The Host
The Department of Health and Human Services is funded for the rest of the fiscal year. But lawmakers remain concerned about whether the Trump administration will spend the money as directed.
Meanwhile, negotiations over extending expanded subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans have broken down in the Senate, mostly over a perennial issue — abortion. The subsidies’ expiration at the end of 2025 has left millions of Americans unable to afford their health insurance premiums.
This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico Magazine, and Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call.
Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:
President Donald Trump signed government spending legislation that provides for HHS, as well as a separate measure that addresses pharmacy benefit managers and some Medicare programs. Meanwhile, Trump has yet to put out his own budget — traditionally a president’s wish list of priorities. On the health side, that is likely to include familiar “Make America Healthy Again” ideas, such as funding for a new agency, proposed last year, that would be known as the Administration for a Healthy America.
In Congress, negotiations over renewing more-generous ACA premium tax credits have collapsed. While lawmakers are likely to continue hearing from constituents about the high cost of health care, now Senate negotiators are signaling that the chances of renewing the expired tax credits are low.
A new study in JAMA finds that cancer patients covered by high-deductible health plans had lower rates of survival. The research suggests that high out-of-pocket costs discourage preventive and necessary care — and it comes as little surprise in an environment where many Americans cannot afford unexpected bills for a few hundred dollars, let alone four- or five-figure deductibles.
And a new interview reveals a very different mandate for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remade vaccine advisory panel: to scrutinize the risks of immunizations, rather than balance their risks and benefits. The interview with the panel’s chair, published by Politico, quoted him saying Americans should view them “more as a safety committee,” adding, “Efficacy will be secondary.” The notion that the panel will no longer balance a vaccine’s potentially health- and lifesaving effects against its possible side effects flies against decades of government best practic …