The top health stories of 2022

A review of 2022’s top health stories

It’s our second-to-last edition of the year. What a ride 2022 has been.

The public learned of the Supreme Court’s likely decision to overturn Roe v. Wade from a leaked draft. The pharmaceutical industry saw a rare defeat. The coronavirus marched on, and the White House faced another infectious-disease threat. 

As the year draws to a close, we’ve compiled a list of health stories that we’re still thinking about from around The Post and beyond — from memorable scoops to revealing features to accountability journalism. 

— In January, Dan Diamond dove deep into President Biden’s pandemic response a year in, and found that Biden was struggling to deliver on some of the key promises of his 200-page plan to defeat the virus. 

— “This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins.” Caroline Kitchener wrote about an 18-year-old who learned she was pregnant in late August 2021, just two days before a state law restricting the procedure after fetal cardiac activity is detected went into effect. Caroline’s story — published less than a week before the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion — offered a glimpse of what a post-Roe America would look like. 

— In mid-May, the country had one case of monkeypox. Three months later, that number had grown to 13,500, though the caseload has since subsided. Despite efforts to learn from the nation’s coronavirus failures, federal officials struggled early in the first months of the record outbreak to meet the growing demand for testing, vaccines and treatments, Dan Diamond, Fenit Nirappil and Lena H. Sun reported in August. Meanwhile, public health authorities were navigating a delicate balancing act: How to warn men who have sex with men about the virus without fueling hate, Fenit wrote.

— “What if Yale finds out?” William Wan revealed that the university had pressured suicidal students to withdraw from school and then apply to get back in. Current and former students then sued Yale.

— One sobering statistic: Firearms killed more children and adolescents in 2020 than car accidents, which had long been the leading cause of death for young people, according to an analysis by Dan Keating. 

— And around the D.C.-area … Tension over the role of racism in public health strained a Virginia agency under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The state’s chief public health official, Colin Greene, rejected the state-recognized declaration that racism is a public health crisis and downplayed the role of racism in health disparities — and that left some fearing for their jobs, Jenna Portnoy reported.

— Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward landed a massive story. A majority of the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, an initial draft opinion showed. The bombshell report quickly upended the political landscape, catapulting the issue to the forefront of the upcoming midterm elections. 

— Another staggering statistic: More than 100 million Americans are saddled with health-care debt, per Kaiser Health News’s Noam N. Levey. That’s one of the data points from a series exploring the scale and causes of medical debt from KHN and NPR.

— Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has lost its edge, Stat’s Rachel Cohrs reported. The major drug lobby “couldn’t muster the money or the clout” to stop Democrats from passing legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a major defeat for the industry. “PhRMA may have watered the major reforms down, but it didn’t mount a pressure campaign like it has in the past,” Rachel wrote.

— The hospice movement has become a for-profit hustle, ProPublica’s Ava Kofman revealed in a deep dive into the industry. Half of all Americans die in hospice care, yet a lack of regulation has allowed fraud and exploitation to proliferate.

— This story may feel like it happened a lifetime ago. But in 2022, Politico’s Alex Thompson broke the news that an internal White House investigation concluded Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, had bullied and demeaned his subordinates. Lander resigned hours after the story came out.

— The Indianapolis Star’s Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette reported that a 10-year-old rape victim had traveled from Ohio to Indiana to obtain an abortion. Across the country, conservatives had pushed for abortion restrictions without exceptions for rape and incest, and the story of the 10-year-old put the GOP in an uncomfortable public spotlight.

— Americans enrolled in Medicaid have retained their coverage throughout the pandemic. But in Mississippi, the state sent a letter to postpartum women telling them they were no longer eligible for the program, leading to confusion and a reluctance to seek care, Mississippi Today’s Isabelle Taft wrote. 

Omni-update: Title 42 is once again holding up a critical deal in Congress.

Senate leaders were aiming to pass the $1.7 trillion spending package early this morning with government funding set to run out at the end of the week. But the two parties are now feuding over an amendment from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) that would keep pandemic-era rules allowing the U.S. to quickly expel migrants at the borders, per The Early 202. 

The latest: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the two sides are “very close” to an agreement on the chamber’s floor at 2 a.m. The Senate is convening at 8 a.m. 

