Each year, healthcare experts and policy wonks take to Twitter to craft #HealthPolicyValentines — sometimes witty, sometimes biting odes to the healthcare industry.
The tradition started in 2012, after HHS staffer Emma Sandoe created the hashtag on her commute home, according to the Advisory Board. That year, she told the Advisory Board's newsletter she thought "it would be funny to tweet one 'health policy valentine' every day until Valentine's Day, but as soon as I started, I couldn't stop."
Since then, Twitter users have posted their own love notes to healthcare ahead of Feb. 14.
Fourteen of Becker's Hospital Review's 2019 favorites, listed in alphabetical order:
1. Aaron Albright (director of external communications at Optum): Our love is like value-based care: widely misunderstood
2. Andy Slavitt (former administrator of CMS): The midterms showed Americans want an answer / To make sure no one goes bankrupt just because they have cancer
3. Angus Worthing, MD (chair of government affairs at the American College of Rheumatology): Shall I compare thee to a biosimilar? Thou art no more lovely and that's because [the FDA] found no clinically meaningful differences
4. Brian J. Cohen (software engineer): Roses are red / Violets are blue / Healthcare is one word / Or maybe it's two?
5. Christina Farr (digital health reporter at CNBC): ED drugs online / Are selling just fine / There are medical chatbots galore / Still, investors want more / But really changing healthcare / Gives them a scare
6. Emma Sandoe (health policy PhD candidate and founder of #HealthPolicyValentines): Trust me, we won't be getting rid of any "private plans"
7. Emma Wager (policy and research associate at NYS Health Foundation): Hey babe, are you the Affordable Care Act? Because you're not perfect but you'd be really really hard to replace
8. Health Affairs: Just like healthcare spending, my love for you increases every day
9. John Mullahy, PhD (professor of health economics in the department of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison): Roses are red / Violets are blue / Vaccines are safe and effective / For measles, mumps and (sometimes) flu
10. Lisa Bari (health IT lead at the CMS Innovation Center's Seamless Care Models Group): Roses are red / Violets are blue / If you think reading thousands of pages of regulatory text is hard / Try writing it, too
11. Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission: Roses are boring / But violets are great / Medicaid is complicated / It varies by state
12. Megan Foster Friedman (senior healthcare analyst at the Center for Health and Research Transformation): When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's S05.91XA (unspecified injury of right eye and orbit, initial encounter)
13. Jonathan Cohn (senior national correspondent at the Huffington Post): Yes, it's Valentine's Day / But I'm not thinking of cupid / I'm recalling Uwe's wisdom: / It's the prices, stupid
14. Thomas Novak (Medicaid interoperability lead at ONC and CMS): My love for you is as surprising as an out of network anesthesiologist's bill showing up in my mailbox