Members of the House Ways and Means Committee, with Chairman Kevin Brady's blessing, introduced a handful of bills today that would delay some of the Affordable Care Act's taxes and temporilty lift the employer mandate.
Why this matters: Insurers and medical device manufacturers have been lobbying hard for Congress to freeze the ACA's taxes on their products. But introducing a bill doesn't mean it will become law, and next steps aren't yet clear.
In 2016, 92,000 children entered the foster care system in drug-related cases, AP reports, citing data from the Department of Health and Human Services. That's a 32% jump since 2012 and accounts for a third of total foster care entries in 2016.
The bottom line: The opioid crisis is taking a toll on children. The breadth of the impact ranges from newborn babies who inherit addicitons from their mothers to teens placed in foster care away from parents incapicitated by drug use.
Aetna will waive copays for Narcan, a medication that reverses opioid overdoses, starting Jan. 1. Narcan copays could be as much as $150 for some Aetna enrollees, but the company said $30 to $40 has been a more common range.
Why it matters: Health insurers have been spotlighted as enabling the opioid epidemic and now are focusing on ways to prevent or manage addiction. The other major national health insurers — Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare — did not immediately respond when asked whether they would copy Aetna's policy.
Former President Barack Obama today thanked volunteers who have been calling people to remind them to sign up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act ahead of Friday's deadline. "So far, we’ve gotten more people covered this year than in past years, which is incredible given that there’s been so little advertising or outreach from some official quarters to remind people when and how they should get covered," he said.
Why it matters, per Axios' Sam Baker: All told, ACA enrollment is expected to end up well below past years' totals, in part because the Trump administration has cut off almost all outreach funding. The law's supporters are trying to fill that as much of that void as they can, and Obama is clearly their most powerful tool.
