Category: From California Healthline.org

When the first fire of the season broke out on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California in July, Greg Moon faced a dilemma.

As Hoopa’s fire chief and its pandemic team leader, Moon feared the impact of the blaze on the dense coniferous forests of the reservation, near Redwood National and State Parks, where 3,000 tribal members depend on steelhead trout and coho salmon fishing. He was even more terrified of a deadly viral outbreak in his tribe, which closed its land to visitors in March.

“We’re a high-risk community because we have a lot of diabetes, heart disease and elders that live in multigenerational homes. If a young person gets it, the whole household is going to get it,” Moon said.

Eventually, the three major blazes that burned nearly 100,000 acres around Hoopa were too much for the tribe’s 25-member fire team. Moon had no choice but to request help from federal wildland rangers and other tribal firefighters.

Native American tribes are no strangers to fire. Working with flames to burn away undergrowth and bring nutrients and biodiversity back to lands is an ingrained part of their heritage. But epidemics are also a familiar scourge. With the devastation that pathogens like smallpox and measles brought to Native populations following the arrival of Europeans, tribes are especially wary of COVID-19’s impact.

“When thinking about the potential of COVID-19 repeating history and wiping out entire communities and tribes, there is concern,” said Vernon Stearns, who as the fuels manager for the Spokane Tribe in eastern Washington is responsible for organizing controlled burns.

Some tribes have abandoned traditional fire suppression techniques, watching large swaths of land burn in order to protect a more fragile and essential resource: their people.

“The biggest fear the tribe had was COVID would hit our elders. And they are a very valuable resource of knowledge and connection to our ancestry and teaching of our ways to our children, who we also felt were at risk, and we obviously want to protect them,” said Ron Swaney, fire management officer for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana.

“I’ve seen how [the virus] has affected families close to me. I know the grief,” said Don Jones, fire chief of the Yakama Nation reservation in central Washington, where there have been at least 28 COVID-19 deaths. “I’m not going to send sick people out to fight the fire. I’m not going to say, ‘Come on, guys, toughen up, go out there.’ Life takes precedence over that.”

Around the country, many tribes have full-time fire crews that traditionally aid one another and federal firefighters, sending out teams to help with blazes. But this year’s COVID-19 pandemic has pushed them to reconsider how much help they can give and receive in the face of encroaching infernos.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found Native Americans and Alaskans were 3.5 times more likely than whites to test positive for the coronavirus. The rapid spread of the virus within tribes early in the pandemic led many reservations to aggressively control outside access. Casinos closed. Entrances to tourist areas such as lakes, hiking trails and fisheries were blocked off. Economically many tribes suffered, but COVID caseloads stabilized or declined.

The ongoing fire season is now threatening that progress.

Tribal families often live in multigenerational housing, sometimes in trailers or other small homes with no running water. Their isolated, tightknit communities can be sequestered from COVID-19 spikes in nearby towns but are ripe for an outbreak if the virus enters. Social distancing is a challenge on small, remote reservations. There may be only a single gas station or supermarket, where visiting fire crews would be likely to interact with the tribal population. Many tribes also lack strong internet connections, forcing fire crews to meet in person rather than stage briefings via Zoom, as federal crews have done elsewhere during the pandemic.

On the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula, Montana, COVID-19 hit the fire crew of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes before the fires did. A firefighter who came in direct contact with someone who was sick with the virus in early July took the tribe’s entire 12-person aviation team, consisting of an air attack plane and a helicopter crew, out of business for four days. While no fires were burning at the time, it was a worrisome wake-up call for Swaney.

“For a minute there, I really thought we would all be infected with COVID-19 and I was wondering who would be responding to the fires,” he said.

It was enough to convince Swaney that this year the tribe wouldn’t share any of its 60 firefighters with neighbors. It was a tough call because historically “in fire, when our neighbors need help, we go help,” he said.

At the end of July, Swaney had to accept help from nearly 300 outside firefighters when lightning started a blaze in the mountains surrounding the bison-dotted grass valley his tribe calls home.

After the 3,500-acre Magpie Rock Fire was under control, Swaney learned that a federal wildland firefighter involved had tested positive for COVID-19 during his next assignment. He didn’t appear to have infected Swaney’s team, though four members have tested positive this season.

“We’ve had a lot of close calls,” he said.

Other tribes have sought to bolster their fire crews to do without the help of off-reservation teams. The Spokane Tribe in Washington earmarked some of the $19 million it received from the CARES Act to hire an additional 10-person seasonal crew. It hoped to aggressively attack any fire and keep it small, thereby avoiding the need for outside firefighters who might also bring in the coronavirus, Stearns said.

The Yakama Nation, near the Oregon border, was still struggling with a coronavirus outbreak that had infected at least 6% of its population when fires started in July. The crews learned quickly that facing wildfire and a pandemic simultaneously would be an exercise in trade-offs.

Early in the effort, five fire crew members were taken off the line when several people got sick, leaving the 20 remaining members to make do. Federal firefighting is stretched thin as megafires consume vast areas of the West Coast — and other tribes were no help because they’ve restricted their fire teams’ movement to prevent COVID spread.

“We had no one else to call on. … It was pretty tough,” said Jones. “The stress level has gone up. You’re worried about exposure all the time.”

Ultimately, eight Yakama crew members tested positive for COVID-19. One of the firefighters who tested positive had already lost two family members to the virus. Another spread COVID-19 to a family member who ended up at the hospital on a ventilator but survived.

“Everyone in my program was affected one way or another,” Jones said. “Everyone lost somebody.”

The West’s brutal fire season is forcing tribes to concentrate on fires that start by lightning or accident, with no resources to give to prescribed burning.

“These fires are just gobbling up the ground,” said Jones. His tribe canceled the carefully controlled fires it normally conducts in September to avoid bringing together the large numbers of people needed to do them.

“Fires are just going to get bigger,” Jones said. “If we can’t do anything about it, we can’t do anything about it. We have to make sure everyone’s healthy first.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Note to Readers: Sarah Jane Tribble spent more than a year and half reporting on a small town in Kansas that lost its only hospital. This month, KHN and St. Louis Public Radio will launch “Where It Hurts,” a podcast exploring the often painful cracks growing in America’s health system that leave people vulnerable — and without the care they need. Season One is “No Mercy,” focusing on the hospital closure in Fort Scott, Kansas — and what happens to the people left behind, surviving the best way they know how. You can listen to Episode One on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

David Usher is sitting on $1.7 million he’s scared to spend.

The money lent from the federal government is meant to help hospitals and other health care providers weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some hospital administrators have called it a payday loan program that is now, brutally, due for repayment at a time when they still need help.

Coronavirus cases have “picked up recently and it’s quite worrying,” said Usher, chief financial officer at the 12-bed Edwards County Medical Center in rural western Kansas. Usher said he would like to use the federal loan money to build a negative-pressure room, a common strategy to keep contagious patients apart from those in the rest of the hospital.

