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What will Harris mean for Health Care? – Not much

By MATTHEW HOLT

The Democratic convention wrapped with a fine speech from Kamala Harris, star power from the Obamas and Clintons, and a bunch of Republicans telling their ideological brethren that it was better to be a Democrat than a Trumper. More importantly no Beyonce/Taylor Swift duet–as we were promised by Mitt Romney.

There was a lot of talk about some aspects of health care. But overall if Harris wins, don’t expect much change to the current health care system. 

Why not?

First there’s the pure politics. The Dems need to win back the House (probable but not certain) and hold the Senate to pass legislation. Right now they have a 51-49 edge in the Senate. Most likely that goes to 50-50 as the Republicans will definitely pick up Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia. There’s a series of seats the Dems currently hold in close races (Montana, Ohio, MIchigan, Nevada, Arizona) that they’ll need to keep to maintain it at 50-50, and it’s hard to see any pickups from Republicans (perhaps Florida or Texas if you squint really hard). The good news is that Manchin (WV) and Sinema (AZ) will soon both be gone, so the Dems that will be there won’t be as difficult to persuade to follow a Presidential agenda. But that will still leave Walz as VP to do what Harris did and pass a bunch of deciding votes under reconciliation, which massively limits what the legislation can do–it has to be “budget related.”

Which leads us to what we have been hearing from Harris and her campaign about health care? We’ve heard a lot about issues that have impacts on health, specifically creating affordable housing and fighting child poverty, but little that is directly related to health care itself. Really only two issues stand out. Abortion and reproductive rights, and drug prices.

Clearly Harris will take a swing at reversing Dobbs and passing a national right to abortion. This will need either a packing of the Supreme Court (my favorite) or ending the filibuster or both. Either of these will be incredibly tough to pull off constitutionally and politically and will take huge amounts of political oxygen. Of course the cynics would say, the Democrats are better off leaving this as an issue to use to beat up the Republicans on. But if it gets done, womens’ and reproductive rights will only be back where they were in 2022. 

Regarding the cost of drugs, there will continue to be much justified bashing of big pharma, but the extension of insulin price controls is something that (eventually) the market via CivicaRX and others is getting to anyway. Meanwhile the IRA gave Medicare the right to negotiate drug prices and the results are not exactly earth shattering. For example, CMS says it’s negotiated the cost of blood thinner Eliquis from about $6,000 a year to under $3,000 This sounds good until you realize that the price is only that high because of patent games the manufacturer BMS plays in the US, and the price in the rest of the world is under $1,000. We’ll hear more about this as the price cuts come into effect, (although not till 2026!) and more drugs get negotiated, but overall this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering change.

Finally there’s already a guaranteed fight about extending the premium subsidies for ACA plans. These were first in the pandemic American Rescue Act, then extended in the IRA, but they currently are scheduled to end in 2025. It’s hard to imagine them not being extended further whatever the makeup of the Senate, assuming a Democratic House of Representatives. (A Marjorie Taylor Greene speakership does give me pause!). But again there’s nothing new here and the overall flavor of expensive premiums and high deductibles in the current ACA marketplace won’t change.

So what’s not going to happen? Virtually all the interesting stuff we were promised by Harris and for that matter Biden in 2020. You may have missed the one actual “policy-first” speech at the convention which came from Bernie Sanders. To be fair a lot of his agenda was already in the Biden legislation. That was no accident as Biden deliberately reached out to him in 2020 and 2021 and enacted a pretty radical agenda on infrastructure, climate, industrial policy and more. And when I say radical I mean milquetoast social democrat by European standards! But what wasn’t in that agenda? No Medicare for all, which Bernie ran on in 2019/20 and brought up again at the convention. Who else proposed that in 2019? Why, a certain Kamala Harris. That never made it into the Biden agenda. We didn’t even get legislation introduced about lowering the Medicare age to 60, which was a campaign promise. There’s been no conversation about any of this from Harris or from Biden before he withdrew. It’s just a bridge too far.

Which leads to the stuff that gets debated about in THCB and elsewhere as to how the system actually works. There’s been nothing about Medicaid expansion (or its continued contraction). No talk about reining in hospital consolidation. No mention even of insurers gaming Medicare Advantage or private equity buying up physician practices. Nothing about the expansion of value-based care.

What we can expect in a Harris administration is more of the same from CMS and potentially a slightly more aggressive FTC. That will mean continued efforts to veer slightly away from fee-for-service in Medicare, a few more constraints on the worst behavior in Medicare Advantage, and possibly some warning shots from the FTC about hospital monopolies. But the trends we’ve seen in recent years will largely continue. We’re not getting a primary-care based capitated system emerging from the wreckage of what we have now, and unlike the Clinton and even Obama administrations, there’s not even any rhetoric from Harris or Biden about how that would be a good idea.

