“It’s all happening.” This is a theme in the film Almost Famous that “Penny Lane” emotes but actually says in the movie to explain how she tries to live in the moment. It seems to me that the inside-the-beltway set is trying to grapple with how “it’s all happening” in this new moment post-election. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I offer a few insights into what we know is happening in the health policy scene.
Some health policy news is still happening, despite being fully overshadowed by the election:
- The FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs are collaborating to launch a virtual health AI lab – the first intergovernmental health AI lab – to test new AI tools and provide insight that may help develop regulatory frameworks.
- CMS released its 2025 Physician Fee Schedule, which established permanent coverage of audio-only telehealth visits, extended the use of telehealth by teaching physicians, and maintained Medicare coverage of behavioral telehealth regardless of location. But Congress has not yet extended Medicare telehealth flexibilities, which expire Dec. 31, 2024, and CMS complained in the fee schedule about its limited authority in this space.
- Private equity firm Francisco Partners announced its plan to acquire medical software company AdvancedMD for $1.125B. AdvancedMD is a Utah-based medical office software platform offering practice management, payment software, and EHR. systems for 13,000 ambulatory physician practices and several hundred medical billing companies.
The boy reporter says: “I have to go home.” And Penny Lane says: “You are home.” The notice that his reality is very different than what he thinks is true comes in the middle of a spontaneous group sing of Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, after a night of fights, hurt feelings, and chemically-induced bad behavior. This hungover shrug of acceptance is very relatable to health policy experts right now. It explains why all the healthcare journalists are eagerly reporting on conjecture rather than anything that is actually known about the next administration’s plans for health policy changes. There is a strong need for certainty. Normally, we all KNOW things. But all we know for certain is that there is uncertainty. I give a lot of credit to Caitlin Owens of Axios. She wrote a great Top 10 Themes piece about the new health care world while fully acknowledging how much we don’t know. She apologizes for repeatedly hedging because President-elect Trump’s approach to health care is very unpredictable and his instincts and likely appointees are very different from standard Republican orthodoxy. While we wait out the 75-day transition to the new world order, we will be reading the conjecture too: Advisory Board, The Hill, Kaiser Family Foundation, Wall Street Journal, STAT, NPR, Healthcare Finance News, PwC, Politico. In the meantime, I am going to impatiently wait until I know what I am talking about again. As the great Philip Seymour Hoffman says in Almost Famous, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
