Insurance Coverage Lags as Cancer Science, Treatment Move Forward
“Brain cancer” or “H4 G34-mutant”? As knowledge about genetics advances, some doctors say cancers should be defined by their mutations, not the tissues where they manifest.
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“Brain cancer” or “H4 G34-mutant”? As knowledge about genetics advances, some doctors say cancers should be defined by their mutations, not the tissues where they manifest.
Patients and researchers point to evidence that many cancer drug dosages are excessive, and that reducing the amount and frequency could save billions of dollars and prevent some of the worst side effects.
Congress appropriated $345 million for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for the 2026 fiscal year, but the agency has spent less than $15 million on grants. AHRQ hasn’t issued a new one in over a year.
Federal officials charged two virologists they stopped en route from an African disease outbreak with violating import rules. But scientists tell KFF Health News the inactivated samples they carried posed no threat to the public, and they characterize the arrests as part of a government harassment campaign.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new autism panel is championing a controversial communication method popular among parents of severely autistic people. Critics warn of abuse — and fake “telepathy.”
The work of Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn has long been controversial. Until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the U.S. health policy chief, most vaccine scientists tended to ignore it. That has changed.
A third of patients in a clinical trial had tumors shrink while taking a genetically engineered treatment known as RP1.
For all of President Donald Trump’s showmanship, the share of Americans his policies will likely help remains slim, even if some patients do come out ahead.
President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis forced families into hiding and catalyzed informal medical networks to deliver critical health care services.
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The CDC is recommending fewer childhood vaccines, although the ones it has jettisoned from the recommended schedule have successfully battled serious illness for years. Experts warn that if vaccine uptake falls, millions could be hospitalized — or worse — as a result of preventable diseases.
A session of a vaccine panel dominated by skeptics was chaotically at odds with past practices of the CDC, which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has described as a “cesspool of corruption.” His crew voted to end a 34-year recommendation to vaccinate newborns against hepatitis B.
A reshaped CDC website suggesting that vaccines cause autism has appalled the medical community.
Drug industry officials and analysts praised the FDA’s plans to streamline regulation of “biosimilars,” which are cheaper alternatives to biologic drugs. But patents that block such drugs from the U.S. market are getting harder to fight.
Florida’s surgeon general, spiritual healers, and Trump allies push their cures in a swampy outpost of anti-government absolutism and mystical belief.
Florida has announced plans to end mandatory vaccination. Now scientists are assessing which of several diseases deadly to children — whooping cough, measles, polio, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus — are likely to make a resurgence and when.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meeting on vaccines pitted scientific expertise against vaccine skepticism. An often confusing debate ended with critics of the current vaccine schedule tabling a vote to remove one of its cornerstones.
A lack of faith in the soundness of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new direction has led states to explore enacting their own vaccine policies. A patchwork of divergent recommendations and requirements could result.
Susan Monarez and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief medical officer Debra Houry described turmoil in an agency dominated by anti-vaccine political officials nominated by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Advisory committee meetings help FDA scientists make decisions and increase public understanding of drug regulation, and abandoning them doesn’t make sense, former officials said.
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