But he’s not sure it’s safe to spend that cash. Officially, the total repayment of the loan is due this month. Otherwise, according to the loan’s terms, federal regulators will stop reimbursing the hospitals for Medicare patients’ treatments until the loan is repaid in full.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not yet begun trying to recoup its investment, with the coronavirus still affecting communities nationwide, but hospital leaders fear it may come calling for repayment any day now.

Hospital leaders across the country said there has been no communication from CMS on whether or when they will adjust the repayment deadline. A CMS spokesperson had not responded to questions by press time.

“It’s great having the money,” Usher said. “But if I don’t know how much I get to keep, I don’t get to spend the money wisely and effectively on the facility.”

Usher took out the loan from Medicare’s Accelerated and Advance Payments program. The program, which existed long before the pandemic, was generally used sparingly by hospitals faced with emergencies such as hurricanes or tornadoes. It was expanded for use during the coronavirus pandemic — part of billions approved in federal relief funds for health care providers this spring.

A full repayment of a hospital’s loan is technically due 120 days after it was received. If it is not paid, Medicare will stop reimbursing claims until it recoups the money it is owed — a point spelled out in the program’s rules. Medicare reimburses nearly $60 billion in payments to health care providers nationwide under Medicare’s Part A program, which makes payments to hospitals.

More than 65% of the nation’s small, rural hospitals — many of which were operating at a deficit before the pandemic — jumped at the Medicare loans when the pandemic hit because they were the first funds available, said Maggie Elehwany, former vice president of government affairs for the National Rural Health Association.

CMS halted new loan applications to the program at the end of April.

“The pandemic has simply gone on longer than anyone anticipated back in March,” said Joanna Hiatt Kim, vice president of payment policy and analysis for the American Hospital Association. The trade association sent a letter to CMS in late July asking for a delay in the recoupment.

On Monday, the House Appropriations Committee included partial relief for all hospitals in a new government funding plan. The committee’s proposal would extend the start of the repayment period for hospitals and the amount of time they are allowed to take to repay.

The continuing resolution that includes this language about relief for hospitals (among many, many other things) is still being hammered out, though it does face its own deadline: It must be approved by the House and the Senate within the next nine days or the federal government faces a shutdown.

Tom Nickels, executive vice president at the AHA, said his organization appreciates the House committee’s effort to address the loans in the new bill, but full forgiveness of the loans is still needed.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) has called for changes to the loan repayment period for months and said Monday “our work is far from over.”

“We are still in the middle of this crisis — from both health and economic standpoints,” Shaheen said.

Meanwhile, hospital administrators like Peter Wright are holding their breath, waiting to see if, in order to settle the debt, Medicare will stop making payments to hospitals, even as facilities continue to grapple with coronavirus in their communities.

“The feds, if you owe them money, they just take it,” said Wright, who oversees two small hospitals for Central Maine Healthcare in Bridgton, Maine. He said his health care system took the money because “we had no other choice; it was a cash flow issue.”

For many hospitals, Medicare payments make up 40% or more of their revenue. Not being reimbursed by Medicare would be crippling — akin to a household losing nearly half its income.

“We have no idea what we’re going to do if we have to pay it back as quickly as they say,” Wright said.

In rural Kentucky, hospital executive Sheila Currans said she “vacillated” for about a week or so trying to decide whether to tap the loan program for her hospital — she knew it would have to be repaid and worried that could prove difficult.

“It was a desperate time,” said Currans, chief executive of Harrison Memorial Hospital in Cynthiana, Kentucky. Harrison Memorial was the first hospital in Kentucky to treat a COVID-19 patient in early March, she said.

The hospital immediately quarantined dozens of staff members and shut down elective procedures. And with COVID confirmed in the community, there was a “horrible fear,” Currans said, of getting infected that kept people from seeking outpatient care as well.

“Through March and April and most of May, I was in a complete spiral,” Currans said. By the end of April, Currans said, her hospital was losing millions of dollars. To cope with the pandemic, she furloughed staff and turned one wing of the hospital into a “cough clinic” to be used exclusively by patients whose symptoms suggested they might be infected with the coronavirus.

Currans said the hospital is still seeing COVID cases, but patients are beginning to return for other services, such as outpatient clinics.

In terms of the hospital’s finances, “it’s still not a wonderful time,” Currans said. The Medicare loan “as well as all the other support from the federal government helped us at least — for now — survive it.”

She’s hoping the repayment demand will be pushed back to 2021 or, perhaps the loan will be forgiven.

“I know it’s a pipe dream,” Currans said. “But this has been a historic event.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

Michael Costanzo, a Colorado farmer diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2016, has a well-honed ritual: Every six months, he takes an IV infusion of a medicine, Rituxan, to manage his disease, which has no cure. Then he figures out how to manage the bill, which costs thousands of dollars.

For a time, the routine held steady: The price billed to his health insurance for one infusion would cost $6,201 to $6,841. Costanzo’s health insurance covered most of it, and he paid the rest out-of-pocket.

But last fall the cost for the same 20-year-old drug and dosage jumped to $10,320, even though he was covered by the same insurance.

“Why does it have to increase in price all of a sudden?” wondered Costanzo, who lives in a small town about 50 miles north of Denver.

“I think greed is a huge problem,” he said.

As drug prices spiral upward, politicians in Washington, D.C., and in state governments across the country have sought to address the problem in limited ways, focusing mostly on one drug: insulin, a drug more than 7 million Americans rely on to manage diabetes and whose price tag more than doubled from 2012 to 2017.

With comprehensive drug price legislation stalled in Washington during the COVID-19 state of emergency, seven states in the midst of the pandemic enacted insulin payment caps of less than $100 per month, bringing the total to eight; five more have proposed legislation. In March, President Donald Trump’s health officials announced a Medicare test project limiting seniors’ monthly out-of-pocket costs to $35. In July, he signed four executive actions targeting insulin and a handful of other medications, boasting, “It’s going to have an incredible impact.”

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Insulin took center stage last year, after moving demonstrations by mothers who caravanned to Canada to buy lifesaving medicine for their children at a tenth of the U.S. price; they swarmed the halls of Congress.

The measures that have resulted so far have not solved a far more widespread problem: escalating drug prices across the board — a problem that voters, left and right, say Congress must fix.

Underlying the problem is that lawmakers spent much of last year at loggerheads about whether the federal government should have the power to set prices or limit price increases. Prospects of comprehensive legislation already in the works slipped away this spring as Congress turned its focus to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 150,000 Americans and tanked the country’s economy.

So state lawmakers played whack-a-mole, targeting the drug with the most notoriety, and tackled insulin’s cost to patients. But patients like Costanzo — among the millions who rely on other vital drugs — struggle evermore to afford unchecked price increases for everything from HIV/AIDS and depression to asthma, autoimmune disorders and Type 2 diabetes.

A 2019 survey from the Scripps Research Translational Institute published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the costs of 17 top-selling brand-name drugs more than doubled from 2012 to 2017. Many of the drugs that made the list are household names: Lipitor and Zetia for high cholesterol, Advair and Symbicort for asthma, Lyrica for pain and Chantix for smoking cessation.

“The general public doesn’t realize this is happening with all sorts of drugs,” Costanzo said. “We’re all suffering from increased prices.”

