Congress faces several critical choices before departing for their August recess. Should the $600-per-week additional unemployment insurance (UI) benefit (which has resulted in five of six workers earning more in unemployment benefits than wages) be extended, modified, or allowed to expire at the end of July?
“‘One of the ways to align these incentives would be for CMS, in particular the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, to launch a demonstration project, a shared savings program in Medicare Part B for biosimilars. This would reward physicians for increasing their utilization of biosimilars, which would both create that incentive for physicians and align that incentive with the desire of taxpayers to lower overall costs in the biologic spend category,’ [Alex Brill] said.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across our country and claimed more than 100,000 lives in a few short months, the opioid epidemic, which dates back to at least the early 2000s, has received less attention. But the toll of the opioid crisis in the United States remains enormous by any measure.
Recent data show a small decline in opioid-related mortality following a decade during which opioid-related mortality more than doubled to nearly 53,000 in 2018. However, the aggregate statistics mask important spatial and temporal trends in the data. This report estimates nationwide, regional, and county-level economic costs associated with the opioid crisis.
Nursing homes have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recently released data show that the severity of outbreaks in these facilities has varied substantially across the United States. Some have argued that policy decisions have driven the variation in outcomes observed in nursing homes, while a competing theory is that nursing home outbreaks largely mirror the surrounding area.
