government
The new head of Medicare loves a bargain
Photo illustration: Christine Kao/STAT; Screen Capture via Youtube
The new head of Medicare is famously thrifty. When Chris Klomp was CEO of health IT company Collective Medical, he bought office snacks from Costco and boasted about sleeping in his rental car to save money on business trips. Now his former colleagues and business associates expect he'll try to save Medicare money with tech upgrades (in keeping with the Trump administration's cost-cutting priorities) while making crucial decisions about whether to cover GLP-1 weight loss drugs and rein in private Medicare Advantage plans' abusive denials practices.
"Because of Medicare's reach, other insurers often follow its lead on payments and other policies, putting Klomp in a position to significantly influence the entire American health care system," Mario Aguilar writes in a meaty profile this morning. Read more to find out what we might expect from Klomp — a fairly nonpartisan figure with scant experience in government but big goals around modernizing the trillion-dollar program.
first opinion
What poetry and therapy have in common
"Any good poem is asking you simply to slow down," poet Dorianne Laux once said. The same is true of practicing psychotherapy, psychiatrist Owen Lewis writes in a First Opinion: Both involve the pursuit of meaning, learning to carefully parse words as well as the pauses, pacing, and emphases that convey what language alone cannot.
Lewis, who is also a poet, approaches both practices with the goal of creating a "container" for thoughts and emotions that need release. Check out his lovely essay, and his new book of poems, too.
children's health
A new "limit of viability" for premature infants
Between 2014 and 2023, survival rates for infants born at 22 weeks who received active treatment increased from 26% to 41%, according to a research letter published over the weekend in JAMA. That means factors like advancements in medical technology and updated clinical guidelines have "collectively shifted the limit of viability," according to the authors, who also presented their findings at the Pediatric Academy Societies meeting in Honolulu. Survival rates among infants born at 23 weeks who received active treatment also went up, from 54% to 58%.
The study looked at data from nearly 59,000 U.S. infants born between 22-25 weeks at hundreds of NICUs. It follow what happened after infants were discharged from the hospital, so it's not clear what kinds of health problems, if any, they may have later on. But we do know there is "a growing willingness among clinicians to intervene aggressively at the earliest stages of prematurity," the study's lead author Nansi Boghossian told MedPage Today.
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