***

Insulin was a natural poster child for pharmaceutical greed, encapsulating America’s problem with high drug prices in a neat package that few, if any, other medications do as effectively.

“You have an illustration of the problem — politics gone awry and capitalism gone awry,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster. “They think of it as being emblematic of everything that’s going on with the system.”

Three pharmaceutical companies dominate the market for the diabetes treatment that has essentially the same formula as when it was introduced in the 1920s. Not taking insulin can quickly turn fatal. In 2017, Minnesota resident Alec Smith died at age 26 after rationing his insulin because he couldn’t afford it.

People dying “is what it takes for Congress to actually commit money and act, and then we solve these problems eventually,” said Andy Slavitt, who was acting head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Obama administration.

Yet proponents of lowering drug costs say an effort centered on a single drug could backfire, and it did when COVID captured center stage.

“Everywhere in this country people are angry about their drug prices,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, a Washington, D.C.-based group that lobbies Congress and runs campaign ads in support of lower prices. “The people with cancer, the people with autoimmune problems, the people with multiple sclerosis, the people who are taking a variety of drugs that are wildly overpriced, are going to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, what about me?’”

In early March, University of Pittsburgh researchers published research finding that, without discounts, list prices of brand-name drugs were rising about 9% a year. Late last year, House Democrats passed a bill that would let the federal government set prices for hundreds of drugs and cap seniors’ out-of-pocket costs for medication at $2,000. Trump opposed the bill, calling on Congress to send him a drug pricing bill that has bipartisan support.

“Let’s be clear — these price hikes aren’t because the medicines got better or there was a significant increase in research and development,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) in a March 5 floor speech. The chairman of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee spearheaded a bipartisan drug pricing bill with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat. “No, this was because the pharmaceutical companies could do it and get away with it.”

While Congress dithers and the topic periodically becomes the subject of a presidential tweet, patients continue to fend for themselves.

Tara Terminiello has seen the total underlying cost of her son’s anti-seizure medication, Topamax, skyrocket to about $1,300 a month, hundreds more than when he started taking it over a decade ago.

In Texas, Joseph Fabian, a public school teacher in San Antonio with health insurance through his job, has relied on inhalers since childhood to manage his allergy-induced asthma. In February 2019, he paid $330.98 for a three-pack of Symbicort inhalers, which he typically uses twice a day but more frequently during allergy season.

A year later and after a change in his health insurance plan, Fabian’s costs tripled, to $348.95 for a single inhaler, he said in an interview. According to the Scripps’ drug pricing study, the median cost of Symbicort rose from $225 in January 2012 to $308 in December 2017.

“There’s no way I can keep working out $350 every month and a half,” Fabian said.

***

Chances that Congress will pass comprehensive drug pricing legislation before the 2020 election have slipped away as lawmakers focus on additional COVID-19 relief. Moreover, the Trump administration, Congress and the public are now hoping for pandemic deliverance by the very same drug companies that have been raising prices as they develop potential virus treatments and vaccines. PhRMA, the powerful industry trade group, has seized the moment with ad campaigns emphasizing the sector’s enormous value.

The stalemate provides little solace for patients like Costanzo, whose medicine, Rituxan, made by Genentech, was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997 to treat lymphoma and can be used off-label for MS. It is one of seven medications with price increases unsupported by new clinical evidence, according to a report from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. ICER noted that over 24 months, the net price — the price after any discounts from drug companies are factored in — “increased by almost 14%, which results in an estimated increase in drug spending of approximately $549 million.”

In a statement, Genentech spokesperson Priscilla White said ICER’s analysis was “significantly limited” because it didn’t account for “meaningful, high-quality, and peer-reviewed evidence supporting the clinical and economic benefits of Rituxan.” White said the company did not increase Rituxan’s price during the period in which Costanzo’s bill rose and wouldn’t speculate on the change without knowing “other factors” that may have contributed.

“We take decisions related to the prices of our medicines very seriously, taking into consideration their value to patients and society, the investments required to continue discovering new treatments, and the need for broad access,” she said.

Costanzo was prescribed the drug by two neurologists and hasn’t had any acute relapses since he started the infusions. He eventually did get a financial reprieve, not thanks to Washington, but by enrolling in a patient discount program operated by the very drug company that sets Rituxan’s price, a program he said was an “absolute lifesaver” financially.

Genentech said its patient foundation provides free medicine to more than 50,000 patients each year. Costanzo got his first free dose in July.

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Betty Jones voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, but the lifelong Republican has her doubts she will do it again this year.

The federal response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed about 200,000 Americans and forced older adults to restrict their activities has her contemplating a leadership change.

It “makes me unsure,” said Jones, 78, of Largo, in Pinellas County, Florida. Before COVID-19, she said, she would have definitely voted for Trump.

Polls show that many people will have the pandemic and its public health and economic consequences on their minds when they cast their votes — whether by mail or in person — this fall. Early in-person voting starts Oct. 19 in most Florida counties, including Pinellas.

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Even if the issue leads a tiny proportion of them to change their choice for president, it could have huge consequences in battleground states like Florida, which Trump carried in 2016 by about 1 percentage point.

Within the Sunshine State, few places loom as large in the race for the White House as here in Pinellas County, the largest swing county in the ultimate swing state.

Pinellas, with nearly 1 million residents, has been a political bellwether in recent years, having voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1980 — except for the disputed race between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.

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This county just east of Tampa known for its sugar-white beaches is nearly evenly split between the major parties, with 251,000 registered Democrats and 245,000 registered Republicans. An additional 200,000 voters registered as independents.

The city of St. Petersburg, in the southern part of the county, is a Democratic stronghold, while the northern half of the county is more Republican. The county is largely a white suburban area, with a large, older middle-class electorate.

President Barack Obama twice won Pinellas — and Florida — but Trump outpaced Hillary Clinton here by 5,500 votes out of the nearly 500,000 cast.

Democrats are hoping Pinellas will help tip the statewide balance to former Vice President Joe Biden this fall — and they expect a boost from residents spooked by the pandemic. The county has been hit hard by COVID-19 with more than 20,000 cases, 2,000 hospitalizations and 700 deaths. It has the highest COVID-19 death rate of the state’s most populous counties.

Older voters have been deeply affected by the coronavirus since they face a high risk of serious complications and have had to curtail their lives dramatically to avoid the virus. Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist in Tallahassee, said those factors should help Biden do well with this key voting group. About 1 in 4 Pinellas voters are 65 or older.

“There is no world where we win Florida without Pinellas,” Schale said. “If we win there by a few points, it’s a harbinger of good things.”

A tiny shift in voter preferences could have major implications, he added.

“We are talking like 4% to 5% of the electorate in Florida is truly up for grabs, but in a state where the vote was decided by 1%, that is a huge chunk of the electorate,” Schale said.

While about one-third of Florida voters said the economy was their leading issue in the presidential campaign, Democrats were seven times more likely than Republicans to cite the coronavirus outbreak as their top issue, according to a KFF and Cook Political Report survey of three Sun Belt states released Thursday. Nearly a third of Democrats said the pandemic is their most important issue, while just 4% of Republicans and 17% of independents chose the coronavirus outbreak.

