| | | | |  | | By Carmen Paun and Daniel Payne | | | | | 
Like other abortion rights supporters, some religious groups are pushing to restore access to abortion. | Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo | RELIGIOUS GROUPS FIGHT ABORTION BANS — A year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, nearly a dozen challenges to abortion restrictions filed by clergy members and practitioners of everything from Judaism to Satanism are making their way through state and federal courts — a strategy that aims to restore access to the procedure and chip away at the assumption that all religious people oppose abortion, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports. In Missouri, United Church of Christ and Unitarian reverends, rabbis and ministers across several denominations joined a first-of-its-kind lawsuit arguing that the state blurred the line between church and state, imposed a particular Christian idea of when life begins over the beliefs of other denominations and threatened their ability to practice their religions. The case attempts to strike down the abortion ban entirely. So do other cases in Florida and Wyoming. Lawsuits filed in Indiana, Kentucky and Texas demand exemptions from the bans for people whose religions support abortion rights. Conservatives with a history of mounting their own religious challenges to state laws dismiss the effort as doomed to fail, arguing that even if people can prove the abortion bans violate their beliefs, it won’t be enough to halt enforcement. But with oral arguments and rulings in several cases expected this summer and fall, other legal experts say the challengers have a solid chance of persuading courts to grant religious exemptions to abortion bans if not strike them down. WELCOME TO WEDNESDAY PULSE, where we’re surprised that women without children by age 35 are at higher risk of binge drinking and alcohol use disorder than those who have children. I’m Carmen Paun, POLITICO’s global health reporter. Send news tips and comments to cpaun@politico.com and to your regular Pulse author Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com. TODAY ON OUR PULSE CHECK PODCAST, host Megan Messerly talks with Alice Miranda Ollstein, who expands on her reporting about the religious groups employing their unconventional legal tactic in an effort to dismantle abortion bans.
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More than two dozen bills that involve fentanyl and the opioid crisis will be reviewed in the House. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo | TAKING ON FENTANYL — The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee will hold a hearing this morning examining more than two dozen bills to take on fentanyl, which has become the top killer of young adults in the U.S. The panel will discuss reauthorizing key portions of the SUPPORT Act in response to the ongoing opioid crisis, which claimed more than 70,000 lives in 2022. The 2018 law funded opioid use disorder treatment, prevention, recovery and enforcement. It also helped states use Medicaid to better serve people who need treatment. Many of the law’s provisions are set to expire in September, and subcommittee members support reauthorizing parts of it to fight the addiction and poisoning crisis. Lawmakers will consider bills ranging from expanding telehealth benefits to providing recovery treatment services to combating xylazine, a horse tranquilizer that’s increasingly being combined with fentanyl, leading the White House to declare it an emerging threat to public health in April. Officials from the CDC, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, CMS and the DEA will testify about their agencies’ use of the SUPPORT Act and how it can be improved. Separately, the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee will consider legislation this morning that would impose sanctions on transnational criminal organizations, including cartels, for trafficking of illicit fentanyl and its raw materials. The FEND Off Fentanyl ACT is sponsored by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and more than 50 other senators from both parties.
| | | | SUBSCRIBE TO POWER SWITCH: The energy landscape is profoundly transforming. Power Switch is a daily newsletter that unlocks the most important stories driving the energy sector and the political forces shaping critical decisions about your energy future, from production to storage, distribution to consumption. Don’t miss out on Power Switch, your guide to the politics of energy transformation in America and around the world. SUBSCRIBE TODAY. | | | | | | | | LATEST PhRMA SHAKEUP — Anne Esposito is stepping down as the top lobbyist at PhRMA, the drugmakers’ most powerful industry group, POLITICO’s Megan R. Wilson reports. Esposito served as senior vice president of federal advocacy for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America since January 2020, overseeing its federal lobby shop. She will stay “through the end of July,” after which Mike Woody, PhRMA’s vice president of federal advocacy, will serve as an interim head of the department, a PhRMA spokesperson wrote to Megan. PhRMA declined to comment about her departure. Her resignation is the latest top departure at the pharma lobbying group, which lost three member companies — AbbVie, Teva and AstraZeneca — in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, which compelled Medicare to negotiate the cost of some high-cost drugs into law.
| | | ROE REVERSAL EFFECTS — Obstetricians and gynecologists nationwide surveyed by KFF felt the Supreme Court reversal of the federal right to abortion nearly a year ago has increased pregnancy‐related mortality and racial and ethnic inequities in maternal health and made it harder to attract new obstetricians and gynecologists to the field. About 40 percent of OB-GYNS in states with abortion bans felt constrained to provide care for miscarriages or other pregnancy-related emergencies, according to the survey. Among all states, that share fell to 1 in 5. Half of the OB-GYNs practicing in states where abortion is banned said they had patients who couldn’t obtain an abortion. Nationally, that’s the case for about a quarter of OB-GYNs. However, the share of OB-GYNs who said they provide abortions has fallen only slightly, by 3 percentage points — from 21 to 18 percent — compared with the time before the Supreme Court ruling. Background: KFF received responses from 569 OB-GYNs who spend most of their working hours in direct patient care and provide sexual and reproductive health care to at least 10 percent of patients.
| | HOSPITALS TRY TO STAVE OFF CMS CUTS — Hospitals are looking to persuade CMS to reverse course on a proposed small cut in a fund for facilities treating many low-income patients, POLITICO’s Robert King reports. CMS proposed a $115 million cut compared to last year in payments to so-called disproportionate share hospitals, which treat large numbers of Medicare, Medicaid and uninsured patients, for the federal fiscal 2024 year. The agency argued that the cuts are fine because of the low uninsurance rate of 9.2 percent. However, some hospitals and advocacy groups say CMS isn’t fully considering cuts to Medicaid coverage as part of the unwinding following the end of the pandemic public health emergency. As many as 15 million people could lose Medicaid in the coming months as a result. An estimate from the think tank KFF puts the number of people dropped off Medicaid across 22 states at 1.3 million so far.
| | IMMUNITY ON THE MIND — Independent experts for the CDC start meeting today to consider the latest data on vaccines for 10 infectious diseases, including respiratory syncytial virus, POLITICO’s Katherine Ellen Foley reports. The three-day advisory committee meeting is part of the panel’s regularly scheduled discussions. The CDC can choose whether to follow the experts’ guidance. Most insurance companies look to the CDC’s formal recommendations to decide which vaccines to cover for beneficiaries. Today, the panel will discuss data behind two RSV vaccines for adults ages 60 and older from Pfizer and GSK, which received FDA approval last month. Both companies will present new data on their shots’ efficacy over multiple seasons, as well as data on co-administration with annual flu shots. The companies have said they are prepared to deliver vaccinations in the fall. If the CDC recommends the vaccines, it will be the first time any population has immunization against the common respiratory virus. On Thursday, advisers will discuss Pfizer’s RSV candidate for infants and an antibody from Sanofi and AstraZeneca that can boost infant protection against the disease.
| | STAT reports on an FDA study to put nutrition labels on the front of food packages. Reuters writes about the struggle of groups fighting the opioid crisis to get settlement money. Nature writes about the debate on how to fairly compensate countries for sharing viral genome sequences as part of the negotiations for an international pandemic accord.
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