Marketplace Morning Report is brought to you by you. Yep, the most important piece of our budget is donations from you, our listeners. We call the folks who donate Marketplace investors, because every dollar you give comes back to you in the form of trustworthy, grounded reporting, with a sense of humor. Please become a Marketplace investor today at marketplace.org slash donate, or click the link in our show notes. Insurers are easing up on prior authorization. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshore in New York. UnitedHealthcare, the nation's biggest insurer, announced that it's cutting back on its requirements for prior authorization by 30%. Prior authorization is where your doctor orders a medical procedure or a test or a drug, but you can't get it until your insurance company approves it. From the insurer's perspective, it's a way to cut costs and prevent people from getting expensive or unnecessary care. For doctors and patients, it has been a source of massive frustration. UnitedHealth isn't the only one to cut back on the requirement, though, and other insurers have been doing this in the past year as well. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more. If you have a chronic health condition, you're probably quite familiar with prior authorization. Amy Killalay at Georgetown's Center on Health Insurance Reforms has done a lot of research on coverage for diabetes. And I will say, continuous glucose monitors are often, if not predominantly, covered with prior authorization attached to them. Lots of other durable medical equipment prescribed by a doctor often requires insurer approval, too, like insulin pumps and wheelchairs. So do certain surgeries, imaging tests like MRIs, and many prescription drugs and therapies. Kay Pestena at the health policy nonprofit KFF says in polling people with chronic illnesses After cost, they say that prior authorization is the biggest administrative hassle they have. It also increasingly an issue even for people who don have a chronic illness Pestena says that likely why there growing pressure for something to change It coming at a time where costs are going up people are signing up for coverage and then realizing that that's something that they need, the care they need, is not being covered. Soon, UnitedHealthcare says it will no longer require prior authorization for certain outpatient surgeries and therapies, some diagnostic tests like echocardiograms, and chiropractic care. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. Marketplace Morning Report is brought to you by you. Yep, the most important piece of our budget is donations from you, our listeners. We call the folks who donate Marketplace investors because every dollar you give comes back to you in the form of trustworthy, grounded reporting with a sense of humor. Please become a Marketplace investor today at marketplace.org slash donate or click the link in our show notes. As we mentioned, the US and Iran are reportedly back to negotiating and are close to a deal. Axiosos reporting the deal would involve a moratorium on nuclear enrichment and an end to sanctions. CNBC is reporting Iran's currently considering the proposal. Meanwhile, inside of Iran, the economy is suffering with more than a million people out of work, food prices spiking businesses closing all while the U naval blockade is shrinking Iranian oil exports For more we joined by Javad Salehi Isfahani He professor of economics at Virginia Tech Good morning Good morning. What is Iran's economy like right now? Well, it's very much an economy at war. There has been considerable destruction of property and factories. Prices are rising very fast because supplies are limited. Inflation last month was over 100%. So nobody is making any plans about the future because of this awaiting nature. I think the most important characteristic of the economy is that it is waiting for something to happen. How much of this uncertainty that you are describing, how much of it is the actual bombardment of infrastructure? How much of it is the closure of the strait? Well, the closure of the strait isn't all that important at this time because I think the critical supplies, those of food, and Iran has other ways of getting food. The land routes has, you know, half a dozen countries border it that can supply Iran with food if it has money. So I don't know how much foreign reserves they have, but as long as they have dollars, they can get their food. The other important thing in Iran is that a lot of industrial establishments were bombed, especially of heavy industries like steel, petrochemicals. Although they did not employ many people, but they have a huge downstream effect. A lot of other factories will not be able to operate. So jobs are being lost at a rate of maybe 100,000 a month. Those are the people that are in huge stress because they're not able to live without the wage and salary and have to depend on cash transfers that the government deposits, which is barely enough to buy daily food. So the government actually has a cash program where it provides people with a certain amount of money and they been doing this for a while How long can efforts like that go on The main constraint in a way is cash because once the food supplies, the inventories run down, they have to buy new supplies, which can come through Pakistan, to Turkmenistan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. John, it's possible that they can buy stuff on credit, especially if the Russians are willing to lend them. Chinese may be able to, in fact, they may be interested in helping Iran survive this because if Iran folds, both China and Russia stand to lose. So I think on the Iran side, it isn't as deterministic as people imagine sometimes that they're doing so badly that in a couple of months, this spirals. I don't see that. I think that's the kind of exaggerations about Iran that has got us into this difficult situation now. Javad Salehi Isfahani, professor of economics at Virginia Tech. Thank you so much. Thank you. There's a lot more to that interview and the state of Iran's economy, as well as how the Iranian people are responding to that economic pressure. You can find that at marketplace.org or on our podcast. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshore with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM American Public Media. Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder. At least half of us will experience a mental illness in our lifetime. In a new series of special reports from Call to Mind, we hear about the mental health impact of stress, climate change, immigration, and more. Tune in for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions. Listen to Call to Mind from American Public Media.