So politically I don’t think the Harris administration will be very exciting for health care. And if the other guy wins, as Jeff Goldsmith wrote on THCB last month, expect even less.

Tiny Is Mighty

By KIM BELLARD

I am a fanboy for AI; I don’t really understand the technical aspects, but I sure am excited about its potential. I’m also a sucker for a catchy phrase. So when I (belatedly) learned about TinyAI, I was hooked.  

Now, as it turns out, TinyAI (also know as Tiny AI) has been around for a few years, but with the general surge of interest in AI it is now getting more attention. There is also TinyML and Edge AI, the distinctions between which I won’t attempt to parse. The point is, AI doesn’t have to involve huge datasets run on massive servers somewhere in the cloud; it can happen on about as small a device as you care to imagine. And that’s pretty exciting.

What caught my eye was a overview in Cell by Farid Nakhle, a professor at Temple University, Japan Campus: Shrinking the Giants: Paving the Way for TinyAI.  “Transitioning from the landscape of large artificial intelligence (AI) models to the realm of edge computing, which finds its niche in pocket-sized devices, heralds a remarkable evolution in technological capabilities,” Professor Nakhle begins.

AI’s many successes, he believes, “…are demanding a leap in its capabilities, calling for a paradigm shift in the research landscape, from centralized cloud computing architectures to decentralized and edge-centric frameworks, where data can be processed on edge devices near to where they are being generated.” The demands for real time processing, reduced latency, and enhanced privacy make TinyAI attractive.

Accordingly: “This necessitates TinyAI, here defined as the compression and acceleration of existing AI models or the design of novel, small, yet effective AI architectures and the development of dedicated AI-accelerating hardware to seamlessly ensure their efficient deployment and operation on edge devices.”

Professor Nakhle gives an overview of those compression and acceleration techniques, as well as architecture and hardware designs, all of which I’ll leave as an exercise for the interested reader.  

If all this sounds futuristic, here are some current examples of TinyAI models:

  • This summer Google launched Gemma 2 2B, a 2 billion parameter model that it claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8X7B. VentureBeat opined: “Gemma 2 2B’s success suggests that sophisticated training techniques, efficient architectures, and high-quality datasets can compensate for raw parameter count.”
  • Also this summer OpenAI introduced GPT-4o mini, “our most cost-efficient small model.” It “supports text and vision in the API, with support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs coming in the future.”
  • Salesforce recently introduced its xLAM-1B model, which it likes to call the “Tiny Giant.” It supposedly only has 1b parameters, yet Marc Benoff claims it outperforms modelx 7x its size and boldly says: “On-device agentic AI is here”  
  • This spring Microsoft launched Phi-3 Mini, a 3.8 billion parameter model, which is small enough for a smartphone. It claims to compare well to GPT 3.5 as well as Meta’s Llama 3.
  • H2O.ai offers Danube 2, a 1.8 b parameter model that Alan Simon of Hackernoon calls the most accurate of the open source, tiny LLM models.   

A few billion parameters may not sound so “tiny,” but keep in mind that other AI models may have trillions.

Continue reading…

Phil Fasano, Recuro Health

Phil Fasano is CEO of Recuro Health. Phil was CIO at Kaiser Permanente in the glory years when it rolled out Epic/Health Connect, which was at the time the biggest roll out of an EMR and was instrumental in creating Kaiser’s system of virtual care. A decade+ later the concept of telehealth and virtual care has been battered around, notably in the stock price of Teladoc and others. However, Phil is now leading a smaller organization called Recuro Health which is delivering extensive primary hybrid care to small & medium employers, has more then 1 million lives on the system, and is profitable. Is this the future of digital health? Maybe, and it’s well worth listening to his approach–Matthew Holt

ChatGPT Vs. Magic 8 Ball: Who Can Solve “The HealthCare Crisis”?

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Long before ChatGPT, whose question-answering choices still remain somewhat of a black box, there was an equally mysterious, question-answering black ball. I decided to ask them each of them how to solve the cost, quality and access issues labeled for more than half a century as “the healthcare crisis.”

The hard, plastic Magic 8 Ball was invented in 1946, two years before a landmark Supreme Court decision spurred a boom in employer-sponsored health insurance. It catapulted into kid-driven popularity in the 1970s, the same decade that rising healthcare costs propelled “healthcare crisis” into the public vocabulary.

Magic 8 Ball and ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a “black box,” Magic 8 ball a black ball.

The healthcare crisis is still with us, as is Magic 8 Ball, which, thanks to current owner Mattel, can now be consulted either in person (i.e., by holding and shaking it) or online. With a fiercely fought presidential election campaign underway, I decided that pitting the black box vs. the black ball to answer crucial health policy questions would likely provide just as much clarity as wading through weasel-worded white papers.

Both ChatGPT (Cost to OpenAI: $400,000 per day to operate) and Magic 8 Ball (One-time cost: $14.99) were up for the challenge, though they acknowledged it wouldn’t be easy.

