AP: CBO: Trump's Tax Law Could Lead To $491B In Medicare Cuts
The federal budget deficits caused by President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law could trigger automatic cuts to Medicare if Congress does not act, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported Friday. The CBO estimates that Medicare, the federal health insurance program for Americans over age 65, could potentially see as much as $491 billion in cuts from 2027 to 2034 if Congress does not act to mitigate a 2010 law that forces across-the-board cuts to many federal programs once legislation increases the federal deficit. (Groves, 8/16)

The Washington Post: North Carolinians Just Got Medicaid Expansion. Now It’s Jeopardized
Roughly 650,000 people here have signed up for Medicaid since the legislature expanded it 18 months ago — the culmination of a years-long effort in this politically split state. But now they are in danger of losing it under provisions in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In signing that law, Trump approved more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. Those cuts are colliding with state budget challenges, imperiling the future of Medicaid in states such as North Carolina. (Winfield Cunningham, 8/17)

ProPublica: Trump’s Rollback of Rules for Mental Health Coverage Could Lead More Americans to Go Without Care
During his first term, President Donald Trump frequently turned to the issue of mental health, framing it as a national crisis that demanded action. He linked it to opioid addiction, mass shootings and a surge in veteran suicides — and he later used it to argue against COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures. At times, he backed up his rhetoric with action. His administration issued tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand community mental health services and continued funding contracts to help federal regulators enforce the parity law, which requires insurers to treat mental and physical health care equally. (Miller and Kohler, 8/18)

The Washington Post: Fed Up With U.S. Health Care Costs, These Americans Moved Abroad
Jennifer Sontag cracked her skull and couldn’t afford emergency brain surgery. Her doctors suggested she start a GoFundMe. “Their advice was, ‘You’ve got to get the surgery. You’ll work it out later,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? Your advice to someone in a medical crisis is to beg for money?’” Sontag, 52, was teaching business management in China in 2019 when she fell while exiting a bus and hit her head so hard that it caused a leak of cerebral fluid in her brain. She spent five days in a hospital in Shanghai before her worried family persuaded her to get the necessary surgery close to them in St. Louis. (Kasulis Cho, 8/17)

More health industry news —

Asheville Watchdog: Patient Called For Help From Mission Bathroom 29 Minutes Before Someone Found Him. By Then, His Heart Stopped, New Report Shows.
A patient who died in February after calling for help in a Mission Hospital emergency department bathroom went 29 minutes with no response as multiple staff members passed by the door with a call light flashing above, according to documents obtained by Asheville Watchdog. By the time an employee entered the bathroom, the 54-year-old patient was slumped in a wheelchair, unresponsive, his heart no longer beating. (Jones, 8/17)

North Carolina Health News: State Finds Repeated Failures After Violent Patient Uprising At Holly Hill 
Just days before Christmas 2024, a group of female teen patients broke into the nurse’s station and medication room at a psychiatric hospital in Raleigh, where they tore down parts of the ceiling, hurled objects at staff, damaged equipment and used syringes as weapons. Several police officers responded to the disturbance at Holly Hill Hospital, and emergency responders took seven patients to the emergency room for monitoring due to possible medication ingestion. (Knopf, 8/18)

MedPage Today: Bias In The Chart? Black Patients More Likely To Be Doubted By Doctors 
Black patients were more likely than white patients to have notes from their clinicians questioning their sincerity or competence, a study found. In a cross-sectional analysis of more than 13 million notes in electronic health records, Black patients had higher odds of having credibility-undermining terms in their documentation compared with white patients (adjusted OR 1.29, 95% CI 1.27-1.32), as well as lower odds of credibility-supporting language (aOR 0.82, 95% CI 0.79-0.85), reported Mary Catherine Beach, MD, MPH, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, and colleagues in PLoS One. (McCreary, 8/15)

Stat: Draft MAHA Report: RFK Jr. Tiptoes Around Pesticides, Food Lobby 
A much-awaited game plan for how the Trump administration will make Americans healthier largely steers clear of policy recommendations, instead calling for more research on nutrition, agricultural chemicals, and “potential benefits of select high-quality supplements,” among other topics. (Cueto, Todd, Cooney, Broderick and Oza, 8/15)

On the CDC shooting and RFK Jr. —

KFF Health News: CDC Staff Tell Journalist They Felt Targeted Even Before Atlanta Campus Shooting
Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees’ reaction to a deadly shooting at the agency’s Atlanta office on CBS News 24/7’s “The Daily Report” on Aug. 11. KFF Health News Southern correspondent Sam Whitehead discussed how President Donald Trump’s recent megabill is unlikely to insulate Medicaid expansion holdout states from health cuts on WUGA’s “The Georgia Health Report” on Aug. 8. (8/16)

