Love in a time of unwinding: Health Policy Valentines 2024
In a year of existential threats, and an era in which the corporate practice of medicine knows few curbs, there is still a stream of health policy wins worth serenading in the time-honored (since 2012!) tradition of #HealthPolicyValentines. This year’s mash notes are below.
The Medicaid unwinding
is often blind and cruel.
But spare some V-day love
For ex parte renewal.
* * *
A valentine from Democrats,
enacted, but hardly trending:
An annual Part D cap
on out-of-pocket spending.
* * *
What’s sweeter for seniors
than sugar and spices?
Medicare negotiating
selected drug prices.
* * *
Send flowers, chocolate and smiles
for keeping insurers squirmin’
over AI-driven denials
to Casey Ross and Bob Herman.
* * *
O ACA, flawed child,
I’ll no longer carp
so long as your subsidies
remain enhanced by the ARP.
* * *
For low-income tar heels,
nothing can be finer
than Medicaid expansion
in North Carolina.
* * *
Let’s honor legislation
little known, in point of fact,
preventing harm, unnoticed:
The No Surprises Act.
* * *
As oligarch-funded theocrats
harm the women of this nation,
my love goes to the National
Abortion Federation.
* * *
State plan amendments: the clay
for a legislative work of art (um…)
inducing 46 states
to grant 12 months of Medicaid postpartum.
* * *
And one for my wife as I join her on the far side of the age-65 threshold:
After 40 years of love
we’ll take no crap
from MA insurers —
thanks to Medigap.
* * *
While dredging up healthcare doggerel like this, I always end up with some bitter snippets, then remind myself they’re not um, valentines. Since they now exist, however, at the risk of spoiling the mood, I’ll share a little rage rhyming:
The Supreme Court’s out of control,
but had better not go postal
by voiding the FDA rule
for Mifepristone and Misoprostol.
* * *
Nothing’s more dangerous
for those with colon polyps,
financially speaking,
than private equity rollups.
Take a trip down ACA memory lane with a visit to the Health Policy Valentines archives: Surprise! No Surprises (2023), Flowers in the graveyard (2022), Institutional edition (2021), But love grows old and waxes cold (2020), The Water is Wide: Health Policy Valentines (2019), HPV (2018), Love Knows No Repeal (2017), Love in the Time of Obamacare (2016), love, 2015, and Romance of the Rose, Health Policy Edition (2014).
Photo by Aykut Aktemur
Love them!