First Edition: Monday, May 12, 2025

KFF HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES

KFF Health News: Medicaid Payments Barely Keep Hospital Mental Health Units Afloat. Federal Cuts Could Sink Them
This town’s hospital is a holdout on behalf of people going through mental health crises. The facility’s leaders have pledged not to shutter their inpatient psychiatric unit, as dozens of other U.S. hospitals have Keeping that promise could soon get tougher if Congress slashes Medicaid funding. The joint federal-state health program covers an unusually large share of mental health patients, and hospital industry leaders say spending cuts could accelerate a decades-long wave of psychiatric unit closures. (Leys, 5/12)

KFF Health News: KFF Health News’ ‘An Arm and a Leg’: A Health Policy Veteran Puts 2025 In Perspective
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. So in this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner to try to get a handle on what’s happened so far. (Weissmann, 5/12)

KFF Health News: KFF Health News’ ‘Letters To The Editor’: Readers Scrutinize Federal Cuts And Medical Debt
Trump Team’s Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Actions. The recent KFF Health News article “Beyond Ivy League, RFK Jr.’s NIH Slashed Science Funding Across States That Backed Trump” (April 17) struck a nerve. The rapid succession of suspended National Institutes of Health grants that swept the country shortly after President Donald Trump’s election have left us struggling to understand why such vital research — the bedrock of our ability to support the public’s health — would be treated as unnecessary or, worse, harmful. (5/12)

KFF Health News: Journalists Zero In On Potential Medicaid Cuts And Social Security Hiccups 
KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed funding cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services on CBS News’ “24/7” on May 7. KFF Health News correspondent Darius Tahir discussed Social Security and the Trump administration’s plans on CBS on May 6. (5/10)

MEDICAID

The Hill: New Mexico Governor Says Potential GOP Cuts To Medicaid Would ‘Destroy Health Care As We Know It’
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) on Sunday blasted Republican efforts to reduce Medicaid funding, saying potential cuts would “destroy health care as we know it.” “This is very simply an effort to destroy health care as we know it, to rip it away from everyday Americans, make it more costly for everybody else,” Lujan Grisham said in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” The Democratic governor warned that potential cuts would have far-reaching consequences across the country. (Fortinsky, 5/11)

The Colorado Sun: Colorado Mental Health Providers Say They Were “Betrayed” By Medicaid
Behavioral health providers stepped up to offer new services to fill a gap, but the promise of higher reimbursement rates is going away. (Brown, 5/12)

PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICES

FUNDING AND RESEARCH CUTS

AP: Judge Pauses Much Of Trump Administration's Massive Downsizing Of Federal Agencies 
The Trump administration must halt much of its dramatic downsizing of the federal workforce, a California judge ordered Friday. Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco issued the emergency order in a lawsuit filed last week by labor unions and cities, one of multiple legal challenges to Republican President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of a federal government he calls bloated and expensive. (Har, 5/10)

CBS News: HHS Moving To Fire Probationary Employees Again, Officials Say
The Department of Health and Human Services is moving for a second time to fire probationary employees at the nation's health agencies, multiple federal officials said, after many previously had their terminations paused amid court battles over their fate. In mid-February, thousands of recently hired or promoted workers at the department had received letters firing them, but those firings were temporarily reversed by multiple court orders. Many workers who did not leave for other jobs have been on paid leave since. (Tin, 5/9)

The Washington Post: Trump’s Funding Cuts Are Unofficially Halting Government Operations 
At the Environmental Protection Agency, research at 11 laboratories has ground to a halt because the Trump administration has not approved most new lab purchases. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, key work on weather forecasting has slowed to a crawl because Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick must sign off personally on many contracts and grants. And at the Social Security Administration, some employees are running out of paper, pens and printer toner because the U.S. DOGE Service has placed a $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards. (DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.) (Natanson and Joselow, 5/11)

Politico: Trump Transforms Congressionally Mandated Health Offices Into Ghost Towns
The Trump administration’s purge of the health department is cutting so deep that it has incapacitated congressionally mandated programs and triggered legal challenges. The administration insists the cuts are a lawful “streamlining” of a “bloated” agency, but federal workers, Democratic lawmakers, state officials and independent legal experts say keeping offices afloat in name only – with minimal or no staff – is an unconstitutional power grab. (Ollstein and Gardner, 5/11)