The Hill: HHS Secretary Kennedy Rules Out 2028 Presidential Bid
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Friday he is not running for president in 2028, denying speculation amid attacks from right-wing activist Laura Loomer. “Let me be clear: I am not running for president in 2028. My loyalty is to President Trump and the mission we’ve started,” Kennedy said in a post on the social platform X. (Weixel, 8/15)

Axios: VA Curbs Maternity Leave After White House Cancels Union Contract
New and expecting parents who work at Veterans Affairs are getting approved maternity and paternity leave canceled after their union contract was terminated by the White House, according to two internal memos viewed by Axios. (Peck, 8/15)

In abortion news —

Virginia Mercury: Virginia Abortion Funds See Sharp Uptick In Patients Both In And Out Of State 
Virginia-based abortion funds are citing an increased uptick in calls to their intake lines, as more people rely on their assistance to help cover the cost and sometimes travel expenses to get abortions. Since federal protections were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court three summers ago, various states have enacted restrictions or near-total bans on the procedure. With Virginia the least-restrictive southern state, several funds here told the Virginia Mercury in interviews they’re seeing a spike in assistance requests. (Woods, 8/18)

West Virginia Watch: Abortion Pill Campaign Targets Rural West Virginia, Kentucky Gas Stations 
Advertisements promoting the abortion pill will be at gas stations across West Virginia and Kentucky over the next few weeks. Mayday Health, a New York-based health education nonprofit, will run the ads at 104 rural gas stations through Sept. 7. The campaign started Aug. 11. The advertisements say “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Learn more at Mayday Health.” (Kersey, 8/18)

Axios: Ohio's Abortion Wait Times Drop After Pause On 24-Hour Law
Preterm Cleveland, the region's largest abortion provider, says its patients are getting care faster since Ohio's 24-hour waiting period was put on hold last year. The change has been especially significant for out-of-state patients, whose numbers have doubled since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. 80% of those patients were seen in a single day over the past year, avoiding costly extended stays in Ohio, per Preterm. (Allard, 8/18)

Mother Jones: Anti-Abortion Playbook, Flipped: Arkansas Abortion Fund Opens Its Own “Crisis Pregnancy Center” 
For nine years, Karen Musick stood outside the Little Rock Family Planning Services clinic in Arkansas, protecting women arriving for their abortion appointments from anti-abortion protesters who regularly gathered there. After retiring from her job as a loan specialist with the Small Business Administration, Musick was filled with purpose as a clinic escort volunteer. “I remember thinking on a Saturday morning, while I’m being called the devil and a murderer and all these things,” she recalls, “that I’m doing exactly what God wants me to do.” In 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned and the total abortion ban in Arkansas went into effect that summer, the Little Rock clinic shut down. But Musick had found another way to contribute to the pro-choice movement by co-founding the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, which helps pregnant women travel out of state for abortion care. The clinic’s owner allowed them to work from the building for free. (Morel, 8/18)

Newsweek: Texas Laws Changing On September 1: From Abortion To Property Tax 
Texas Senate Bill 33 bans local government in the state from funding out-of-state abortions after the Lone Star State introduced a near-total abortion ban, with limited exemptions to protect the life of the mother, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. (Bickerton, 8/16)

The Hill: Patty Murray Rips Costco Over Mifepristone Decision
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hammered Costco on Friday for appeasing “far-right extremists,” after the retailer said earlier this week that its pharmacies would not dispense the abortion medication mifepristone. “I am deeply alarmed by news reports that Costco is refusing to sell safe, effective, and legal medication for no other reason than to appease the politics of anti-abortion fanatics,” Murray said in a statement following the news. “I refuse to stand by and allow far-right extremists to bully major corporations and dictate what medicine women can or cannot get access to.” (Thomas, 8/16)

Also —

The Hill: US Plan To Destroy $10M Contraceptives Sparks Fierce Pushback
Lawmakers and activists in Europe and the United States are scrambling to stop the State Department from destroying nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contraceptives have been sitting in a warehouse in Belgium for months after President Trump froze all U.S foreign aid and shuttered USAID earlier this year. (O’Connell-Domenech, 8/16)

