Members of Congress headed home for the summer last weekend, leaving the healthcare community in an all too familiar position: Wondering how key priorities will turn out after lawmakers failed to address them in the first part of the year. At the top of the list is money, with billions of dollars in cuts to physician pay and safety net hospitals funding set to begin in January, as well as appropriations for expiring programs such as community health centers. Congress has not completed its work on bills that would impose restrictions on pharmacy benefit managers, mandate transparency in multiple realms of healthcare, enact site-neutral payments for certain outpatient services, regulate artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, overhaul the 340B drug discount program, and extend COVID-19 pandemic-era authorizations for telehealth and hospital-at-home care.
