ADDICTION
Coalition pushes insurance companies to better fund alternatives to opioids
A bipartisan coalition of 37 states and territories are calling on health insurance companies to help find solutions to the nation’s opioid crisis.
West Virginia and Kentucky attorney generals Patrick Morrisey and Andy Beshear announced the coalition in press conference at Marshall University Monday afternoon.
“This is the challenge of our time,” said Andy Beshear to a room or reporters and health experts.
The main goal of the coalition, he said, is to pressure health insurance companies to adopt financial incentives for the prescription of non-opioids pain management techniques such as PT or massage.
“And we are pressing, and I would use the words, pressing, to ultimately change practices,” he said. “To change practices in a way that will lessen the amount of prescription drugs flooding into our communities because ultimately they are the payors. And if they change their incentives to where people don’t make as much for prescribing them or groups don’t provide them as quickly, then we will lessen the number.”
Beshear said the initiative is not intended to combat existing addiction, but rather to begin the development of policy that will prevent future pain patients from becoming addicted themselves. – Joana Suleiman
POSTAL SERVICE
USPS watchdog report has senators wanting answers, possible firings
In a letter to Postmaster General Megan Brennan, Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., urged the Postal Service to “take immediate action” after the Office of Inspector General reported in August that USPS had underreported about 2 billion pieces of mail nationwide over the course of a year.
“The mail continues to be a vital lifeline in rural American and the dependence on this service as a way to deliver goods as well as connect individuals, communities and businesses demands that it be a reliable and accurate mode of delivery,” the senators wrote.
While the OIG report recommends formal training requirements for mail processing center staff and supervisors, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said employees should be fired if anyone intentionally tampered with the late mail count.
“To be clear, any employee who deliberately delayed mail delivery or who knowingly misreported mail delivery should be terminated for violating the trust of America’s hardworking taxpayers and postal ratepayers,” Tester wrote in a separate letter to the postmaster general.
The OIG report claims $85.1 million in USPS revenue is at risk due to the underreporting of late-arriving mail. To put that in perspective, the Postal Service ended the third quarter of fiscal 2017 with a $2.1 billion loss, and has defaulted on tens of billions of dollars in congressionally-mandated payments to pre-fund health benefits for postal retirees. – Joana Suleiman
HOUSING
Trump’s HUD keeps climate-smart rebuilding guide under wraps
Just a few months before two record-breaking hurricanes hit Florida and Texas, the Trump administration received detailed guidelines from consultants for factoring climate change into how federal aid is spent.
Yet, the recommendations, developed to help local officials consider climate risk when they use Department of Housing and Urban Development grants, have stayed under wraps even as the government prepares to disburse billions of dollars to storm victims.
The “Community Resilience Toolkit” was commissioned last year by the Obama administration and delivered to HUD leadership in April. Former officials say the Trump administration’s delay in releasing the report may lie with its skepticism of global warming.
HUD is looking for a way “to tone it down,” Harriet Tregoning, who oversaw the project as head of HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development for President Barack Obama., told Bloomberg News. She said she believes current officials “didn’t want to directly contradict some of the other messages coming out of the administration.”
HUD Secretary Ben Carson, when asked during a press conference last week how his department would ensure that local officials account for future risks when spending disaster aid, said that his staff was “taking into consideration, you know, the flood plains.”
The stakes for rebuilding decisions are enormous. Congress has already approved $7.4 billion in grants after Harvey; Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said his state alone could require $120 billion in federal aid.
“The nation is reeling from repetitive billion-dollar disasters from flooding to wildfires,” Shana Udvardy, a climate preparedness specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. “HUD’s leadership on how communities can build back smarter and safer is needed now more than ever.” – Joana Suleiman