The poll of 1,009 Florida voters was conducted Aug. 29 to Sept. 13. The margin of error for Florida results is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The survey found Biden and Trump virtually tied in Florida with 11% undecided.

National surveys show the pandemic — and its impact on the U.S. economy — are key issues for voters.

A Pew Research Center poll in August found that 62% of voters overall say the outbreak will be a very important factor in their decision about whom to support in the fall. For Trump supporters, however, the economy (88%) and violent crime (74%) are the most salient issues.

By contrast, the largest shares of Biden supporters view health care (84%) and the coronavirus outbreak (82%) as very important. According to an August Georgetown University poll of Florida and other battleground states, 38% of respondents said they approve of how Trump is handling COVID-19, while 60% said they disapprove.

John Andrew Barnes, 33, of Largo, said he knew he liked Biden before the pandemic, but the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 reinforced his decision. Trump’s “blatant distrust” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other experts and what Barnes viewed as a lack of national response left him unsatisfied, he said.

Yet, among Republicans, the president’s decisions on coronavirus policies have played well and some are nervous that Biden’s efforts to curb the virus might undercut the economy even more.

Ricard Gregorie, 54, of Largo, said the federal government’s response to the pandemic has “absolutely been incredible.” For Gregorie, the quick distribution of ventilators and maintaining an open economy were decisions that reaffirmed his support for Trump. “We can’t ask for miracles,” he said.

Carl Joyner, 35, a firefighter who lives in St. Petersburg, said COVID-19 has not affected his support for Trump. He opposes anyone who wants to force him to wear a mask. He backs Trump’s position to quickly open businesses and schools.

“People are living paycheck to paycheck here and the hospitality industry here really got lambasted,” he said.

Anthony Pedicini, a GOP political consultant based in Tampa, said the pandemic may not have a big influence because most voters were locked in on their choice for president before the pandemic hit. “If you didn’t like the president before the pandemic you don’t like him after,” Pedicini said. “But if you liked him before you still will.”

That’s also what more than a dozen Pinellas voters said in interviews in shopping centers over the past month.

Pinellas has a large working-class community that is trending Republican, Pedicini said. It’s a county in transition with many elders aging out and a younger, more diverse population moving in.

Most political experts say that even in swing counties fewer than 10% of voters switch their party support from election to election. As a result, victory likely depends on who can turn out his base of voters.

In Florida, Hispanic as well as Black turnout declined markedly in 2016, from 59% in 2012 to 52%, according to the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Given Trump’s poor approval ratings, the upheaval in the economy and polls showing voters’ disdain of the federal response to the pandemic, there is just no way you would expect the president to win reelection, said Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida. “If history holds, Joe Biden will be president. But Trump is a candidate who breaks all the rules.”

On Feb. 27, 2018, I got an email from the Heritage Foundation, alerting me to a news conference that afternoon held by Republican attorneys general of Texas and other states. It was referred to only as a “discussion about the Affordable Care Act lawsuit.”

I sent the following note to my editor: “I’m off to the Hill anyway. I could stop by this. You never know what it might morph into.”

Few people took that case very seriously — barely a handful of reporters attended the news conference. But it has now “morphed into” the latest existential threat against the Affordable Care Act, scheduled for oral arguments at the Supreme Court a week after the general election in November. And with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, that case could well morph into the threat that brings down the law in its entirety.

Democrats are raising alarms about the future of the law without Ginsburg. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday morning, said that part of the strategy by President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans to quickly fill her seat was to help undermine the ACA.

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“The president is rushing to make some kind of a decision because … Nov. 10 is when the arguments begin on the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “He doesn’t want to crush the virus. He wants to crush the Affordable Care Act.”

Ginsburg’s death throws an already chaotic general election campaign during a pandemic into more turmoil. But in the longer term, her absence from the bench could accelerate a trend underway to get cases to the Supreme Court toward invalidating the ACA and rolling back reproductive freedoms for women.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The ACA Under Fire — Again

The GOP attorneys general argued in February 2018 that the Republican-sponsored tax cut bill Congress passed two months earlier had rendered the ACA unconstitutional by reducing to zero the ACA’s penalty for not having insurance. They based their argument on Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 conclusion that the ACA was valid, interpreting that penalty as a constitutionally appropriate tax.

Most legal scholars, including several who challenged the law before the Supreme Court in 2012 and again in 2015, find the argument that the entire law should fall to be unconvincing. “If courts invalidate an entire law merely because Congress eliminates or revises one part, as happened here, that may well inhibit necessary reform of federal legislation in the future by turning it into an ‘all or nothing’ proposition,” wrote a group of conservative and liberal law professors in a brief filed in the case.

Still, in December 2018, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas accepted the GOP argument and declared the law unconstitutional. In December 2019, a three-judge 5th Circuit appeals court panel in New Orleans agreed that without the penalty the requirement to buy insurance is unconstitutional. But it sent the case back to O’Connor to suggest that perhaps the entire law need not fall.

Not wanting to wait the months or years that reconsideration would take, Democratic attorneys general defending the ACA asked the Supreme Court to hear the case this year. (Democrats are defending the law in court because the Trump administration decided to support the GOP attorneys general’s case.) The court agreed to take the case but scheduled arguments for the week after the November election.

While the fate of the ACA was and is a live political issue, few legal observers were terribly worried about the legal outcome of the case now known as Texas v. California, if only because the case seemed much weaker than the 2012 and 2015 cases in which Roberts joined the court’s four liberals. In the 2015 case, which challenged the validity of federal tax subsidies helping millions of Americans buy health insurance on the ACA’s marketplaces, both Roberts and now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold the law.

But without Ginsburg, the case could wind up in a 4-4 tie, even if Roberts supports the law’s constitutionality. That could let the lower-court ruling stand, although it would not be binding on other courts outside of the 5th Circuit. The court could also put off the arguments or, if the Republican Senate replaces Ginsburg with another conservative justice before arguments are heard, Republicans could secure a 5-4 ruling against the law. Some court observers argue that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has not favored invalidating an entire statute if only part of it is flawed and might not approve overturning the ACA. Still, what started out as an effort to energize Republican voters for the 2018 midterms after Congress failed to “repeal and replace” the health law in 2017 could end up throwing the nation’s entire health system into chaos.

At least 20 million Americans — and likely many more who sought coverage since the start of the coronavirus pandemic — who buy insurance through the ACA marketplaces or have Medicaid through the law’s expansion could lose coverage right away. Many millions more would lose the law’s popular protections guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting health conditions, including those who have had COVID-19.

Adult children under age 26 would no longer be guaranteed the right to remain on their parents’ health plans, and Medicare patients would lose enhanced prescription drug coverage. Women would lose guaranteed access to birth control at no out-of-pocket cost.

But a sudden elimination would affect more than just health care consumers. Insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals and doctors have all changed the way they do business because of incentives and penalties in the health law. If it’s struck down, many of the “rules of the road” would literally be wiped away, including billing and payment mechanisms.

