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The latest from Axios Vitals
Just wanted to keep you up to date on our progress as we prepare for launch next month.
I’m pleased to tell you about our newest addition to the team: Bob Herman of Modern Healthcare is joining us to cover the business of health care. He’s widely known for his smart, deeply reported stories about the industry, and we’re thrilled that he’ll be working with Caitlin Owens and contributor Steve Brill to broaden our coverage of the coming health care changes.
Hope you’ll also read Caitlin’s latest piece about the Republicans who want to start working on replacing Obamacare now, rather than repealing now and replacing later.
Meantime, here’s what we’re watching:
Republicans in Congress sound deeply unsure about how to stabilize the Obamacare marketplaces. They know they have to do something to keep health insurers from running for the hills between the repeal vote and the replacement, assuming they can pass one. But in talking to key committee chairmen on Capitol Hill last week, I didn’t hear a lot of confidence that they know what it is.
- Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander: “We’ll have to find ways to make sure insurers are willing to sell insurance in the marketplaces during the transition. We don’t know what those things are right now.”
- House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady: “We’re looking at all [ideas] … No decisions have been made about the timing or the final design of the solution.”
- Brady on whether he thinks there is anything that can be done to stabilize the markets: “I think there is. Thank you.” (Ducks into office.)
That doesn’t mean they have no options. The obvious answer is for Congress to provide temporary funding to help insurers with expensive customers, which is what AHIP wants. But that’s not really what Republicans want to do – not after they spent years attacking the Obama administration for “insurer bailouts.” Let’s see what they say next month.
How would Scott Gottlieb run the FDA? The AEI medical research expert is getting more attention as a possible FDA nominee, along with Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor. If you want to know what Gottlieb’s agenda might look like, you can start with this Senate testimony he delivered in October. The highlights:
- Rewrite FDA’s rules so it can approve cheaper generic substitutes without tripping over itself.
- Encourage Congress to let drug makers provide discounts at the front end, not rebates at the back end.
Jim O’Neill, in context. There has been a lot of reporting about O’Neill’s support for letting the FDA approve new drugs and then find out whether they’re effective. That’s the main thing we know about him, but if you want to find out what else he said, here’s the speech. It was a 2014 presentation where he spent a lot of time talking about why drug development takes so long, and why it’s harder to invest in biotech than software startups.
One telling story from his days at HHS: He said FDA officials used to come to him with requests, saying “industry wants this,” expecting him to be sympathetic because he’s a Republican. But O’Neill said he would push back: Do you mean five scientists working in a garage, or “crony capitalists” with political connections? “So they stopped asking that question,” O’Neill said.
That’s it for now. Please add this email address to your contacts so the newsletter doesn’t end up in your spam folder when we launch for real. And please follow us on the Twitters: @DavidNather, @caitlinnowens, @bobjherman, and @StevenBrill.
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