“Can you help me solve the healthcare crisis?” I asked. “Signs point to yes,” Magic 8 ball replied, in its typically pithy, understated manner. ChatGPT, on the other hand, took my question as an invitation to show off its artificial intelligence.

“Addressing the healthcare crisis is a complex and multifaceted challenge that requires a holistic approach,” ChatGPT began. Then, as if a Washington think tank had been crossed with an academic policy conference, the Large Language Model offered a very large helping of language. There were 8 “key strategies,” each of which contained three bullet points, and each of which, I was advised, “involves detailed planning, resource allocation, and collaboration among various stakeholders, including government, healthcare providers, insurers, and the public.”

Then there was this diss when I asked about its competitor. “It’s a fun toy,” sneered the chatbot (if chatbots could sneer), “but it doesn’t provide reliable or informed answers.”

I decided to home in on specifics.

“Is a government-run single payer system the right answer?” I asked. “My sources say ‘no,’” Magic 8 ball told me. ChatGPT was more positive, with caveats.

“A government-run single-payer healthcare system is one potential solution to the healthcare crisis, and it comes with its own set of advantages and challenges,” the chatbot replied. It added, “Whether it is the ‘right’ answer depends on various factors” – and then, once more, went on to provide a long list of relevant ones.

I decided to inquire about an approach with bipartisan support. “Is value-based healthcare the best way to control costs?”

“It is decidedly so,” said the Magic 8 Ball immediately. But ChatGPT, usually lightning quick, waited perhaps 20 seconds before not only responding positively, but presenting an overview and specific suggestions. There were 5 advantages and 5 challenges, plus 3 examples of possible strategies (accountable care organizations, bundled payments and patient-centered medical homes), all tied together with 5 considerations for implementation.

“Ultimately, VBHC can be a key component of a broader strategy to reform healthcare systems and achieve sustainable cost control,” ChatGPT concluded.

That pattern continued as I probed about the need for more effective financial incentives to reward high-quality, cost-effective care, a central component of VBHC. “It is certain,” Magic 8 Ball quickly agreed. ChatGPT, meanwhile, again paused for a lengthy period (by its standards) before responding “thoughtfully” (by human standards).

“Yes,” it said, “effective financial incentives are crucial for promoting high-quality, cost-effective care. Properly designed incentives can align the interests of healthcare providers, payers and patients, leading to better health outcomes and more efficient use of resources.”

The chatbot then listed 5 types of financial incentives, 5 key elements of effective incentive programs and three specific examples incorporating them.

Continuing the financial incentives theme, I asked whether health savings accounts could help. Magic 8 Ball simply replied, “Yes,” while ChatGPT carefully pointed out that while HSAs “offer some benefits, they are not a comprehensive solution to the broader health care crisis.”

Like politicians, both ChatGPT and Magic 8 Ball sometimes hedged. “Are hospital mergers good or bad for patients?” I asked. “Ask again later,” said Magic 8 Ball. “Hospital mergers can have both positive and negative impacts on patients,” responded ChatGPT, before presenting a long list of why either might be the case.

“Is private equity buying doctors’ practices good or bad for patients?” I inquired. “Concentrate and ask again,” evaded Magic 8 Ball, followed by an incomprehensible, “Most likely.” ChatGPT allowed that this was “a complex issue, with potential benefits and drawbacks for patients,” before going on to the kind of pro and con balancing act any politician might admire.

I decided it was time to cut to the heart of the matter.

“Will health care costs ever be effectively controlled in America?” I demanded.

Magic 8 Ball tried to spare my feelings – “Better not to tell you now”– while ChatGPT, in its elliptical way, pointed me towards the unpleasant truth. While the challenge was not “insurmountable,” answered ChatGPT, it would require a “multi-faceted approach” involving “strong political will, stakeholder collaboration, and continuous evaluation and adjustment of strategies.”

In other words, “No.”

Michael Millenson is President of Health Quality Advisors and a long time THCB regular, he’s also a Forbes columnist where this piece first appeared.

Take My Gun, I Mean, Phone, Please

By KIM BELLARD

I understand that states are “racing” to pass laws designed to help protect school-aged kids against something that has been a danger to their mental and physical health for a generation now, as well as adversely impacting their education. Certainly I’m talking about reasonable gun control laws, right?

Just kidding. This is America. We don’t do gun control laws, no matter how many innocent school children, or other bystanders, are massacred. No, what states are taking action on are cellphones in schools.

Florida seems to have kicked it off, with a new last year banning cell phones and other wireless devices “during instructional times.” It also prohibits using TikTok on school grounds. Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and South Carolina followed suit this year, although the new laws vary in specifics. Connecticut, Kansas, Oklahoma, Washington, and Vermont have introduced their own versions. Delaware and Pennsylvania are giving money to schools to try lockable phone pouches.