A new Democratic president could not drop the lawsuit, because the Trump administration is not the plaintiff (the GOP attorneys general are). But a Democratic Congress and president could in theory make the entire issue go away by reinstating the penalty for failure to have insurance, even at a minimal amount. However, as far as the health law goes, for now, nothing is a sure thing.

As Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in health issues, tweeted: “Among other things, the Affordable Care Act now dangles from a thread.”

Reproductive Rights

A woman’s right to abortion — and even to birth control — also has been hanging by a thread at the high court for more than a decade. This past term, Roberts joined the liberals to invalidate a Louisiana law that would have closed most of the state’s abortion clinics, but he made it clear it was not a vote for abortion rights. The Louisiana law was too similar to a Texas law the court (without his vote) struck down in 2016, Roberts argued.

Ginsburg had been a stalwart supporter of reproductive freedom for women. In her nearly three decades on the court, she always voted with backers of abortion rights and birth control and led the dissenters in 2007 when the court upheld a federal ban on a specific abortion procedure.

Adding a justice opposed to abortion to the bench — which is what Trump has promised his supporters — would almost certainly tilt the court in favor of far more dramatic restrictions on the procedure and possibly an overturn of the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade.

But not only is abortion on the line. The court in recent years has repeatedly ruled that employers with religious objections can refuse to provide contraception.

And waiting in the lower-court pipeline are cases involving federal funding of Planned Parenthood in both the Medicaid and federal family planning programs, and the ability of individual health workers to decline to participate in abortion and other procedures.

For Ginsburg, those issues came down to a clear question of a woman’s guarantee of equal status under the law.

“Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right ‘to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation,’” she wrote in her dissent in that 2007 abortion case. “Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized, is intimately connected to ‘their ability to control their reproductive lives.’’

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Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen.

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Laura Derrick lived with an undiagnosed medical condition for decades, and when she finally got answers and access to effective treatment, medical bills threatened to swamp her family. During her personal fight for affordable health care, she was inspired by and swept up in a historic political fight.

This is a great time for Derrick’s story, which is all about persistence through difficult and uncertain times. In late 2018, it was one of the first stories on “An Arm and a Leg,” and it has special resonance right now when we’re all enduring a lot.

Bonus: We catch up with Derrick for an update.

“An Arm and a Leg” is a co-production of Kaiser Health News and Public Road Productions.

To keep in touch with “An Arm and a Leg,” subscribe to the newsletter. You can also follow the show on Facebook and Twitter. And if you’ve got stories to tell about the health care system, the producers would love to hear from you.

To hear all Kaiser Health News podcasts, click here.

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President Donald Trump, who seems intent on announcing a COVID-19 vaccine before Election Day, could legally authorize a vaccine over the objections of experts, officials at the Food and Drug Administration and even vaccine manufacturers, who have pledged not to release any vaccine unless it’s proved safe and effective.

In podcasts, public forums, social media and medical journals, a growing number of prominent health leaders say they fear that Trump — who has repeatedly signaled his desire for the swift approval of a vaccine and his displeasure with perceived delays at the FDA — will take matters into his own hands, running roughshod over the usual regulatory process.

It would reflect another attempt by a norm-breaking administration, poised to ram through a Supreme Court nominee opposed to existing abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act, to inject politics into sensitive public health decisions. Trump has repeatedly contradicted the advice of senior scientists on COVID-19 while pushing controversial treatments for the disease.

If the executive branch were to overrule the FDA’s scientific judgment, a vaccine of limited efficacy and, worse, unknown side effects could be rushed to market.

The worries intensified over the weekend, after Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services, asserted his agency’s rule-making authority over the FDA. HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley said Azar’s decision had no bearing on the vaccine approval process.

Vaccines are typically approved by the FDA. Alternatively, Azar — who reports directly to Trump — can issue an emergency use authorization, even before any vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective in late-stage clinical trials.

“Yes, this scenario is certainly possible legally and politically,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who outlined such an event in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said it “seems frighteningly more plausible each day.”

Vaccine experts and public health officials are particularly vexed by the possibility because it could ruin the fragile public confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine. It might put scientific authorities in the position of urging people not to be vaccinated after years of coaxing hesitant parents to ignore baseless fears.

Physicians might refuse to administer a vaccine approved with inadequate data, said Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in a recent webinar. “You could have a safe, effective vaccine that no one wants to take.” A recent KFF poll found that 54% of Americans would not submit to a COVID-19 vaccine authorized before Election Day.

White House spokesperson Judd Deere dismissed the scientists’ concerns, saying Trump cared only about the public’s safety and health. “This false narrative that the media and Democrats have created that politics is influencing approvals is not only false but is a danger to the American public,” he said.

Usually, the FDA approves vaccines only after companies submit years of data proving that a vaccine is safe and effective. But a 2004 law allows the FDA to issue an emergency use authorization with much less evidence, as long as the vaccine “may be effective” and its “known and potential benefits” outweigh its “known and potential risks.”

Many scientists doubt a vaccine could meet those criteria before the election. But the terms might be legally vague enough to allow the administration to take such steps.

Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the government program aiming to more quickly develop COVID-19 vaccines, said it’s “extremely unlikely” that vaccine trial results will be ready before the end of October.

Trump, however, has insisted repeatedly that a vaccine to fight the pandemic that has claimed nearly 200,000 American lives will be distributed starting next month. He reiterated that claim Saturday at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, N.C.

The vaccine will be ready “in a matter of weeks,” he said. “We will end the pandemic from China.”

Although pharmaceutical companies have launched three clinical trials in the United States, no one can say with certainty when those trials will have enough data to determine whether the vaccines are safe and effective.

• Officials at Moderna, whose vaccine is being tested in 30,000 volunteers, have said their studies could produce a result by the end of the year, although the final analysis could take place next spring.
• Pfizer executives, who have expanded their clinical trial to 44,000 participants, boast that they could know their vaccine works by the end of October.
• AstraZeneca’s U.S. vaccine trial, which was scheduled to enroll 30,000 volunteers, is on hold pending an investigation of a possible vaccine-related illness.

Scientists have warned for months that the Trump administration could try to win the election with an “October surprise,” authorizing a vaccine that hasn’t been fully tested. “I don’t think people are crazy to be thinking about all of this,” said William Schultz, a partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm who served as a former FDA commissioner for policy and as general counsel for HHS.

“You’ve got a president saying you’ll have an approval in October. Everybody’s wondering how that could happen.”

In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, conservative former FDA commissioners Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan argued that presidential intrusion was unlikely because the FDA’s “thorough and transparent process doesn’t lend itself to meddling. Any deviation would quickly be apparent.”

But the administration has demonstrated a willingness to bend the agency to its will. The FDA has been criticized for issuing emergency authorizations for two COVID-19 treatments that were boosted by the president but lacked strong evidence to support them: hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma.

Azar has sidelined the FDA in other ways, such as by blocking the agency from regulating lab-developed tests, including tests for the novel coronavirus.

Although FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times he would be willing to approve emergency use of a vaccine before large-scale studies conclude, agency officials also have pledged to ensure the safety of any COVID-19 vaccines.

A senior FDA official who oversees vaccine approvals, Dr. Peter Marks, has said he will quit if his agency rubber-stamps an unproven COVID-19 vaccine.