Life expectancy drops for second consecutive year in 2021

U.S. life expectancy continued its steady, alarming decline last year, dropping to 76.4 years at birth in 2021 from 77 in 2020, according to final data released this morning by the National Center for Health Statistics. 

That means Americans can expect to live as long as they did in 1996 — a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in a developed nation, our colleague Lenny Bernstein writes. 

• In all, 3.46 million people died in the United States in 2021, 80,502 more than the previous year.
• At birth, women could expect to live 79.3 years last year and men could expect to live to 73.5 — life spans that both declined sharply from 2020. 
• The coronavirus killed 416,893, while drug overdoses were responsible for 106,699 deaths. 

Zooming in: Drug overdoses rose by 14 percent in 2021 and have quintupled in two decades. Two-thirds of the deaths were due to the powerful synthetic fentanyl, although deaths from methamphetamine and cocaine also rose sharply last year. 

Heart disease and cancer continued as the leading causes of death. However, the flu and pneumonia dropped off the list of the top 10 causes of mortality in the U.S. — likely because parts of the population remained masked against the coronavirus — and were replaced by diseases of the liver, which are often related to alcohol use or viruses.

Biden administration releases Tamiflu stockpile

The Department of Health and Human Services is releasing additional doses of the prescription flu medicine Tamiflu from the nation’s reserves to meet surging demand for the drug as the United States confronts a severe and early flu season.

States and territories were given access to their own Tamiflu stockpiles last week, which were previously reserved for pandemic preparedness. Jurisdictions that have exhausted their supplies of the antiviral treatment may now request additional doses from the Strategic National Stockpile.

The big picture: The Food and Drug Administration hasn’t listed Tamiflu as being in short supply, but pharmacists and consumers have reported difficulty finding generic versions of the drug in some regions across the country, CNN reports. 

CBS News’s Margaret Brennan spoke with former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb about the demand on Sunday:

Hundreds of U.S. hospitals sue patients over unpaid medical pills

Many of the nation’s hospitals use legal action or other aggressive tactics to pursue patients for unpaid bills, despite growing evidence of the harm caused by medical debt, an investigation by Kaiser Health News found.

While individual hospital systems have come under scrutiny in recent years for their collection practices, KHN’s analysis of more than 500 facilities shows that the policies are widespread, suggesting most of the nation’s roughly 5,100 hospitals deploy such tactics. Among the findings: 

• More than two-thirds sue patients or take other legal action against them, such as garnishing wages or placing liens on property. 
• About 25 percent sell patients’ debts to debt collectors, who in turn can pursue patients for years for unpaid bills. 
• About 1 in 5 deny non-emergency care to people with outstanding debt. 

Many hospital officials say they’re obligated to collect what patients owe, but stress the industry’s commitment to helping patients who can’t pay their bills. Charity care is available at most U.S. hospitals, and nonprofit medical systems must provide financial aid as a condition for not paying taxes. 

But at many medical centers, information about financial assistance is difficult to find: About 1 in 5 hospitals researched by KHN don’t post their aid policies online. Also, standards for qualifying for assistance vary widely and applying for aid can be extremely complicated, requiring patients to produce exhaustive information and personal finance records, KHN’s Noam N. Levey writes. 

• State health officials are once again calling on people to wear masks to protect against a triple threat of respiratory viruses this holiday season. But unlike winters of the pandemic’s past, they’re counting on Americans to voluntarily comply with their pleas, Fenit Nirappil, Henry Rodgers, Vanessa Kjeldsen and Samantha Aguilar report for The Post. 
• The FDA fully approved monoclonal antibody Actemra to treat covid-19 in hospitalized adult patients, Genentech announced yesterday.
• China may be struggling to keep a tally of coronavirus cases and deaths, experts at the World Health Organization warned yesterday amid concerns about a lack of thorough and reliable data from the country as it battles a surge of infections, The Post’s Adam Taylor reports. 

The Secret Abortions of Texas (Stephania Taladrid | The New Yorker )

Medicare’s home hospital program may soon get a lifeline from Congress. Can it prove its worth? (By Mario Aguilar | Stat)

A TikTok trend sold out Ozempic, leaving people with diabetes dizzy, scared (By Emma Court | Bloomberg News)

Thanks for reading! See y’all tomorrow.