Bloomberg: AstraZeneca Launches At-Home FluMist As Vaccination Rate Drops
AstraZeneca PLC released its flu vaccine nasal spray for at-home use on Friday, an option that comes at a contentious time for vaccine access in the US. FluMist Home is the same product as the pharmaceutical company’s seasonal influenza vaccine spray, which has been offered by clinicians for the past two decades. FluMist Home received approval for patients ages 2 and up from the US Food and Drug Administration last fall. (Nix, 8/15)

KFF Health News: It’s Almost Flu Season. Should You Still Get A Shot, And Will Insurance Cover It?
For parents of school-aged children, the fall to-do list can seem ever-growing. Buy school supplies. Fill out endless school forms. Block off parent-teacher nights. Do the kids’ tennis shoes still fit? Somewhere, at some point, you might remember flu shots. Get your flu shot. Get their flu shots. Or should you? Can you? Is that still a thing? Amid political chatter about vaccines and the government entities that oversee them, it’s understandable to wonder where all this leaves the 2025-26 flu vaccine. (Czopek, 8/18)

On the covid surge —

Los Angeles Times: COVID-19 Surges Nationwide — And The Highest Rates Are In California
COVID-19 rates in the Southwestern United States reached 12.5% — the highest in the nation — according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this week. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County recorded the highest COVID levels in its wastewater since February. The spike, thanks to the new highly contagious “Stratus” variant, comes as students across California return to the classroom, now without a CDC recommendation that they receive updated COVID shots. That change in policy, pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been criticized by many public health experts. (Haggerty, 8/16)

The Washington Post: Covid Is Rising. New Vaccines May Not Be Ready Until Mid-September.
The federal committee that would recommend the updated coronavirus vaccine is not expected to meet until at least mid-September, according to industry employees and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information. By that point, the summer covid wave could be over, but Americans could still get a boost of immunity ahead of an expected winter wave. (Malhi, 8/16)

Also —

CIDRAP: CDC Data Show Uptick In Some Teen Vaccine Coverage
New survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that uptake of two vaccines routinely recommended for teens increased last year, while coverage with another recommended shot remained flat. The data from the 2024 National Immunization Survey-Teen, published yesterday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, show that, among 16,325 US adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, coverage with more than one dose of the tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine increased from 89.0% in 2023 to 91.3% in 2024. (Dall, 8/15)

CIDRAP: Measles Surge Continues In Americas, With Outbreaks In 10 Nations
More than 10,000 cases, 18 of them fatal, have been reported across 10 countries in the Americas this year, with the pace of infections 34 times higher than a year ago, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said today, urging countries to step up their vaccination, surveillance, and outbreak responses. In a news release, PAHO said the outbreaks are mainly linked to low vaccination coverage, with 89% of cases occurring in people who are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status. (Schnirring, 8/15)

AP: Health Officials Warn Of Rabies Threat From Bat-Infested Cabins In Wyoming
Health officials are working to alert hundreds of people in dozens of states and several countries who may have been exposed to rabies in bat-infested cabins in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park over the past few months. As of Friday, none of the bats found in some of the eight linked cabins at Jackson Lake Lodge had tested positive for rabies. But the handful of dead bats found and sent to the Wyoming State Veterinary Laboratory in Laramie for testing were probably only a small sample of the likely dozens that colonized the attic above the row of cabins, Wyoming State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist said. (Govindarao and Gruver, 8/15)

Bloomberg: Cencora Directors Reach $111 Million Deal On Opioid Claims
Cencora Inc. directors have agreed to a settlement of more than $111 million to resolve claims by pension funds that they ignored years of red flags about the drug distributor’s handling of opioid painkillers and failed to set up required systems to monitor sales of the drugs. The deal would end litigation accusing directors of turning a blind eye to suspiciously large opioid shipments to reap billions for the firm, which was known until 2023 as AmerisourceBergen Corp. before it changed its name. (Feeley, 8/15)

Minnesota Public Radio: Fentanyl, Synthetic Opioids Have Accelerated Overdose Deaths Among Older Black Men 
Four years ago, JR Graham, 55, had a job he loved in security at Ecolab in St. Paul. Then, he relapsed. “My father passed away and then that led me back into being involved in drugs,” he said. “I gave up on myself.” It’s been more than 30 years since Graham first started using drugs. And as he continues to work toward recovery, he said the drugs of today are unlike anything he’s come across before. (Bui, 8/18)

In other public health news —

The Washington Post: Is Human Hair The New Answer To Better Dental Care?
The next major innovation in dental care just might be a new ingredient added to our toothpaste and mouthwash from an unlikely source: sheep’s wool or human hair. Both contain the fibrous protein keratin, which can repair damaged tooth enamel, according to an international study led by researchers at King’s College London. (Johnson, 8/15)