“I think there would be an outcry from the public health community second to none, which is my worst nightmare — my worst nightmare — because we will so confuse the public,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in his weekly podcast.

Still, “even if a company did not want it to be done, even if the FDA did not want it to be done, he could still do that,” said Osterholm, in his podcast. “I hope that we’d never see that happen, but we have to entertain that’s a possibility.”

In the New England Journal editorial, Avorn and co-author Dr. Aaron Kesselheim wondered whether Trump might invoke the 1950 Defense Production Act to force reluctant drug companies to manufacture their vaccines.

But Trump would have to sue a company to enforce the Defense Production Act, and the company would have a strong case in refusing, said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.

Also, he noted that Trump could not invoke the Defense Production Act unless a vaccine were “scientifically justified and approved by the FDA.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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El presidente Donald Trump, que parece decidido a anunciar una vacuna para COVID-19 antes del día de las elecciones, podría autorizarla legalmente a pesar de las objeciones de expertos, funcionarios de la Administración de Alimentos y Medicamentos (FDA) e incluso los fabricantes, que se han comprometido a no lanzar nada a menos que haya demostrado ser seguro y eficaz.

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En podcasts, foros públicos, redes sociales y revistas médicas, un número creciente de líderes de salud dicen que temen que Trump, quien ha señalado repetidamente su deseo de que la vacuna se apruebe rápido, tomará el asunto en sus manos, pasando por alto el proceso habitual.

Esto reflejaría otro intento por inyectar política en decisiones sensibles de salud pública. Trump ha contradicho repetidamente el consejo de científicos de alto nivel sobre COVID-19 y ha avalado tratamientos controversiales para tratar la enfermedad.

Las preocupaciones se intensificaron durante este fin de semana, después que Alex Azar, secretario de Salud y Servicios Humanos (HHS), afirmara la autoridad de su agencia sobre la FDA para establecer normas.

La FDA suele aprobar las vacunas. Pero Azar, que informa directamente a Trump, puede emitir una autorización de uso de emergencia, incluso antes que se haya demostrado que la vacuna es segura y eficaz en ensayos clínicos en etapa avanzada.

“Sí, este escenario es ciertamente posible legal y políticamente”, afirmó el doctor Jerry Avorn, profesor de medicina en la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard, quien describió este escenario en el New England Journal of Medicine. Dijo que “parece más aterrador y posible cada día”.

Expertos en vacunas y funcionarios de salud pública están particularmente molestos por la posibilidad porque podría arruinar la frágil confianza del público en una vacuna para COVID-19. Podría poner a las autoridades científicas en la posición de instar a las personas a no vacunarse después de años de intentar persuadir a los padres indecisos para que ignoraran temores infundados.

Los médicos podrían negarse a administrar una vacuna aprobada con datos inadecuados, dijo el doctor Preeti Malani, director de salud y profesor de medicina en la Universidad de Michigan en Ann Arbor, en un seminario virtual. “Podrías tener una vacuna segura y eficaz que nadie quiera usar”.

Una encuesta reciente de KFF encontró que el 54% de los estadounidenses no se pondría una vacuna para COVID-19 autorizada antes del día de las elecciones.

Judd Deere, vocero de la Casa Blanca, desestimó las preocupaciones de los científicos y dijo que a Trump solo le importaba la seguridad y la salud del público.

Por lo general, la FDA aprueba las vacunas solo después que las empresas presentan años de datos que demuestran que una vacuna es segura y eficaz. Pero una ley de 2004 permite a la FDA emitir una autorización de uso de emergencia con mucha menos evidencia, siempre que la vacuna “pueda ser efectiva” y sus “beneficios conocidos y potenciales” superen sus “riesgos conocidos y potenciales”.

Muchos científicos dudan que una vacuna pueda cumplir con esos criterios antes de las elecciones. Pero los términos pueden ser lo suficientemente vagos desde el punto de vista legal como para permitir que la administración tome tales medidas.

Moncef Slaoui, asesor científico jefe de Operation Warp Speed, el programa gubernamental que apunta a desarrollar más rápidamente las vacunas para COVID-19, dijo que es “extremadamente improbable” que los resultados del ensayo de una vacuna estén listos antes de finales de octubre.

Sin embargo, Trump ha insistido repetidamente en que a partir del próximo mes se distribuirá una vacuna para combatir la pandemia que ya se ha cobrado cerca de 200,000 vidas en el país. Reiteró esa afirmación el sábado 19 de septiembre en un mitín de campaña en Fayetteville, Carolina del Norte.

La vacuna estará lista “en cuestión de semanas”, dijo. “Pondremos fin a la pandemia de China”.

Aunque compañías farmacéuticas han lanzado tres ensayos clínicos en los Estados Unidos, nadie puede decir con certeza cuándo tendrán suficientes datos para determinar si las vacunas son seguras y efectivas.

• Los funcionarios de Moderna, cuya vacuna se está probando en 30,000 voluntarios, han dicho que sus estudios podrían producir resultados para fin de año, aunque el análisis final podría realizarse la próxima primavera.
• Los ejecutivos de Pfizer, que han ampliado su ensayo clínico a 44,000 participantes, aseguran que sabrán si su vacuna funciona a finales de octubre.
• El ensayo de la vacuna de AstraZeneca en los Estados Unidos, que estaba programado para inscribir a 30,000 voluntarios, está entre paréntesis por una posible enfermedad relacionada con la vacuna.

Los científicos han advertido por meses que la administración Trump podría intentar ganar las elecciones con una “sorpresa de octubre”, autorizando una vacuna que no haya sido completamente probada.

En un artículo de opinión publicado en The Wall Street Journal, los ex comisionados conservadores de la FDA, Scott Gottlieb y Mark McClellan, argumentaron que la intrusión presidencial era poco probable porque el “proceso completo y transparente de la FDA no se presta a la intromisión. Cualquier desviación se haría evidente muy rápido”.

Pero la administración ha demostrado su voluntad de doblegar a la agencia a su voluntad. La FDA ha sido criticada por emitir autorizaciones de emergencia para dos tratamientos de COVID-19 que fueron impulsados ​​por el presidente, pero que carecían de evidencia sólida que los respaldara: la hidroxicloroquina y el plasma convaleciente.

Azar ha dejado de lado a la FDA de otras maneras, como impidiendo que la agencia regule las pruebas desarrolladas en laboratorio, incluidas las del nuevo coronavirus.

Aunque el comisionado de la FDA, Stephen Hahn, le dijo al Financial Times que estaría dispuesto a aprobar el uso de emergencia de una vacuna antes de que concluyeran los estudios a gran escala, los funcionarios de la agencia también se han comprometido a garantizar la seguridad de cualquier vacuna para COVID-19.

El doctor Peter Marks, alto funcionario de la FDA que supervisa las aprobaciones de vacunas, ha dicho que renunciará si su agencia aprueba una vacuna para COVID-19 que no esté bien probada.

