Nearly a Quarter of Americans Think the Healthcare Reform Law Has Been Repealed

The most recent Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll, conducted in the wake of the healthcare reform repeal vote in the US House of Representatives, found that 22% of Americans believe that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been repealed. In addition, 26% say they do not have enough information to say whether it is still law. In the same survey, 52% of Americans said they knew that the ACA is still in effect. Public opinion of the law remained stable in the latest poll: 48% of Americans have a negative opinion about the law and 43% are favorable toward it. As has been the case since the poll began, opinions fall strongly along party lines. Among Democrats, 66% have favorable opinions about the law and 84% of Republicans have negative views (a proportion that has increased steadily in recent months). Opinions among independents are divided: 3% have favorable views and 47% have negative views. Opinions about changing the law remain fractured. Three in 10 want Congress to expand the law, 2 in 10 want the law to remain as it is, and 4 in 10 are in favor of repeal of the law, with 19% of those respondents hoping that the law will be replaced with a Republican option and the remainder wanting no further action after the current law is repealed. Most Americans (61%) are against using the budget process to stall implementation of the law. Those against stalling implementation using the budget process include a majority of Democrats and independents, while 59% of Republicans favor the idea. When asked why they were opposed to defunding health reform, 59% chose “using the budget process to stop a law is just not the way our government should work” as the major reason for their opposition. The debate over repeal continues to be complicated because individual provisions of the law are more popular than the law itself. The large majority of Americans (8 in 10) say they would keep the provisions that extend tax credits to small business, and 7 in 10 are in favor of provisions that would close the Medicare doughnut hole, provide coverage subsidies to Americans with low or moderate income, institute the voluntary long-term care insurance program, and prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. There is one provision of the law that 67% of Americans want removed: the individual mandate. Many experts say that without the individual mandate provision, the system may not work as intended. Just over half of respondents (51%) think the law will improve healthcare for lower income Americans, but for all the other groups asked about, as many or more respondents believe things will be worse under healthcare reform. Seniors as a group are consistently less likely to support the law than younger Americans; 59% of seniors have an unfavorable view of the law. Finally, when asked if Congress was spending too much time on healthcare reform, 39% said the lawmakers were paying too little attention, 27% said it was just about the right amount of attention, and 28% think lawmakers are giving the issue too much attention. There's an App for That The FDA has announced approval of an application that can be used on an iPhone or an iPad to view results of computed tomography, positron emission tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. The software allows radiology images from the physician’s office or hospital to be “compressed for secure network transfer then sent to the appropriate portable wireless device,” according to a statement from the FDA. The physician can then view the images in a format that “allows the physician to measure distance on the image and image intensity values and display measurement lines, annotations, and regions of interest,” the FDA statement continued. The FDA tested the software by evaluating its performance on a number of devices, measuring luminance, resolution, and noise, using international standards and guidelines for comparisons. CMS Considering Covering STD Treatment The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has posted a National Coverage Analysis announcing that it is considering including coverage for testing for chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis B, and syphilis and to pay for counseling to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The coverage would apply to elderly and disabled Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. According to an article in Medpage Today, STD rates among the elderly are increasing: statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that nearly one quarter of people living with HIV in the United States are >50 years of age, and the rates of chlamydia among men 45 to 64 years of age increased threefold from 1996 to 2007 and doubled among women in the same age group. DHHS Announces Grants to Develop Premium Rate Review Programs Nearly $200 million in grant funds are available to help states develop programs that will make health insurance premiums more transparent. In a recent news release, the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said that the new funds would also give the states the power to stop unreasonable premium increases from taking effect. Steve Larsen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the agency that delivers the rate review grants, said, “For too long, families and small business owners have struggled to pay ever-increasing health insurance premiums. The Affordable Care Act provides states new resources and tools to curb those rising costs, as well as to help make sure that consumers and businesses are getting value for premium dollars.” Of the total funding, $149 million is available to states for baseline grants. Another approximately $50 million in additional grant funds is available in 2 ways: workload grants ($22.5 million) that will be distributed to states with larger populations and more health insurers, and performance incentives ($27.5 million) that will be awarded to states that have or enact the authority to approve or disapprove rate increases. Supreme Court Rules to Uphold Law Protecting Vaccine Manufacturers The US Supreme Court has ruled that a federal law bars lawsuits against drug makers over serious side effects from childhood vaccines. In a ruling on February 22, 2011, the court ruled against the parents of a child who sued Wyeth in state court in Pennsylvania for health issues they say their daughter suffered from a vaccine she received as an infant, according to an article in the Newark Star Ledger. (Wyeth’s vaccine business is now owned by Pfizer.) The court ruled 6-2 against the plaintiffs’ arguments that they should be able to sue Pfizer’s Wyeth unit over allegations that the company could have marketed a safer vaccine but opted not to. In his ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that “the vaccine manufacturers fund from their sales an informal, efficient compensation program for vaccine injuries,” adding that “in exchange they avoid costly tort litigation and the occasional disproportionate jury verdict.”