Bloomberg: Electric Vehicle Fast Chargers Have A Surprising Health Downside
Hundreds of public fast chargers are popping up across the US to serve electric vehicle drivers seeking a cleaner alternative to gas-powered cars. But they come with a surprising risk: Charging stations create air pollution. While EVs contribute vastly less to air pollution than combustion-powered vehicles, fast-charging stations are what a recent study called an “overlooked source of air pollution.” (Alake and Court, 8/15)

The New York Times: Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked In Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick And Dying 
The smoke from the wildfires that burned through Los Angeles in January smelled like plastic and was so thick that it hid the ocean. Firefighters who responded developed instant migraines, coughed up black goo and dropped to their knees, vomiting and dizzy. Seven months later, some are still jolted awake by wheezing fits in the middle of the night. One damaged his vocal cords so badly that his young son says he sounds like a supervillain. Another used to run a six-minute mile and now struggles to run at all. (Dreier, 8/17)

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Hair Relaxers And Cancer: Hundreds Of Lawsuits Allege Injury
JoAnna Zackery wanted the bone straight hair that flowed flawlessly on the Black women she saw on television. It was 1990 and the 21-year-old went to a salon to put chemical hair relaxer for the first time on her coils. “Everybody was getting it,” Zackery said. “It was beautiful to see straight hair, and I wanted it. I wanted to try it.” (Burns and Hogan, 8/17)

Stat: Culinary Medicine Pioneer David Eisenberg On Food As Means To Health
To understand how David Eisenberg became one of America’s greatest champions of culinary medicine, it helps to know that his childhood is divided into a before and after. Before: He grew up amid neat rows of cream puffs and the warm smell of yeast, learning the alchemy of food at his father’s Viennese-Jewish Brooklyn bakery. Then came the after: His father died at age 39 of a heart attack, and he lost his three grandparents within the same year. Eisenberg was 10 years old. (Todd, 8/18)

AP: Judge Denies Trump Administration Request To End A Policy Protecting Immigrant Children In Custody
A federal judge ruled Friday to deny the Trump administration’s request to end a policy in place for nearly three decades that is meant to protect immigrant children in federal custody. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles issued her ruling a week after holding a hearing with the federal government and legal advocates representing immigrant children in custody. (Gonzalez, 8/16)

Chicago Tribune: As One Boy Heals In Chicago, US Halts Medical Care Visas For Gazans
At a farm in the south suburbs, upbeat Arabic music swept across the land as more than a dozen Palestinian children — many with prosthetic limbs or in wheelchairs — and their families danced and moved to the music in the center of a raised platform. One of the children, Khalil Abu Shaban, traveled in a circle using his wheelchair and periodically sang into a microphone as the dozens who attended the Saturday celebration at Arab Chicago Farm in Frankfort excitedly clapped for him. (Johnson, 8/17)

Chicago Tribune: Migrant Given Humanitarian Parole Donates Kidney To Brother
The minutes dragged into hours on Wednesday night as Jose Gregorio Gonzalez tossed and turned through the night. At 5 a.m. the next day, he was scheduled to donate his kidney to his younger brother, Alfredo Pacheco, who was also restless. By 2 a.m. the two couldn’t stay in bed any longer and began to get ready for a day that they thought would never come. (Presa, 8/17)

On homelessness —

The New York Times: For D.C.’s Homeless, Strained Lives Become More Unstable
For some 15 years, David Brown had made a home in Washington Circle, living in a tent with a handful of others in an encampment. On Friday, that home was destroyed — his tent, clothing and other possessions were tossed into a dumpster by police officers carrying out President Trump’s crackdown on some of the city’s most powerless residents. Left with a fraction of his things, Mr. Brown and his 6-month-old puppy, Molly, moved a block away and slept outside the Foggy Bottom subway station. Sitting in a wheelchair outside the station on Saturday, he was still baffled at what was happening. “Why is he doing this, for no reason?” he asked of Mr. Trump. (Patil and Kavi, 8/18)

KFF Health News: Health Care Groups Aim To Counter Growing ‘National Scandal’ Of Elder Homelessness
At age 82, Roberta Rabinovitz realized she had no place to go. A widow, she had lost both her daughters to cancer, after living with one and then the other, nursing them until their deaths. Then she moved in with her brother in Florida, until he also died. And so last fall, while recovering from lung cancer, Rabinovitz ended up at her grandson’s home in Burrillville, Rhode Island, where she slept on the couch and struggled to navigate the steep staircase to the shower. (Freyer, 8/18)

