Week ahead: PhRMA to push trade deals across finish line

{mosads}Also, the nation’s culture wars will flare up again Thursday when the House takes up legislation from Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) barring healthcare reform subsidies from going to health plans that cover abortions. Social conservatives are holding their annual Value Voters Summit through Sunday, where they’ll try to get the ear of Republican primary candidates who have so far been focused almost exclusively on jobs and the economy.

Meanwhile, pressure continues to grow on the deficit-busting supercommittee. 

Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) on Thursday spearheaded a letter with 113 bipartisan co-signers urging that the committee repeal Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate formula for paying doctors, which has required costly legislative “fixes” for years to prevent statutorily mandated cuts. The independent board that advises Congress on Medicare payments this past week also approved a proposal to replace the formula.

Repealing the SGR, however, would add some $300 billion to the $1.2 trillion the committee already has to find in spending cuts. 

Medicaid advocates are worried the program for low-income Americans makes a juicy target. On Thursday, the NAACP and others will release state-by-state data detailing how cuts to the program could affect blacks and Latinos with chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and chronic lung disease.

On Wednesday, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health and Commerce subpanels will hold a joint hearing on voluntary restrictions on food marketing to children that government regulators are currently finalizing. The hearing is titled “Food Marketing: Can ‘Voluntary’ Government Restrictions Improve Children’s Health?” (hint: Republicans — and the food and marketing industries — think not).

Also Wednesday, the Senate HELP Committee will hold a hearing on “the state of chronic disease prevention.”

And on Thursday a Senate Judiciary hearing on “forced arbitration” will likely touch upon medical malpractice; Deborah Pierce, the associate director for emergency medicine at Elkins Park Hospital in Pennsylvania, is scheduled to testify.