It’s worth pointing out that school districts were not waiting around for states to act. According to a Pew Research survey earlier this year, 82% of teachers reported their district had policies regarding cellphones in classrooms. Those policies might not have been bans, but at least the districts were making efforts to control the use.

Surprisingly, high school teachers – whose students were most likely to have cellphones — were least likely to report such policies, but, not surprisingly, the most likely to report that such policies were difficult to enforce. Also not surprising, 72% of high school teachers say students being distracted by cellphones in the classroom is a major problem.

Russell Shaw, the head of school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., writes in The Atlantic that his parents were given free sample packs of cigarettes in school, and warns:

I believe that future generations will look back with the same incredulity at our acceptance of phones in schools. The research is clear: The dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide correlates closely with the widespread adoption of smartphones over the past 15 years. Although causation is debated, as a school head for 14 years, I know what I have seen: Unfettered phone usage at school hurts our kids. 

Similarly, last year Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, urged emphatically: Get Phones Out of School Now. At the least, he writes, they’re a distraction, harming their learning and their ability to focus; at worst, they weaken social connections, are used for bullying, and can lead to mental health issues. “All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults,” Professor Haidt believes. “All children deserve phone-free schools.”

Mr. Shaw agrees. “For too long, children all over the world have been guinea pigs in a dangerous experiment. The results are in. We need to take phones out of schools.”

Believe it or not, not everyone agrees. Some argue that, like it or not, our world is filled with cellphones, and to try to pretend that is not true will just make it harder for kids once they become adults. Along those lines, skeptics note that classrooms are filled with other devices; if kids aren’t distracted by their cellphones, there’s usually a tablet, laptop, or other device handy. And the kids can argue, hey, the adults – the teachers, the administrators, the volunteers – all have cellphones; why shouldn’t we?

Some parents are opposed to the bans. They want to know where their kids are at all times, and to be able to track them in case of an emergency. Even more chilling, some parents argue that if there is a school shooting, they want their kids to be able to call for help, and to let them know their status. None of us can forget the heartbreaking calls that some of the Uvalde children made.  

Of course, even if cellphones are banned during class time or even on school grounds entirely, those phones are going to be there once they leave the school grounds, so their potential for adverse mental impacts will still be there. If distraction is the problem – and I can see where it would be – isn’t it a similar problem for adults?  How many meetings, conferences, or social situations have you been in where many of the adults are paying more attention to their phone than to whatever is being discussed?  

I wonder if the Supreme Court has a policy about cellphones during its deliberations.

All this brings me back to guns. According to the K-12 Shooting Database, there have already been 193 school shooting incidents already this year, with 152 victims (fatal and wounded). That compares to 349 and 249 respectively in 2023, and 308/273 in 2022. I needn’t point out – but I will – that no other nation has numbers anywhere close to those.

I recently read John Woodrow Cox’s searing Children Under Fire. He points out that, even beyond the fatalities, wounded kids need not just medical care but ongoing mental health treatment. Their families usually need it too. The trauma goes well beyond the direct victims. The victim’s classmates and families often need it as well, as do schoolchildren in other districts, even in other states. Even practicing lockdowns have an impact on mental health.

He estimates that there are millions, perhaps tens of millions, of impacted schoolchildren and their families. Yet states aren’t racing to ensure support for all those victims. 

Mr. Cox suggests that the least we could do, the very least, are to ensure more background checks, to hold adults more responsible for the guns in their homes, and to conduct more research on gun violence. Instead, states are rushing to “harden” schools and to get more people with guns guarding (and teaching in) those schools. 

Oh, and to ban cellphones. We must have priorities, after all.

Look, if I was a teacher, I’d hate seeing kids on their phones during class. If I was administrator, I’d be worried about kids hanging out on their phones instead of talking with each other. If I was a parent I’d be nagging my kids to study or read a book instead of being on a screen. I get all that; I understand the drive to better manage cellphone use.

But if people think cell phones are more of a danger to their kids than gun violence, I’m going to have to disagree.  

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor

Why Sam Altman Cares So Much About Voice

By MIKE MAGEE

When OpenAI decided to respond to clamoring customers demanding voice mediated interaction on Chat GPT, CEO Sam Altman went all in. That’s because he knew this was about more than competitive advantage or convenience. It was about relationships – deep, sturdy, loyal and committed relationships.

He likely was aware, as well, that the share of behavioral health in telemedicine mediated care had risen from 1% in 2019 to 33% by 2022. And that the pandemic had triggered an explosion of virtual mental health services. In a single year, between 2020 and 2021, psychologists offering both in-person and virtual sessions grew from 30% to 50%. Why? The American Psychological Association suggests these oral communications are personal, confidential, efficient and effective. Or in one word – useful.