On funding and research cuts —

Undark: Proposed NASA Cuts Could Affect Public Health Research
Daniel P. Johnson, a geographer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, works with a team of researchers who spend a lot of time catching blowflies, dissecting their iridescent blue-green abdomens, and analyzing the contents of their guts. Johnson and his colleagues are tracking the spread of Lyme disease on a warming planet. But they need a lot of additional data. They get it from NASA. The world’s foremost driver of space science is not a public health agency. But NASA’s vast data collection has quietly become important for health research, helping scientists track disease outbreaks and monitor air pollution amid climate change. (Kenen, 8/18)

Bloomberg: Foreign Aid Groups Challenge Loss In Trump Funding Freeze
Nonprofits and businesses that carry out foreign aid programs contested a recent court ruling that empowers the Trump administration to unilaterally refuse to spend billions of dollars in funding approved by Congress. The challengers on Friday asked the full US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to reconsider a panel’s 2-1 decision earlier this week that tossed out a pair of lawsuits over the funding block. (Tillman, 8/15)

The New York Times: A $45 Treatment Can Save A Starving Child. US Aid Cuts Have Frozen The Supply
The women walked miles through the dusty streets of Maiduguri, in the northeastern corner of Nigeria, carrying their emaciated children. At 7 a.m., they began lining up to wait, for hours, to be handed a small, red packet containing a special paste that could bring their children back from the brink of starvation. The children were eerily listless; they did not run, shout or even swat the flies off their faces. Their tiny, frail frames made many appear years younger than they were. (Mandavilli, 8/15)

The New York Times: America Is Abandoning One of the Greatest Medical Breakthroughs
The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced it would wind down 22 mRNA vaccine development projects under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, halting nearly $500 million in investments. This decision undercuts one of the most significant medical advances in decades, technology that could protect millions more from the threats ahead. I know the stakes because I was BARDA’s director when the United States made the decision to invest heavily in mRNA. That investment did not begin with Covid-19. It began in 2016, when we faced the Zika virus outbreak. (Dr. Rick Bright, 8/18)

Bloomberg: RFK Jr. Is Sabotaging President Trump's Health Legacy
For leaders in business, failing to learn the lessons of a crisis can be disastrous. For leaders in government, when millions of lives are at risk, such disasters can be catastrophic. Unfortunately, that’s where the US is heading, thanks to the disagreement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has with his boss, President Donald Trump. (Michael R. Bloomberg, 8/18)

Stat: RFK Jr. Is As Dangerous As The Smallpox Virus 
Physician Brendan Phibbs, who wrote “The Other Side of Time: A Combat Surgeon in World War II,” said, “It is a merciful God that doesn’t let us see the future.” But we all have dreams for that future, and so we went into public health knowing it was not a great approach to riches, and we also knew it was not likely we would ever be thanked. People don’t thank us for something they did not know they were destined to encounter. So we must be secure in the knowledge that what we are doing has a beneficial impact. (William Foege, 8/18)

The Washington Post: Involuntary Commitment Got A Bad Rap. The Streets Got More Dangerous.
Many on the left hurriedly resist the idea of reforming civil commitment laws, given the country’s dark history with mass institutionalization. In the 1950s, more than half a million Americans were detained at state psychiatric hospitals, where they were often subjected to unsanitary conditions and inhumane treatment. Most of those facilities have long since closed, thanks to better psychiatric medications and a shift toward community-based services. (8/18)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Defending Rural Health Care In The Age Of AI-Driven Attacks
The message came through before dawn: “Our EHR is down. No access to patient charts.” In a rural clinic, that isn’t just a technical inconvenience. It’s the mother who drove 40 miles before sunrise to get her child’s asthma medication, the farmer who left the fields to review his lab results, the elderly patient who can’t make another trip for months. When systems go dark, there’s no backup facility down the road. For many, that clinic is their only lifeline. Today, that lifeline is under siege. The newest weapon — for both healers and attackers — is artificial intelligence. (Holland Haynie, 8/17)

Stat: Peer Reviewers Should Be Paid For Their Considerable Labor 
In July, the National Institutes of Health released a request for information seeking public input on a proposed policy to limit allowable publication costs — the portion of grant funds researchers can use to cover journal fees, including article processing charges (APCs). These fees, which can run from hundreds to several thousand dollars per article, are the current price of making scientific work openly accessible to the public. (Angel Algarin, 8/18)