“Creo que habría una protesta insuperable de la comunidad de salud pública, que es mi peor pesadilla, mi peor pesadilla, porque confundiremos al público”, dijo el doctor Michael Osterholm, director del Centro de Investigación de Enfermedades Infecciosas y Políticas en la Universidad de Minnesota, en su podcast semanal.

Aún así, “incluso si una empresa no quisiera que se hiciera, incluso si la FDA no quisiera que se hiciera, él podría hacerlo”, dijo Osterholm, en su podcast. “Espero que nunca veamos que eso suceda, pero tenemos que considerar que es una posibilidad”.

En el editorial del New England Journal, Avorn y el coautor, el doctor Aaron Kesselheim, se preguntaron si Trump podría invocar la Ley de Producción de Defensa de 1950 para obligar a las farmacéuticas reacias a fabricar sus vacunas.

Pero Trump tendría que demandar a una empresa para hacer cumplir esta ley, y la empresa tendría un caso sólido para negarse, dijo Lawrence Gostin, director del Instituto O’Neill para la Ley de Salud Nacional y Global de Georgetown.

Además, señaló que Trump no podría invocar la ley a menos que una vacuna estuviera “científicamente justificada y aprobada por la FDA”.

Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican running in a tight race for reelection in Colorado, says he wants to protect people with medical conditions.

In a mid-September tweet released by his campaign, he promoted legislation he introduced in August that he says will do just that.

“People like my mother who battle chronic diseases are heroes,” read the tweet. “I authored the bill to guarantee coverage to people with pre-existing conditions — no matter what happens to Obamacare — because some things matter more than politics.”

Gardner has voted repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the first federal law to guarantee people with health problems that they could buy insurance when shopping for their own coverage — at the same cost as for healthier consumers.

Polls show broad public support for keeping the ACA’s preexisting condition protections, while also indicating a consistent, if narrow, majority favoring the overall law.

The popularity of those protections has led Gardner, as well as other GOP candidates facing tough challengers, to swear their allegiance to protecting people with medical conditions, despite their records. In previous fact checks, we found Sen. Martha McSally’s promise always to protect preexisting conditions to be False. President Donald Trump also has made related statements, which have ranged from False to Pants on Fire.

That got us thinking: Would Gardner’s legislation, dubbed “The Pre-Existing Conditions Protection Act,” actually guarantee these protections if the ACA didn’t exist? We decided to investigate.

The bill, which was introduced in August, and has no co-sponsors. It’s very short, only 117 words in total.

The main section is a single very long sentence: “A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any pre-existing condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage, factor health status into premiums or charges, exclude benefits relating to pre-existing conditions from coverage, or otherwise exclude benefits, set limits, or increase charges based on any pre-existing condition or health status.”

We reached out to the Gardner campaign to ask for more information.

A campaign spokesperson reiterated in an email that Gardner’s goal is “to guarantee coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions and ensure they cannot be charged more as a result of their underlying medical conditions.”

Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., quipped that the main goal might be something else entirely.

“It’s probably about 100 words too long,” Miller said. “It could have said, ‘I’m running for election. I’ll do whatever is necessary.’”

Past Votes, Present Messages

Proponents of the ACA emphasized that the law would help people with medical conditions as they worked to get it passed by Congress, which happened in 2010 following a yearlong failed effort by Democrats to win Republican support. Among a host of other provisions, the law bars insurers from rejecting applicants with medical conditions, as they routinely did when considering individual applicants before the law passed. Nor can insurers charge the sick more than the healthy.

Since the law went into effect in 2014, it has faced many efforts by Republicans in Congress, including Gardner, to repeal it.

It has also faced three Supreme Court challenges. It survived the first two, although one ruling allowed states to opt out of its expansion of Medicaid programs for the poor. The still-pending case was first brought in 2018 by 20 states and is supported by the Trump administration. That case could overturn the entire law, although the court won’t hear arguments on the issue before the election. And that brings us back to Gardner’s bill. An obvious difference between that proposal and the ACA is length. Gardner’s bill is one page, while the ACA runs to several hundred.

And Gardner’s claim seems pegged to the legislative language that says insurers can’t impose a “pre-existing condition exclusion,” which sounds fairly straightforward.

But it’s not, experts say.

“It’s an adorable little bill but does not address any of the main issues,” said Linda Blumberg, a fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center. “You need a package of policies working together in order to create real protections for people to have coverage to meet their health care needs.”

For instance, the bill does not explicitly bar insurers from outright rejecting applicants with medical conditions, something known as “guaranteed issue.”

“‘Guaranteed issue’ is not in the language of the bill,” said Miller at AEI.

Instead, the language may simply prohibit insurers from restricting services related to a medical condition only if they choose to sell an individual insurance in the first place, he said.

Compare that with the ACA, which says every insurer selling individual or group coverage “must accept every employer and individual in the State that applies.”

Also needed in legislation aiming to protect people with medical problems, said Blumberg, are provisions for subsidies to help people of low and moderate income afford their premiums. The ACA has those, along with specific enrollment periods, so that people don’t wait until they are sick to sign up. Without them, mainly those with medical conditions might sign up, driving up costs and premiums. That, in turn, can price people, especially the sick, out of future coverage.

Another way Gardner’s bill differs from the ACA is that it does not list benefits that must be included in a health insurance policy. The ACA requires insurers to cover 10 broad categories of care, including hospitalization, prescription drugs, childbirth, substance abuse treatment and mental health care.

“Without that, insurers could sell products that don’t cover very much, which is what we had prior to 2014,” Blumberg added, which is one way to discourage those who are sick from even applying. “It was difficult to find a product that covered prescription drugs, and we even saw policies that didn’t cover chemotherapy.”

So, What About Costs?

Gardner’s legislation says insurers can’t “factor health status into premiums or charges.”

So insurers could not charge people more simply because they have diabetes, say, or cancer. Still, that leaves open a whole lot of other things that insurers could consider when setting premiums for individuals, such as such as gender or occupation, which could stand in as a proxy for health. Unlike the ACA, it does not bar insurers from setting annual or lifetime dollar limits on coverage, which could disproportionately affect people with costly medical conditions.

The ACA allows insurers to vary premiums for only three reasons: where people live, their age and whether they use tobacco. It sets upper limits, such as charging older folks no more than three times what younger enrollees pay.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, who wrote a blog post cited by the Gardner campaign, said the proposed legislation is a starting point — a place holder, if you will. His piece mentioned it near the end of a broader look at the Trump administration’s health platform going into the election.

Responding to questions about Gardner’s legislation, Holtz-Eakin said that if the ACA were to be struck down, Gardner would likely add provisions to it.

“I don’t think it’s intended to be a replacement bill but a provision to make sure people can get coverage,” said Holtz-Eakin. “It’s quite clear on the aim to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can get insurance, but it doesn’t address every single policy issue that’s out there.”

Health law professor Mark Hall at Wake Forest University said Gardner’s legislation could survive if the ACA were struck down by the Supreme Court, but he noted that Congress would be unlikely to adopt the Gardner bill as written.

“A freestanding protection of pre-existing conditions without any supporting provisions to keep insurance affordable or encourage people to purchase it before they become sick, is almost certain to cause serious harms to the market,” Hall wrote in an email. “Therefore, a lot more is needed to overcome legitimate objections that almost certainly will be made from both sides of the political aisle.”