As Forbes reported in 2021, “Celebrity endorsements, like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps’ campaign with virtual therapy startup Talkspace, started to chip away at the long standing stigma, while mindfulness apps like Calm offered meditation sessions at the click of a button. But it was the Covid-19 pandemic and collective psychological fallout that finally mainstreamed mental health.” As proof, they noted mental health start-up funding has increased more than fivefold over the prior four years.

Altman was also tracking history. The first “mass medium” technology in the U.S. was voice activated – the radio. He also understood its’ growth trajectory a century ago. From a presence in 1% of households in 1923, it became a fixture in 3/4 of all US homes just 14 years later.

Altman also could see the writing on the wall. The up and coming generations, the ones that gently encouraged Biden to exit stage left, were both lonely and connected.

The most recent Nielson and Edison Research told him that the average adult in the U.S. now  spends four hours a day consuming audio and their associated ads. 67% of that listening was on radios, 20% on podcasts, 10% on music streaming and 3% on satellite radio.

Post-pandemic, younger generations use of online audio had skyrocketed.  In 2005, only 15% of young adults listened online. By 2023, it had reached 75%. And as their listening has risen, loneliness rates in young adults have declined from 38% in 2020 to 24% now.

A decade earlier, screenwriter Spike Jonze ventured into this territory when he wrote Her. Brilliantly cast, the film featured Joaquin Phoenix as lonely, introverted Theodore Twombly, reeling from an impending divorce. In desperation, he developed more than a relationship (a friendship really) with an empathetic reassuring female AI, voiced by actress Scarlett Johansson.

Scarlett’s performance was so convincing that it catapulted Her into contention for 5 academy awards winning Best Original Screenplay. It also apparently impressed Sam Altman, who, a decade later, approached Scarlett to be the “voice” of ChatGPT’s virtual lead. She declined, seeing the potential downside of becoming a virtual creature. He subsequently identified a “Scarlett-like” voice actor and chose “Sky” as one of five voice choices to embody ChatGPT. Under threat of a massive intellectual property challenge, Altman recently “killed off” Sky, but the other four virtual companions (out of 400 auditioned) have survived.

As for content so that “what you say” is as well represented as “how you say it,” companies like Google have that covered. Their LLM (Large Language Model) product was trained on content from over 10 million websites, including HealthCommentary.org. Google engineer, Blaise Aguera y Arcas says “Artificial neural networks are making strides toward consciousness.”

Where this all ends up for the human race remains an open question. What is known is that the antidote for loneliness and isolation is relationships. But of what kind? Who knows? Oxford’s Evolutionary Psychologist Robin Dunbar believes he does.

Altman likely paid close attention to this review by Atlantic writer Sheon Han in 2021: “Robin Dunbar is best known for his namesake ‘Dunbar’s number,’ which he defines as the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. (The proposed number is 150.) But after spending his decades-long career studying the complexities of friendship, he’s discovered many more numbers that shape our close relationships. For instance, Dunbar’s number turns out to be less like an absolute numerical threshold than a series of concentric circles, each standing for qualitatively different kinds of relationships.… All of these numbers (and many non-numeric insights about friendship) appear in his new book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships.”

But what many experts now agree is that voice seems to unlock the key. Shorthand for Altman: Pick the right voice and you might just trigger the addition of 149 “friends” for each ChatGPT “buyer.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.(Grove/2020)

It’s in the Blood

By KIM BELLARD

People are fascinated by blood. Well, it would seem so, given our fondness for vampires, gory movies, and true crime stories. I’m not so keen on any of those, but I was struck by several recent developments about how blood tests can help diagnose medical problems faster, more definitively, and less invasively.

Because, really, shouldn’t that be what our healthcare system always should strive for?

Take concussions. If you are a football fan, you’re very familiar with the problem that it seems very subjective about whether a player has suffered a concussion. They’re not the only ones. Millions of people suffer concussions each year – the vast majority of whom are not athletes – and more than half never get it evaluated.

In April Abbott received FDA approval for a rapid blood test, producing results in 15 minutes. It can be done at a patient’s beside, and not require a lab. “Clinicians have needed an objective way to assess patients with concussions,” said Beth McQuiston, M.D., medical director in Abbott’s diagnostics business. “When you look at all the other diseases, or other organs in the body, they all have blood tests to help assess what’s happening. Now, we have a whole blood test that can help assess the brain right at the patient’s bedside – expanding access to more health providers and therefore patients.”

Expect to see the Abbott’s i-STAT TBI cartridge and portable i-STAT® Alinity® instrument in emergency rooms, not to mention on NFL sidelines.

Or Alzheimer’s disease. Many realize that it has historically been very difficult to diagnose, often not definitively until after death. Now a new study suggests a blood test can accurately diagnose it 90% of the time, which is much higher than even neurologists can do. The test is more accurate the later the stage of Alzheimer’s a person has.