NBC News: Federal Workplace Safety Workers Say Gutting Their Agency Will Lead To Preventable Deaths On The Job
More than 100 current and former employees of a federal agency charged with ensuring workplace safety warn that American workers face a greater risk of death and injury on the job as the Trump administration slashes the organization’s ranks. In a letter to Congress, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health employees say that the agency’s mission is at risk due to the administration’s actions over the past several months. (Soboroff, 5/11)

Politico: Trump Injected Uncertainty Into Federal Contracting. Donor Brains Went To The Grave
President Donald Trump’s push to cut billions of dollars in government contracts is rattling the niche community of scientists who collect, study and share human brains. Two of the country’s brain banks, which have worked with the government to store and distribute specimens to researchers studying diseases like Parkinson’s and ALS for more than a decade, told POLITICO they had temporarily stopped taking new donations for fear the administration would not renew their contracts. (Schumaker, 5/9)

NBC News: Trump Administration Halts Research To Help Babies With Heart Defects
For James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell University, the $6.7 million government grant meant babies would be saved. Awarded by the Department of Defense on March 30, it would allow his team at Cornell to ramp up production and testing of PediaFlow, a device that boosts blood flow in infants with heart defects. A week later, that all changed. The Defense Department sent Antaki a stop-work order on April 8 informing him that his team wouldn’t get the money, intended to be distributed over four years. Three decades of research is now at risk, and Antaki said he has no idea why the government cut off funding. (Kingkade, 5/10)

Stat: NIH Cuts Heavily Impact Chinese, Chinese-American Scientists
Amid deep cuts to U.S. government-funded research and revived scrutiny of their work, Chinese and Chinese-American researchers are reassessing their futures in this country, potentially shifting the balance in global scientific innovation, as well as in the biopharma industry. (Yang, 5/12)

GLOBAL WATCH

Bloomberg: US To Probe Reports Of Swabs On Its Citizens Arriving In China
The US embassy in China said it received reports that American citizens are being subjected to “invasive medical testing” upon arrival in the country. “We are looking into these reports,” the embassy in Beijing said in a response to a query by Bloomberg. “The U.S. Mission to China has no greater priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens in China.” (5/10)

MORE FROM THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

ABC News: FDA Approves, Expands 3 Natural Color Additives After RFK Jr.'s Plan To Remove Artificial Food Dyes
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved on Friday additional color additives from natural sources in line with the Department of Health and Human Services' goal to eliminate artificial food dyes. The agency approved two dyes and expanded approval of a third, meaning it can now be used in a wider range of food products. (Kekatos, 5/9)

NBC News: FDA Stalls In Posting Food Safety Warning Letters Amid Staff Cuts
A seafood company failed to follow federal safety rules to prevent potential botulism contamination. A business was hawking dietary supplements with the misleading claim that they’d cure, treat or prevent disease. A fresh sprouts producer didn’t take adequate precautions against contamination. The Food and Drug Administration laid out these inspection findings in warning letters, accusing the companies of committing “significant violations” of federal laws, according to an FDA staff member who described the letters to NBC News. (Khimm, 5/9)

The Hill: RFK Jr.: Casey Means Left Traditional Medicine Because It Does Not Cure Patients
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a Thursday interview said President Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general turned away from modern medicine because “she was not curing patients.” Casey Means, an ally of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, has come under scrutiny since Trump made her the surgeon general pick, as she never finished her residency and does not have an active medical license. Kennedy defended Means during the interview Thursday on Fox News’s “Special Report.” (Fields, 5/9)

The Washington Post: Unpacking RFK Jr.’s ‘Doublespeak’ On Vaccines
Early last month, after two Texas children had died of measles, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged that the MMR vaccine prevents the spread of that virus. But later that day, he posted photos of himself with anti-vaccine doctors, calling them “extraordinary healers” and promoting unproven treatments. In a television interview three days later, Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, encouraged vaccination for measles. In the same conversation, he cast doubt on whether one of the children had actually died of measles-related complications. (Weber, 5/11)

LGBTQ+ HEALTH

AP: Trump Has Broad Support For Some Transgender Policies, Poll Finds
About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Donald Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans. But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youth. (Mulvihill and Sanders, 5/10)

The Texas Tribune: Texas House OKs Excluding Trans People From State Records 
Dozens of trans people and their allies gathered in the outdoor Capitol rotunda Friday, chanting at the top of their lungs. They will not erase us. The next day, the Texas House of Representatives preliminarily passed a bill that aims to do just that. (Klibanoff, 5/10)

