“You make a million decisions that mean nothing, and then one day you order take-out and it changes your life.” Maybe this is what led to HHS Secretary Kennedy’s conclusion that America’s food is over-processed. But that line is from the 30-year-old movie Sleepless in Seattle. It is one of those Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan rom-coms that you can’t stop watching despite wanting to roll your eyes at the sappy sweetness. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, I explain how you can suppress your eyerolling while enjoying some romantic health policymaking.
Other news from this week that makes you want to suppress your emotions:
As anticipated, the Trump administration is taking action on one of its big healthcare priorities: making the price of healthcare services and products more available.
- To give consumers access to meaningful prescription drug pricing information, the U.S. Departments of HHS, Labor, and Treasury issued a request for information (RFI) to determine how to improve price transparency for prescription drugs. Specifically, the departments are asking what health plans need to do to make their reporting requirements (prescription drug machine-readable file disclosures under the Transparency in Coverage rule) useful to everyone who needs the information.
- The three agencies also issued additional guidance to health plans about how to update their pricing data formatting process. While health plans are already disclosing in-network provider rates and out-of-network provider rates under the Transparency in Coverage rule, the guidance is about making payer data standardized and less duplicative so consumer-friendly price comparison apps can be created.
- CMS issued new guidance to update hospitals’ price transparency reporting (hospitals are supposed to publish their actual prices and not just estimates). But CMS also wants to know how to bring down the hammer in a way that ensures hospitals will actually comply with its rules (see its RFI about enforcement here).
“It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of 40.” Annie (Meg Ryan): “That statistic is not true.” Becky (Rosie O’Donnell): “That’s right, it’s not true. But it feels true.” As this great dialogue from Sleepless in Seattle demonstrates, we are in a world where the facts offered may not be exactly true, but we feel like they are true. That’s why the Make America Healthy Again Commission released a 68-page report about how childhood chronic diseases should be treated less by traditional drug-related medical treatments and more by addressing issues like poor diet, chemical exposure, and sedentary lifestyles. I will not comment on most of the conclusions in this report as a non-scientist and non-physician, except to say that a lot of it seems worth exploring further. As a regular person, I do know about sleep and stress—at least, I like sleeping and I am not as fond of stress. And this report outlines how kids’ pervasive use of technology is preventing them from getting adequate sleep and causing them stress. The irony, as evidenced by the news listed above, is that HHS is trying hard to get much more tech in the hands of people to improve their healthcare knowledge and ability to navigate our healthcare system. So, we want to use health-related technology, but only under a special set of circumstances. Which is like what Rosie O’Donnell accuses Meg Ryan of in Sleepless in Seattle: “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.”