Specifically, it measures “the ratio of plasma phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) relative to non–p-tau217 (expressed as percentage of p-tau217) combined with the amyloid-β 42 and amyloid-β 40 plasma ratio (the amyloid probability score 2 [APS2]).” Got that?

“We’d love to have a blood test that can beused in a primary care physician’s office, functioning like a cholesterol test but for Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, told CNN. “The p-tau217 blood test is turning out to be the most specific for Alzheimer’s and the one with the most validity. It seems to be the front-runner.”

It’s not quite ready for use in your doctor’s office, though. “Right now, we don’t have guidelines for the use of these tests,” Dr. Eliezer Masliah, director of the division of neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, warned NPR. Dr. Suzanne Schindler, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, added: “Blood tests have developed incredibly fast for Alzheimer disease and I think [doctors] aren’t used to that rate of change.”

“The field is moving at a pace I never imagined 10 years ago,” Dr. Heather Whitson, a professor of medicine at Duke University, marveled to NPR.

We’re increasingly seeing FDA approved drug treatments for Alzheimer’s, so it’d be nice if we had FDA approved blood tests to more accurately use them. 

Last but not least, there’s colorectal cancer (CRC). The FDA recently approved Guardant Health’s Shield™ blood test for colorectal cancer screening, and is the first such blood test approved by the FDA as a primary screening option. A Guardant study found that it identified 87% of cancers that were at an early and curable stage, although it does less well at finding precancerous growths. The test is aimed at adults 45 and older who are at average risk.

It’s not so much that it is better than colonoscopies – it’s not — as it is that it should be easier to convince people to use. Despite the fact that CRC kills over 50,000 Americans annually, more than a third of older Americans are not getting screened. Even worse, more than three-fourths of those who die from CRC are not up-to-date with their screening.

“The persistent gap in colorectal cancer screening rates shows that the existing screening options do not appeal to millions of people,” said Daniel Chung, MD, gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The FDA’s approval of the Shield blood test marks a tremendous leap forward, offering a compelling new solution to close this gap.”

Dr. Sapna Syngal, director of strategic planning for prevention and early cancer detection at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston agrees, telling NBC News: “If this test increases the number of people getting screened, it’s going to have a huge impact.” 

The test is on the market now, and Guardant expects approval for coverage by Medicare and commercial insurance.

Most of us are used to getting routine blood tests for things like blood counts or cholesterol levels, so it’s exciting that blood tests are started to be used for other important health issues.

————–

Blood tests are all well and good, but they’re not (yet) the kind of test you’d routinely expect to use at home on your own. ARPA-H has even bigger aspirations. It just announced the Platform Optimizing SynBio for Early Intervention and Detection in Oncology (POSEIDON) program, the goal of which is “to develop first-in-class, at-home, synthetic Multi-Cancer-Early Detection (MCED) tests for the most sensitive and specific stage I detection of 30+ solid tumors* using only breath and/or urine samples.”

No blood draw or lab tech needed, just breath or urine samples done yourself at home. That’s something to shoot for.

“Access to a low-cost cancer screening test that does not need a lab test is so critical to preventing late-stage diagnoses, increasing survival rates, and reducing high treatment costs,” said ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D. “With POSEIDON, we could put the power of cancer screening into homes in the U.S. and around the world.” 

“But what if any adult could, at their discretion, take an at-home test that could detect Stage I cancer? POSEIDON aims to create a future in which any adult can take a simple, over-the-counter test to screen for and detect 30+ cancers at Stage I, when they are still localized, to drastically improve the chances of curative treatment and survival,” said Ross Uhrich, DMD, MBA, ARPA-H POSEIDON’s Program Manager.

“But what if…” indeed.  ARPA-H is thinking big — as it should. And as should we all.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor

What the Health System Can Expect from a Second Trump Term

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

Though the results of the November election are by no means a foregone conclusion, it is worth thinking about how a second Trump administration might affect the nation’s $4.7 trillion health system. People were not the problem with the first Trump term; his healthcare team was strong and capable: Alex Azar, Scott Gottlieb, Seema Verma,. Bret Giroir, Brad Smith etc.  

After the embarrassing political failure of Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare in 2017 (for which blame look to his White House staff), his healthcare team settled in to a quiet and unremarkable term until the COVID wave broke over them and helped drive them out of office. It was not merely ironic but deeply disturbing that MAGA politics prevented Trump from claiming credit for the Operation Warp Speed vaccine miracle his team produced. 

A second Trump term would likely be very different- both more ideologically driven but also fiscally constrained. The people part is completely unreadable at this early hour. But health policy will almost certainly be a second tier priority because trade and tariffs, conflicts with our traditional allies and trading partners, and inflamed social issues like illegal immigration, wokeness, and abortion will crowd out changes in health coverage, costs and payment policy.   

Show Me the Money! 

