OVERNIGHT HEALTH: House to vote on ‘keep your plan’ bill

by Elise Viebeck - 09/09/14 7:03 PM ET

The House will vote Wednesday on Rep. Bill Cassidy’s signature “keep your plan” health bill that would allow insurers to offer cheaper group plans that fall short of ObamaCare standards.

The Louisiana representative — who is also competing in one of the nation’s tightest Senate races — has pitched his plan as a rebuttal to President Obama’s promise last year that Americans could keep their plans under the new law.

{mosads}Cassidy’s plan is expected to raise more than $1 billion in tax revenues over the next decade, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday. The same agencies predicted that the Affordable Care Act would cost the federal government $36 billion in 2014 alone.

Healthcare has been a major plank in Cassidy’s campaign for Senate, in which he has attacked his opponent, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) for her support of Obama’s law. About one-in-five Louisianans were uninsured in 2010.

Cassidy’s plan could mean cheaper premiums for about 2 million people who choose the group plans, likely those who are younger and in better health. But a migration away from ObamaCare plans will likely mean the rest of the country’s healthcare customers will pay more, the budget office said. Read more here.

Ebola epidemic sees new funding: House Republicans have chosen to meet the White House’s full request for new anti-Ebola funds, according to the stop-gap government funding bill released Tuesday night. The lower chamber’s continuing resolution allocates a total of $88 million between the Centers for Disease Control and a federal health emergency fund to develop anti-Ebola treatments. The move is an apparent reversal from earlier in the day, when a source told The Hill that House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) had limited the Ebola earmark to $40 million. Read that story here. Earlier in the day, USAID announced an additional $10 million to support the deployment of healthcare workers by the African Union. That post is here.

HEALTHCARE PLAYERS TO WATCH: Read The Hill’s recap of which D.C. figures will shape the healthcare landscape this fall, from ObamaCare’s second enrollment period to the House GOP’s lawsuit over the employer mandate delay.

Senate announces hearing, but will the House? Two Senate panels will convene a joint hearing on the Ebola outbreak next week in a sign of lawmakers’ rising interest in the topic. The event comes as the upper chamber weighs how much additional funding to provide for agencies responding to the crisis. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) will lead the event, which will bring together his two panels: the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee devoted to healthcare spending. An Appropriations spokesman said additional funding levels for agencies like the CDC are still up the in air. House Dems have requested a hearing but there’s been no answer from the GOP. Read more here.

ObamaCare approval lower than Obama’s: Support for ObamaCare has continued to slide this summer, with just 35 percent of voters now approving of the law, according to a poll released by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Tuesday. The downward slide in support for ObamaCare has worried Democrats ahead of the November election, particularly in vulnerable Senate districts. Healthcare remains one of the most important issues in midterm elections, ranking only behind the economy and jobs as voters’ top issue.

Still, four years after its passage, nearly 60 percent of voters said they have not felt any direct impact of the law, according to the poll. A more reliable predictor of voters’ feelings on the health care law? Their political affiliation. The Kaiser poll found that opinion on the law is nearly entirely split along party lines. Read more here.

Dem pans CVS for birth control coding error: Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) is warning CVS to correct an apparent error in its pharmacy coding that charges women a co-pay for generic birth control. In a letter to the company Tuesday, Speier warned that requiring cost-sharing for contraception violates federal law. “CVS Health needs to get to the bottom of how widespread these unlawful charges were, and make sure that all of the individuals who were charged are reimbursed,” she wrote to CVS Health CEO Larry Merlo. Read the letter here.

NPR launches NIH grant database: National Public Radio (NPR) just announced a new transparency tool that tracks National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to individual institutions since 2000. The database, which launched Tuesday, allows users to search for a university or institution and see a year-by-year breakdown of their annual grant totals from the NIH. The site is part of a larger NPR project on the impact of research budget cuts. Check it out here.

Wednesday’s schedule:

The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health will meet to discuss the latest news on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers are sure to discuss the administration’s acknowledgment that a part of HealthCare.gov was hacked in July.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a roundtable on its bipartisan 21st Century Cures initiative. The event will focus on the development of new treatments and feature several top health officials, including HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell.

State by state:

Nebraska healthcare premiums will rise 11 percent

North Carolina’s Medicaid budget has $64 million left over

More legislators want to ditch Cover Oregon after delays

California governor will approve mandatory sick leave bill

Reading list:

The tough politics of Medicaid for Republicans, The Week

Obamacare has reduced the uninsured rate for virtually everyone – except kids, Washington Post

Apple healthcare strategy remains shrouded in mystery despite Watch wearable arrival, Tech Times

What you might have missed by The Hill:

Fourth American aid worker evacuated after catching Ebola

VA watchdog: Wait-time manipulation prevalent