OUTBREAKS AND HEALTH THREATS

CNN: Measles Outbreak In North Dakota Prompts Local Health Officials To Quarantine Unvaccinated Schoolchildren 
Measles cases continue to accumulate in the United States in what is already the second-worst year since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago. Now, a recent outbreak in one North Dakota county has led local health officials to quarantine nearly 200 unvaccinated students. (McPhillips, 5/9)

AP: At Least 10 People Hospitalized After Listeria Outbreak In California And Nevada
At least 10 people in the U.S. have been sickened in a listeria outbreak linked to ready-to-eat food products, and a producer is voluntarily recalling several products, federal officials said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Saturday that federal, state and local officials are investigating the outbreak linked to foods produced by Fresh & Ready Foods LLC of San Fernando, California. The FDA says the 10 people who fell ill were in California and Nevada, and required hospitalization. (5/12)

CIDRAP: US Flu Activity Now At Low Levels, But CDC Confirms 10 More Kids' Flu Deaths
A 2024-25 flu season that has been classified as high severity has now reached low transmission levels, but 10 new flu-related deaths in children bring the season's total to 226, the most since 2009-10, when 288 pediatric deaths were recorded, according to the latest FluView update today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The percentage of outpatient visits for influenza-like illness (ILI), or respiratory illness, dipped slightly from 2.2% the previous week to 2.1% last week (see CDC graph below). (Wappes, 5/9)

CIDRAP: Enterovirus D68 Can Lead To Severe Respiratory Illness In Even Healthy Kids
Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) can cause severe acute respiratory illness (ARI) in otherwise healthy children of all ages, with hospitalized children who have an underlying condition other than asthma or who have reactive airway disease (RAD) at higher risk for poor outcomes, finds a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open. A team led by researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mined data from the New Vaccine Surveillance Network, a system based in emergency departments (EDs) and hospitals at seven US pediatric medical centers. (Van Beusekom, 5/9)

AP: US Suspends Mexican Live Cattle Exports Over Screwworm Pest
The United States will suspend Mexican exports of live cattle for 15 days to review the joint strategy in the fight against the screwworm, Mexico’s Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué said on social media Sunday. Berdegué said on social platform X that he had spoken with his U.S. counterpart, Brooke Rollins, who had informed him of the decision. “We don’t agree with this measure, but we’re confident we’ll reach an agreement sooner rather than later,” Berdegué said. (5/11)

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

The Texas Tribune: Texas Lawmakers Propose Abortion Pill Bill That Can’t Be Challenged In State Courts
Senate Bill 2880, which passed the Senate last week, allows anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails, prescribes or provides an abortion-inducing drug to be sued for up to $100,000. ... That the Texas Senate passed a bill to crack down on abortion pills isn’t surprising. But the protections written into this bill, which says the law cannot be challenged as unconstitutional in state court, could have ripple effects far beyond the question of abortion access. “This is absolutely unprecedented, what they’re trying to do here,” Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, said. “I haven’t reviewed every law in Texas, but I think it’s safe to say this has never been tried.” (Klibanoff, 5/12)

The Washington Post: Digging Into The Math Of A Study Attacking The Safety Of The Abortion Pill
The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that says it opposes “the extreme progressive agenda while building consensus of conservatives,” recently issued a report on a key abortion medication, mifepristone, that it says raises questions about its safety. After analyzing insurance claims for more than 865,000 prescribed mifepristone abortions, the group said it had determined that almost 11 percent of women experienced a “serious adverse event,” much higher than an overall 0.5 percent rate found in clinical studies. ... We should note that, unlike most credible medical studies, the report did not undergo a formal external peer review before publication. (Kessler, 5/12)

HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY

Modern Healthcare: American Medical Association Hires Dr. John Whyte As CEO 
Dr. John Whyte has been tapped as the next CEO and executive vice president of the American Medical Association. Whyte, who specializes in internal medicine, will assume the role July 1, the physician trade group said Friday. He will succeed Dr. James Madara as CEO, who has held the position since 2011. (DeSilva, 5/9)

Modern Healthcare: Omada Health Files For IPO
Omada Health filed Friday for a proposed initial public offering. The digital health company sells its chronic condition management, hypertension, diabetes and musculoskeletal programs to employers, pharmacy benefit managers, health systems and health plans that then give access to individual users. It also offers a companion service for patients who take glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist weight loss drugs. (Turner, 5/9)