However, fiscal pressures will force a second Trump administration to confront federal health spending and set him on a collision course with the hospital and pharmaceutical industries, two of the three largest organized actors in healthcare. Trump inherits a 2024 $5 trillion federal budget with a $1.7 trillion deficit, an anomalous degree of fiscal stimulus at the height of an economic boom. That deficit is also a major driver of the inflation Trump has promised to conquer.   

Trump is committed to reauthorizing the individual tax cuts from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which are scheduled to expire in 2025, which would add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He also wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%. If Trump does nothing meaningful about federal spending, his FY 26 budget, due shortly after he arrives in the White House, would harbor immense out year deficits and completely gross out both the bond and currency markets–a “Liz Truss” moment for the new regime. The promise of immediately reducing inflation which Trump made in his RNC acceptance speech goes sailing out the window.  

Savaging Medicaid Spending  (or Trying to)

Trump has tied his budgetary hands by committing to not cutting a single penny from Medicare and Social Security, which are forty percent (!) of the federal budget. This commitment appears both in the Republican platform and in Agenda47, which is the Trump campaign’s compilation of commitments made in his speeches. Trump has also committed to not reducing the $850 billion spent on Defense.

Ringfencing Social Security, Medicare and Defense leaves the more than trillion dollar Medicaid program (state and federal combined) as the largest single potential source of potential budgetary savings to avoid inflationary blow-out growth in the federal deficit. At its peak in March of 2023, Medicaid/CHIP enrolled 94 million people, or 28% of the US population. Expect an incoming Trump administration to attack Medicaid spending, both by accelerating the decline in enrollment that began in 2023 with the expiration of the COVID Public Health Emergency and by cutting rates and payments to Medicaid Managed Care providers. Some 24 million Medicaid beneficiaries have been “redetermined” and over 15 million have lost coverage. KFF says present Medicaid enrollment is about 80 million in mid-2024 but that number is certainly moving down 

While Trump has distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, that policy blueprint characterized the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion as “inappropriate” and the program itself as a “cumbersome, complicated and unaffordable burden on nearly every state”. It advocated ending what it called “financing loopholes” (e.g. provider taxes that have trued up Medicaid rates to hospitals and physicians vs. Medicare), tightening Medicaid eligibility, and imposing both work requirements and cost sharing, “reforming” disproportionate share payments, time limits and lifetime caps on Medicaid benefits and ending coverage for “middle and upper income beneficiaries”! We can certainly expect inflammatory publicity from a Trump White House on states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility to  “undocumented aliens”, followed by pressure on Congress to prohibit this coverage by statute.   

When former Trump press secretary and present Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced her removal of 400 thousand Arkansans from Medicaid enrollment, she said she was “liberating them from dependency”.  It is likely that that millions more Americans will be “liberated from dependency” on Medicaid during the first two years of a second Trump Administration. There will be work requirements (with politically damaging pressure on the 11 million very poor or disabled “dual eligibles” eg. Medicare plus Medicaid) population), as well as cost sharing and an voucher option to purchase private insurance (!?) for Medicaid beneficiaries. An aggressive effort to “re-welfare-ize” the Medicaid program will raise numerous bureaucratic barriers to Medicaid enrollment, scaring off a lot of otherwise eligible beneficiaries. 

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My Trip To Paris This Week

By MIKE MAGEE

While others regale in the accomplishments of quirky pommel horse specialist, Stephen Nedoroscik, from Worcester, MA, or Celine Dion’s remarkable performance at the closing of the Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Paris this week, I time-traveled to Paris this week on a different mission.

I was there to visit Germaine de Staël. The French writer, who in 1803 tangled with Napoleon at the height of his power and asked him, “Who is the greatest woman in the world?”  His reply was immediate,  “She who has borne the greatest number of children.” The question alone earned her an exile from Paris to Switzerland.

It called to mind the JD Vance 2021 interview on FOX, where he tied women’s worth to birthing, stating that “We should give miserable, childless lefties less control over our country and its kids…” and claimed that their choice of cats over babies had created a collection of disgruntled women politicians who “are miserable.”

In 1803, Germaine de Stael had the last laugh, decamping to the bucolic Le château de Coppet on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. She spent the next 10 years organizing his opposition, until fleeing to Austria, then St. Petersburg, while carefully avoiding Napoleon’s northward advancing troops. On Napoleon’s defeat, she returned to Paris in 1814.

Napoleon’s campaign of terror, and ultimate defeat were also the subject of Leo Tolstoy’s legendary 1869 literary feat, War and Peace. But he could have as easily been reflecting on our two MAGA leaders and their Project 2025 sycophants a century and half later. And yet, as with Germaine de Staël, they appear to have missed that Vice President Harris was born to lead, something Tolstoy would surely have highlighted.

In his brilliant Epilogue (p.1131), Tolstoy undresses Napoleon while pointing a contributory finger at an endless array of knowing followers. Written 155 years ago, his expose’ is poignant and devastating, and worth careful consideration from all those concerned with ethical leadership, governance, and compliance.

