FHI's Week in Review - 4/1/19 - Consequences of Overturning the ACA + A No-Pain Gene

Volume VI, Issue 13

April 1, 2019

The Trump administration wants to kill ObamaCare. What happens if it does?

Megan Henney reports for FOXBusiness on March 28, 2019:

The Trump administration made its intentions clear this week about the future of the Affordable Care Act: It wants to nix it, in its entirety. On Monday <3.25.19>, in a letter to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Department of Justice said it agreed with a December ruling by a federal judge in Texas that struck down one of the biggest legislative accomplishments of the Obama administration as unconstitutional.

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Regardless of one's personal view of the ACA, the fact remains that it is now embedded into our economy. Millions of ACA enrollees with pre-existing conditions would have trouble finding affordable coverage, if the law is overturned. A significant number of Medicaid beneficiaries would be impacted negatively. Meanwhile, the healthcare industry, after years of adjusting to the ACA, would have to re-tool for a post-ACA world. In a panel discussion held in Coral Gables Friday, March 29 at the University of Miami, all participants agreed that the death of ObamaCare would have serious negative repercussions for the sector. The panelists included C-level executives from the AMA, the MGMA, AHIP, the AHA, HFMA and the ANA.

A No-Pain Gene Mutation

On 3/28/19, there was a story in the New York Times about Jo Cameron, a 71 year old woman who has felt almost no pain in her lifetime, including from burns, arthritis and several surgeries. She also scored zero on standardized anxiety questionnaires and doesn't recall ever feeling depressed.

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Her two gene mutations responsible for this have been mapped now and may open doors to new approaches to treating chronic pain. And, of course, this discovery supports the notion that physical and emotional pain are, really, all the same, according to Hans Duvefelt, MD.

View the research article published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Fitch Ratings: Fortunes May Soon Turn for the Better for U.S. NFP Hospitals

Fitch Ratings reports on the state of not-for-profit hospitals in a 3/26/19 post. Though not over yet, U.S. not-for-profit hospitals appear to have weathered the worst of their operational challenges with more performance stability not far off, the article's authors predict.

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According to Fitch:

Among the developments generating the most market interest is the emergence of non-traditional competitive entrants like Amazon with grand designs to reinvent healthcare delivery. Whether they succeed in the long run remains to be seen, but it seems inevitable that these non-traditional entrants will ultimately change the way individuals interact with the sector. As such, hospitals will become more concerned with "steerage" into the provider's care delivery system versus "leakage" outside the provider system.