Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a gastroenterologist, is a contender to chair the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee if Republicans can eke out control of the Senate. He’s a telehealth proponent and has repeatedly warned about hackers targeting hospitals and other health care organizations.

No matter who wins the majority, both issues have bipartisan support.

In the current Congress, Cassidy has teamed with Nevada Democrat Jacky Rosen on a bill that would bolster cybersecurity by requiring HHS to work more closely with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Cassidy spoke with Ben about what the new political alignment in Washington means for health policy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Divided government is most likely coming in January. What can move that’s bipartisan? 

I’m hoping that there will be a bipartisan effort on telehealth so we can look at what worked and didn’t work under the public health emergency. Telemental health has been very valuable. There have been some issues that need to be worked through in terms of payment, but we can work through those. Telephysical health could be very valuable. I like to think we get something passed in the next Congress.

Should eased pandemic telehealth rules be made permanent or do you favor a temporary extension? 

I want to talk to CMS about it because I’ve heard they’re concerned about the cost. Intuitively to me, it’d be less expensive to provide telehealth. Your overhead is dramatically different. If you reduce that overhead, is your cost basis for providing service the same?

You need to make reimbursements for telehealth roughly equal to seeing people in person because nobody will want to see somebody in person otherwise. There are some times when you need to see somebody in person, so we can’t create a disincentive.

How would you assess the state of cybersecurity in health care? 

It needs to get better. There are different reports on data breaches that are affecting providers significantly, including one in 2020 that cost $67 million in lost revenue. There are increasingly virtual components to medical devices, and they are programmable and can be monitored from afar. That creates vulnerability. It’s not just what has occurred but that which we can imagine. We need to address both.

What should be done about it? 

You just have to assess the risk. On the one hand, we’re looking at these anecdotes and we’re using our imagination. But on the other hand, it has to be data, and it has to be an overall assessment. Studying the incidents that occur is going to help.

Your Democratic colleague Mark Warner from Virginia released a report last week saying Congress should consider setting minimum standards for cybersecurity for health care organizations. How do you feel about that? 

That’s very reasonable. We like to think that everybody is automatically on top of everything, but particularly for smaller systems and even for bigger ones, there should be a list of standards.

Warner also called on HHS to install a senior leader for cybersecurity to create a more unified approach. Should it?

Leadership is always important. The degree to which the decision-making and accountability is diffuse is the degree to which it is less effective than it could be.

What are the biggest obstacles right now to improving cybersecurity in health care? 

The reality is that legacy systems and facilities are potential points of vulnerability, but it’s going to be expensive for systems that have poor margins to change. We need to make the change, but there are structural issues.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, Alice Miranda Ollstein talks with Ben Leonard about the Democrats' big wins in Pennsylvania, with Josh Shapiro being elected governor and John Fetterman winning the Senate seat, and how both made abortion rights central to their campaign. Plus, Alice discusses what we know and what we don't know so far about how motivating abortion rights were at the ballot box.

A coming Supreme Court decision could have broad implications for enforcement of individual rights to federally funded services, including housing, foster care and nutrition, Ruth reports.

The case: HHC v. Talevski, pits Ivanka Talevski against Health and Hospital of Marion County, a public health agency in Indiana.

Talevski says her husband, Gorgi, who was suffering from dementia, was abused and given psychotropic drugs against his will while in the care of a county nursing home, a violation of his rights as laid out in the 1987 Federal Nursing Home Reform Act.

He has since died.

What’s at stake: The justices have to decide whether rights listed in the Medicaid Act are protected by a Reconstruction-era civil rights law that enables individuals to sue if their rights are violated.

Second, they’ll need to settle HHC’s question about whether the nursing home reform law confers rights.

Reading the tea leaves: The justices didn’t signal where they stood in oral arguments on Tuesday. However, many of their questions focused on the scope of the 1987 law.

“It's a very uncomfortable fact for you that the statute says ‘rights’ over and over again,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said to the nursing home’s counsel, Lawrence Robbins.

But both Kavanaugh and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked lawyers for the parties whether they thought a provision in the nursing home law providing for an administrative process was enough to protect patients.

What’s next: The Supreme Court is expected to rule by June 2023.

The devastating impact of Uganda’s Covid-19 lockdown, which is estimated to have shrunk the country’s economy by nearly one-tenth, is making it harder to win Ugandans’ cooperation amid an outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever Ebola.

It’s an example of how the pandemic will likely affect other disease-control efforts across the world in the near term, Carmen reports.

On Saturday, Uganda renewed its lockdown of two areas with Ebola cases for another three weeks. The Mubende and Kassanda districts are about 80 miles west of the capital, Kampala.

Lockdown measures first announced on Oct. 15 by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni include:

• A shutdown of public transportation and motorcycle taxis
  
• A curfew between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m., with places of worship and entertainment venues closed
  
• Symptom screening of students and gold mine workers

How Ugandans are reacting: 

• People in the Mubende district have complained about lost jobs because of the lack of transportation, Uganda’s Monitor reported Monday.
  
• Some with Ebola symptoms have sought care from private clinics or traditional healers to avoid isolation by public health authorities and quarantining of their contacts, who receive little or no support from the government.
  
• Because authorities are burying Ebola victims, a family in Kassanda exhumed a dead relative to perform traditional burial rituals.

Ugandans are worried about a potential lockdown of Kampala’s 1.5 million residents. Museveni tweeted Friday that he won’t lock down the city and urged people to go about their business while observing the measures to control the virus’ spread.