On The Rise To Power

“(The launch requires that) …old customs and traditions are obliterated; step by step a group of a new size is produced, along with new customs and traditions, and that man is prepared who is to stand at the head…A man (like Trump) without conviction, without customs, without traditions, without a name (like Vance)…moves among all the parties stirring up hatreds, and, without attaching himself to any of them, is borne up to a conspicuous place.”

Early Success

“The ignorance of his associates, the weakness and insignificance of his opponents, the sincerity of his lies, and the brilliant and self-confident limitedness of this man moved him to the head…the reluctance of his adversaries to fight his childish boldness and self-confidence win him…glory…The disgrace he falls into…turns to his advantage…the very ones who can destroy his glory, do not, for various diplomatic considerations…”

Fawning and Bowing to Power

“All people despite their former horror and loathing for his crimes, now recognize his power, the title he has given himself, and the ideal of greatness and glory, which to all of them seems beautiful and reasonable….One after another, they rush to demonstrate their non-entity to him….Not only is he great, but his ancestors, his brothers, his stepsons, his brothers-in-law are great.”

Turning a Blind Eye

“The ideal of glory and greatness which consists not only in considering that nothing that one does is bad, but in being proud of one’s every crime, ascribing some incomprehensible supernatural meaning to it – that ideal which is to guide this man and the people connected with him, is freely developed…His childishly imprudent, groundless and ignoble (actions)…leave his comrades in trouble…completely intoxicated by the successful crimes he has committed…”

Self-Adoration, Mobs, and Conspiracy

“He has no plan at all; he is afraid of everything…He alone, with his ideal of glory and greatness…with his insane self-adoration, with his boldness in crime, with his sincerity in lying – he alone can justify what is to be performed…He is drawn into a conspiracy, the purpose of which is the seizure of power, and the conspiracy is crowned with success….”

The Spell is Broken by a Reversal of Chance

“But suddenly, instead of the chances and genius that up to now have led him so consistently through an unbroken series of successes to the appointed role, there appear a countless number of reverse chances….and instead of genius there appears an unexampled stupidity and baseness…”

The Final Act – Biden Anoints Kamala

“A countermovement is performed…And several years go by during which this man, in solitude on his island, plays a pathetic comedy before himself, pettily intriguing and lying to justify his actions, when that justification is no longer needed, and showing to the whole world what it was that people took for strength while an unseen hand was guiding him…having finished the drama and undressed the actor.”

As both Trump and Vance are learning the hard way, celebrity in America is a double-edged sword. In an inaugural speech, prosecutor met defendant head on.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s (and JD Vance’s) type.”

Kamala Harris #understands the assignment.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and a regular THCB contributor. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

No, Health Care Is NOT Brat

By KIM BELLARD

Until last week, I thought “brat” referred to an obnoxious child. I was vaguely aware of Charli XCX, but I wasn’t aware that earlier this summer she’d dropped a new album with that name, or that the cultural zeitgeist subsequently declared this to be Brat Summer. Then last weekend in the space of a day, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, Vice President Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat.”

V.P. Harris’s campaign exploded. Most of us had kind of been dreading the campaign between two eighty-year-old white guys, and then suddenly we had a mixed heritage woman as a candidate, who even at 59 seemed positively youthful by comparison. And brat to boot!

It’s been hilarious to watch people like Stephen Colbert or Jake Tapper try to explain brat to their viewers. Charli XCX herself described it on TikTok as:

That girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it. It’s very honest; it’s very blunt—a little bit volatile, does dumb things, but, like, it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.

It’s been taken much further than that, of course. An article in The Guardian described it: “Because, as we all know by now, brat – inspired by Charli’s most recent album – is more than a name, it’s a lifestyle. It is noughties excess, rave culture. It’s “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. It’s quintessentially cool.”  Shirly Li, in The Atlantic, opined: “The essence of “brat”is not defining people as such; it’s being simultaneously provocative and vulnerable.”

But, more to the point, Xochitl Gonzalez, also writing in The Atlantic, made clear how we should think about brat: “If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.” After all, if you’re not in on the joke, you are the joke.

The Harris campaign is all in on the joke. It fully embraced the appellation, even changing its campaign logo on social media to the easily identifiable lime green of the Brat album cover. The KHive is busy creating memes, posting TikTok clips, and filling the world with coconut emojis (long story). Some have claimed that brat summer is already over, but maybe not so fast.

Whether it is the brat effect or simply a honeymoon period for Ms. Harris, her favorability and enthusiasm ratings have soared, and the Presidential race polls again show a dead heat, after President Biden’s polls had tanked following his disastrous debate performance earlier this month. The simple fact that the Dems have a candidate who can become a cultural meme, in a good way, feels refreshing, especially in a campaign that heretofore had evoked more dread and resignation than enthusiasm.

I wish healthcare was brat.

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