By Elisabeth Rosenthal – The No Surprises Act, which took effect in 2022, was rightly heralded as a landmark piece of legislation, which “protects people covered under group and individual health plans from receiving surprise medical bills,” according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. And yet bills that take patients like Chen by surprise just keep coming.
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By Phil Galewitz & Stephanie Armour – Doctors, hospitals, and health insurers for weeks issued dire warnings to Republican lawmakers that millions of people would lose health coverage and hospitals would close if they cut Medicaid funding to help pay for President Donald Trump’s big tax and spending bill.
By Bernard J. Wolfson – Republican efforts to restrict taxes on hospitals, health plans, and other providers that states use to help fund their Medicaid programs could strip them of tens of billions of dollars. The move could shrink access to health care for some of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people, warn analysts, patient advocates, and Democratic political leaders.
By Jackie Fortier – A document the Department of Health and Human Services sent to lawmakers to support Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to change U.S. policy on covid vaccines cites scientific studies that are unpublished or under dispute and mischaracterizes others.
By Darius Tahir – At one call center in the Philippines, workers help Americans with diabetes or neurological conditions troubleshoot devices that monitor their health. Sometimes they get pressing calls: elderly patients who are alone and experiencing a medical emergency.
By Arthur Allen – The Trump administration’s unprecedented $500 million grant for a broadly protective flu shot has confounded vaccine and pandemic preparedness experts, who said the project was in early stages, relied on old technology, and was just one of more than 200 such efforts.
By Stephanie Armour – But even as he extols MAHA, Trump has unleashed a slew of policies likely to make Americans less healthy. He’s slashing 20,000 full time positions from HHS and cutting more than $4 billion in indirect costs related to health research grants, including studies into treatment for Alzheimer’s and cancer.
From KFF News Network – Their latest podcast, ‘An Arm And A Leg’, This week, News has been coming out of Washington, D.C., since the start of the second Donald Trump administration like water out of a fire hose. It can feel impossible to stay on top of all the changes.
From KFF Health News Network – Their latest podcast, What the Health, Members of Congress are back in Washington, and Republicans are facing hard decisions on how to reduce Medicaid spending, even as new polling shows that would be unpopular among their voters.