disease in the world in 2023, the lowest number since the Carter Center began leading the eradication program in 1986. Back then, an estimated 3.5 million cases occurred every year in 21 African and Asian countries.
Guinea worm disease is transmitted through water contamination, and only shows symptoms about a year after contagion, when painful blisters form on legs and feet. Upon bursting, the worm comes out of the skin, taking weeks to leave the body.
Though human numbers are very small (there were 13 cases in 2022 as well, and 15 in 2021), infections in animals grew from 685 in 2022 to 713 in 2023. Though researchers attribute the increase to expanded surveillance in Angola and Cameroon, eliminating the disease in animals is necessary to achieve complete eradication. More here.
first opinion
A prescription against poverty
Pediatricians around the U.S. are having to deal with a stubborn condition: poverty. Parents who can't afford diapers, stable housing, or even clean clothes are increasingly more common, and children's health simply can't thrive when the most basic needs are not taken care of, writes Ben Hoffman, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in First Opinion.
"Although I can't write my patients prescriptions to address poverty, Congress can take action right now and enact a proposal that can," he writes, urging representatives to pass a bipartisan proposal that would help the child tax credit reach more families, and could lift as many as 400,000 above the poverty line in a year. Read more.
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