Good morning and welcome to the Weekly New York Health Care newsletter, where we keep you posted on what’s coming up this week in health care news, and offer a look back at the important news from last week.
Beat Memo
Home health agencies across the state are facing an existential crisis.
It’s all because of a state law passed years ago to cut costs by limiting participation in New York’s consumer-directed personal assistance program to a finite number of home health agencies awarded contracts by the Department of Health.
The Medicaid program was established in 2012 to enable eligible New Yorkers to choose and hire their own paid caregivers, while home health agencies can handle the administrative tasks on their behalf.
Hundreds of home health agencies provide care through the consumer-directed personal assistance program, but 270 of them will be forced to cease operations after failing to win one of the limited Health Department contracts.
Many are smaller agencies that cater to specific populations.
The law that initiated the contracting process has already been tweaked a few times to change the criteria for agencies to win a contract.
Now stakeholders are trying to drum up support for legislation that would repeal the provision, which is sponsored by state Sen. Leroy Comrie and Assemblymember Nader Sayegh.
“There’s a recognition by a lot of the legislators that this has been kind of a mess,” said Derek Adams, a partner at Potomac Law Group who is representing some of the affected home health agencies.
IN OTHER NEWS:
— Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers have been awarded a five-year, $13.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to identify gene variants associated with longevity. The research team has so far identified 15 longevity gene variants by studying hundreds of healthy people aged 95 and older.
“Their long health spans can’t be attributed to their environment — quite a few centenarians we’ve studied, for example, have been life-long smokers,” said co-principal investigator Nir Barzilai, director of Einstein’s Institute for Aging Research. “Instead, evidence strongly suggests that centenarians possess rare genetic differences that slow their aging and make them resistant to diseases.”
ON THE AGENDA:
— Wednesday at 1 p.m. The City Council Committee on Criminal Justice hosts an oversight hearing on outposted therapeutic housing units.
GOT TIPS? Send story ideas and feedback to Maya Kaufman at [email protected].
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Odds and Ends
NOW WE KNOW — The American College of Emergency Physicians formally withdrew its approval of a consequential 2009 paper on “excited delirium.”
TODAY’S TIP — The Medicare open enrollment period has just begun. Read all about it.
STUDY THIS — New research finds digital wearable devices are more effective than clinicians at tracking the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
What We’re Reading
— Doctors employed by a large nonprofit health system in Minnesota and Wisconsin voted to unionize, The New York Times reports.
— Legislation to support stillbirth prevention heads to the House after unanimous Senate approval, ProPublica reports.
Around POLITICO
— Newsom approves minimum wage for California health care workers, Rachel Bluth reports.
— Via Katherine Ellen Foley: Pfizer, HHS unveil plans for commercialization of Covid antiviral.
MISSED A ROUNDUP? Get caught up on the New York Health Care Newsletter.
