Uninsured Americans rose amid Medicaid unwinding

The national uninsured rate rose from 7.7% to 8.2% earlier this year as states booted millions of Americans from their Medicaid programs, according to new CDC data.

The Biden administration has boasted record-low uninsured rates and record-high ACA enrollment in recent years. But analysts have warned for some time now that uninsured rates would spike once the Covid-19 emergency ended. During the pandemic, states were not allowed to remove people from their Medicaid programs — but those protections ended in April 2023.

Overall, more than 27 million people had no form of health insurance as of March 2024, STAT's Bob Herman reports. Many people who lost Medicaid pivoted to other forms of coverage. The ACA marketplaces, in particular, have hit record levels of enrollment with Medicaid enrollees shifting into heavily subsidized ACA plans. More from Bob.

industry moves

The next chapter for Biden's pandemic prep czar

Raj Panjabi has made a career out of taking on some of public health's toughest challenges, from malaria to Ebola to Covid-19 to mpox. Now, he's joining a particularly influential venture capital group, leading a team focused on preventative medicine, STAT's Rachel Cohrs Zhang exclusively reports.

"The general theme is earlier detection, earlier intervention, and then a focus on diseases that have massive public health consequences," Panjabi said in an interview.

Panjabi is well-connected in the Biden administration, where he served as President Biden's top pandemic preparedness official at the White House National Security Council.

He left the administration a year ago, and has been doing a mix of teaching, consulting, and participating in the boards of nonprofits since. He joins a firm that's hired out of the Trump administration, too. Read more.

cms policy

Money solves all problems

Medicare is throwing money at private insurers in the hopes of keeping premiums for Part D drug plans low, according to John Wilkerson.

Premium hikes for Medicare Part D plans are limited to 6%, or about $2 a month. Medicare does this by paying the private insurers for seniors' share of their premiums above 6%. But that so-called premium stabilization subsidy is calculated on the average base premium. Seniors enrolled in plans with above-average premium increases will be hit with higher premiums.

Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal because premium hikes among plans are similar. But 2025 is the first year that some new changes to the Part D program take effect, and in response to those changes insurers are predicting vastly different premium increases, according to Medicare officials.

Insurers had until the end of Monday to accept the program's subsidy plan. Read more from John on how it works.

addiction treatment

Politics holding back meth addiction treatment changes

Frustration with the Biden administration's response to methamphetamine addiction has spilled into public view this year amid failed advocacy efforts to raise treatment cost caps, Lev Facher reports. Even the president's top domestic policy official appeared to acknowledge recently that decisions about the government's drug crisis response are being made amid a highly charged political atmosphere.

The debate over raising reimbursement caps comes amid a fast-worsening crisis of stimulant use. Increasingly, addiction treatment providers, as well as state governments and local public health groups, are turning to contingency management — in essence, contingency paying people not to use drugs. It's a concept that could easily anger the Biden administration's critics, especially those most opposed to federal agencies' recent embrace of harm reduction strategies, Lev writes.

But as the stimulant use crisis has grown worse, the advocacy push has intensified. More from Lev on the battle.

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