PHARMA AND TECH

The New York Times: Elizabeth Holmes’s Partner Has A New Blood-Testing Start-Up
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. In the meantime, her partner is starting one of his own. Billy Evans, who has two children with Ms. Holmes, is trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to health testing,” according to marketing materials reviewed by The New York Times. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Theranos similarly aimed to revolutionize diagnostic testing. The Silicon Valley start-up captured the world’s attention by claiming, falsely as it turned out, to have developed a blood-testing device that could run a slew of complex lab tests from a mere finger prick. (Copeland, 5/10)

CNBC: Walgreens Doubles Down On Robots To Fill Prescriptions Amid Turnaround
As struggling drugstore chains work to regain their footing, Walgreens is doubling down on automation. The company is expanding the number of retail stores served by its micro-fulfillment centers, which use robots to fill thousands of prescriptions for patients who take medications to manage or treat diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions. (Constantino, 5/11)

CBS News: FDA Approves First At-Home Cervical Cancer Screening Test, A Pap Smear Alternative, Company Says
The maker of an at-home cervical cancer screening test said Friday it has won approval from the Food and Drug Administration, giving patients an alternative to in-clinic pap smears. The screening test, called Teal Wand, from women's health company Teal Health, is available for those aged 25 to 65 at average risk. It tests for human papillomavirus, or HPV, the virus that causes nearly all cervical cancers. The approval comes after a study from the company confirmed self-collected samples using their device perform as accurately as clinician-collected samples. (Moniuszko, 5/9)

AP: Zepbound Beats Wegovy For Weight Loss In First Head-To-Head Trial Of Blockbuster Drugs
People taking Eli Lilly’s obesity drug, Zepbound, lost nearly 50% more weight than those using rival Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy in the first head-to-head study of the blockbuster medications. Clinical trial participants who took tirzepatide, the drug sold as Zepbound, lost an average of 50 pounds (22.8 kilograms) over 72 weeks, while those who took semaglutide, or Wegovy, lost about 33 pounds (15 kilograms). That’s according to the study funded by Lilly, which was published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Aleccia, 5/11)

The Washington Post: For Those Who Don’t Want Knee Replacement, Other Options Exist
Years of high school, college and semiprofessional football meant Layne Herber’s knees didn’t stand much of a chance. ... An estimated 30 million Americans — or more than 11 percent of the adult population — suffer from knee osteoarthritis, the degenerative disease that prompts most knee replacements. In addition to people like Herber who don’t want to undergo the surgery, many Americans aren’t eligible for it because of health issues, including obesity. For those people, several medical specialties — including reconstructive plastic surgery, interventional radiology, and physical medicine and rehabilitation — have developed clinically recognized treatments designed to bring at least temporary relief. (Theim, 5/11)

The Washington Post: 5 Percent Of 10th- And 12th-Graders Say They’ve Used Nicotine Pouches 
More U.S. high-schoolers used nicotine pouches — smokeless nicotine powder products — last year than the year before, according to new research published in JAMA Network Open. The researchers, who used data from a nationally representative survey of 10,146 youths in 2023 and 2024, said 5.4 percent of 10th- and 12th-graders reported having used nicotine pouches, up from 3 percent the year before. The 10th- and 12th-graders’ use of pouches in the 12 months and 30 days before the surveys also increased year to year. Males were also more likely to use pouches than females. (Docter-Loeb, 5/12)

CBS News: FDA Issues Warning Against "Gas Station Heroin" Tianeptine
The Food and Drug Administration is warning the public about the harmful effects of products containing tianeptine, also referred to as "gas station heroin" due to its availability in gas station stores. Tianeptine is an opioid alternative prescribed as an antidepressant in some Latin American, Asian and European countries. It is not approved by the FDA for any use in the U.S. and can cause a range of adverse events. (Moniuszko, 5/9)

Newsweek: Weed Recall In One State Over Fungus That Can Be Life Threatening
Marijuana sold in Arizona has been recalled by the state's health department due to fungus contamination. Newsweek has reached out to ADHS for further comment by email Sunday during non-working hours. Marijuana is legal for medical use in 38 states, and legal for recreational use in 24 states for those over the age of 21, as Newsweek previously reported. Five more states - Wisconsin, Florida, Hawaii, South Dakota, and South Carolina - could approve use in through legislation this year. (Silverman, 5/11)

The New York Times: 130,000 Igloo Coolers Recalled After Fingertip Amputations From Handle 
About 130,000 Igloo coolers were recalled on Thursday after consumers reported 78 fingertip injuries from the cooler’s tow handle, 26 of which led to fingertip amputations, bone fractures or cuts, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. (Ruberg, 5/11)