MEDICAID’S PANDEMIC RULES TO END: Despite the damage Covid-19 wrought on the economy, the number of people without health insurance declined between 2019 and 2021. About 1.5 million people gained insurance coverage thanks largely to a change Congress made to Medicaid rules barring states from bumping people off their health insurance programs for low- and lower-middle-income people so long as the public health emergency remained in effect. That benefit will end on April 1, per a new directive from Congress in its fiscal 2023 omnibus spending bill. POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein explained that Democrats negotiated away the Medicaid coverage for other things on their wish list, including “a year of postpartum coverage for low-income moms in states that don’t already offer it and a year of continuous coverage provisions for children at risk of losing health insurance.” Republicans argued that with the job market long recovered from the early pandemic shock, it no longer made sense to keep people on Medicaid who’d found well-paying work. And, as Alice wrote, with Republicans set to take control of the House in January, Democrats saw the trade as possibly their “last chance to fund some of their top health priorities, including policies that address the country’s worsening rates of maternal mortality.” NO BOOST FOR FAMILY PLANNING: Abortion-rights groups were dismayed that Democrats in charge of both Congress and the White House came up empty in their bid to increase funding for contraception in the year-end funding bill, Alice also reported. Funding for the Title X family planning program will remain where it’s been for the last eight years: at $286.5 million. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said there was little Democrats could do, given Senate rules that require 60 votes to pass appropriations bills. The GOP was opposed to increasing funding for the Title X clinics that provide free and discounted contraception to millions of low-income people. But abortion-rights groups said they expected more, considering the bill also maintains the Hyde Amendment, the decades-old rider banning federal funding for abortion, and several other longstanding restrictions on government health insurance covering the procedure. “Congress had a clear directive, and they failed to deliver,” Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson told POLITICO. “At a time when Roe v. Wade has been overturned and health care access is under increasing threat, this bill fails to meet the moment.” DOMINO EFFECT CUTS LIFESPANS: A baby born in 2021 can expect to live 76.4 years, down from 78.8 in 2019, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of U.S. life expectancy. As POLITICO’s Krista Mahr reported, the latest figures leave expected U.S. lifespans well below those in other large, wealthy nations and reflect the federal and local governments’ ongoing struggle to meet the demands of concurrent public health crises. The drop in life expectancy in 2021 extended a downward trend that began in 2020 and brought the level to its lowest since 1996. Both Covid-19 and fatal drug overdoes were to blame. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said the decline was the result of a domino effect set off by the pandemic. Americans died in large numbers from Covid-19, but the pandemic also “drove social changes that made people more vulnerable to taking drugs as a way of escaping.” It also made it harder to get help. As a result, fatal drug overdoses have skyrocketed, rising nearly 16 percent in 2021 after a 30 percent increase in 2020. | 