Our Ruling

Because protecting people with medical conditions requires many moving parts, the brevity of Gardner’s proposal makes it appear to be a fig leaf for a political problem rather than a means to guarantee protections for people with preexisting conditions.

The legislation is unclear on whether it guarantees that people with health problems will be able to buy insurance in the first place. And, even if they can, they may well find it priced out of reach because the legislation does not bar insurers from varying premiums widely on the basis of age, gender or occupation.

Viewed in its most favorable light, Gardner’s 117-word proposal would only serve as a place holder for larger legislation, upon which more protections would have to be layered to bolster the effectiveness of its guarantee.

We rate this statement False.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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SEELEY LAKE, Mont. — When researchers arrived in this town tucked in the Northern Rockies three years ago, they could still smell the smoke a day after it cleared from devastating wildfires. Their plan was to chart how long it took for people to recover from living for seven weeks surrounded by relentless smoke.

They still don’t know, because most residents haven’t recovered. In fact, they’ve gotten worse.

Forest fires had funneled hazardous air into Seeley Lake, a town of fewer than 2,000 people, for 49 days. The air quality was so bad that on some days the monitoring stations couldn’t measure the extent of the pollution. The intensity of the smoke and the length of time residents had been trapped in it were unprecedented, prompting county officials to issue their first evacuation orders due to smoke, not fire risk.

Many people stayed. That made Seeley Lake an ideal place to track the long-term health of people inundated by wildfire pollution.

So far, researchers have found that people’s lung capacity declined in the first two years after the smoke cleared. Chris Migliaccio, an immunologist with the University of Montana, and his team found the percentage of residents whose lung function sank below normal thresholds more than doubled in the first year after the fire and remained low a year after that.

“There’s something wrong there,” Migliaccio said.

While it’s long been known that smoke can be dangerous when in the thick of it — triggering asthma attacks, cardiac arrests, hospitalizations and more — the Seeley Lake research confirmed what public health experts feared: Wildfire haze can have consequences long after it’s gone.

That doesn’t bode well for the 78 million people in the western United States now confronting historic wildfires.

Toxic air from fires has blanketed California and the Pacific Northwest for weeks now, causing some of the world’s worst air quality. California fires have burned roughly 2.3 million acres so far this year, and the wildfire season isn’t over yet. Oregon estimates 500,000 people in the state have been under a notice to either prepare to evacuate or leave. Smoke from the West Coast blazes has drifted as far away as Europe.

Extreme wildfires are predicted to become a regular occurrence due to climate change. And, as more people increasingly settle in fire-prone places, the risks increase. That’s shifted wildfires from being a perennial reality for rural mountain towns to becoming an annual threat for areas across the West.

Dr. Perry Hystad, an associate professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University, said the Seeley Lake research offers unique insights into wildfire smoke’s impact, which until recently had largely been unexplored. He said similar studies are likely to follow because of this fire season.

“This is the question that everybody is asking,” Hystad said. “‘I’ve been sitting in smoke for two weeks, how concerned should I be?’”

Migliaccio wants to know whether the lung damage he saw in Seeley Lake is reversible — or even treatable. (Think of an inhaler for asthma or other medication that prevents swollen airways.)

But those discoveries will have to wait. The team hasn’t been able to return to Seeley Lake this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Migliaccio said more research is needed on whether wildfire smoke damages organs besides the lungs, and whether routine exposure makes people more susceptible to diseases.

The combination of the fire season and the pandemic has spurred other questions as well, like whether heavy smoke exposure could lead to more COVID-19 deaths. A recent study showed a spike in influenza cases following major fire seasons.

“Now you have the combination of flu season and COVID and the wildfires,” Migliaccio said. “How are all these things going to interact come late fall or winter?”

A Case Study

Seeley Lake has long known smoke. It sits in a narrow valley between vast stretches of thick forests.

On a recent September day, Boyd Gossard stood on his back porch and pointed toward the mountains that were ablaze in 2017.

Gossard, 80, expects to have some summer days veiled in haze. But that year, he said, he could hardly see his neighbor’s house a few hundred feet away.

“I’ve seen a lot of smoke in my career,” said Gossard, who worked in timber management and served as a wildland firefighter. “But having to just live in it like this was very different. It got to you after a while.”

When Missoula County health officials urged people to leave town and flee the hazardous smoke, many residents stayed close to home. Some said their jobs wouldn’t let them leave. Others didn’t have a place to go — or the money to get there.

Health officials warned those who stayed to avoid exercising and breathing too hard, to remain inside and to follow steps to make their homes as smoke-free as possible. The health department also worked to get air filters to those who needed them most.

But when flames got too close, some people had to sleep outside in campsites on the other side of town.

Understanding the Science of Smoke

One of the known dangers of smoke is particulate matter. Smaller than the width of a human hair, it can bypass a body’s defenses, lodging deep into lungs. Lu Hu, an atmospheric chemist with the University of Montana, said air quality reports are based on how much of that pollution is in the air.

“It’s like lead; there’s no safe level, but still we have a safety measure for what’s allowable,” Hu said. “Some things kill you fast and some things kill you slowly.”

While air quality measurements can gauge the overall amount of pollution, they can’t assess which specific toxins people are inhaling. Hu is collaborating with other scientists to better predict how smoke travels and what pollutants people actually breathe.

He said smoke’s chemistry changes based on how far it travels and what’s burning, among other factors.

Over the past few years, teams of researchers drove trucks along fire lines to collect smoke samples. Other scientists boarded cargo planes and flew into smoke plumes to take samples right from a fire’s source. Still others stationed at a mountain lookout captured smoke drifting in from nearby fires. And ground-level machines at a Missoula site logged data over two summers.

Bob Yokelson, a longtime smoke researcher with the University of Montana, said scientists are getting closer to understanding its contents. And, he said, “it’s not all bad news.”

Temperature and sunlight can change some pollutants over time. Some dangerous particles seem to disappear. But others, such as ozone, can increase as smoke ages.

Yokelson said scientists are still a long way from determining a safe level of exposure to the 100-odd pollutants in smoke.

“We can complete the circle by measuring not only what’s in smoke, but measuring what’s happening to the people who breathe it,” Yokelson said. “That’s where the future of health research on smoke is going to go.”

Coping With Nowhere to Flee

In the meantime, those studying wildland smoke hope what they’ve learned so far can better prepare people to live in the haze when evacuation isn’t an option.

Joan Wollan, 82, was one of the Seeley Lake study participants. She stayed put during the 2017 fire because her house at the time sat on a border of the evacuation zone.

The air made her eyes burn and her husband cough. She ordered air filters to create cleaner air inside her home, which helped.

On a recent day, the air in Wollan’s new neighborhood in Missoula turned that familiar gray-orange as traces of fires from elsewhere appeared. Local health officials warned that western Montana could get hit by some of the worst air quality the state had seen since those 2017 fires.

If it got bad enough, Wollan said, she’d get the filters out of storage or look for a way to get to cleaner air — “if there is someplace in Montana that isn’t smoky.”

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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