Gregg's Top Three Health Policy Articles

If you can only read three things about health policy this week, I suggest...

The Top Three...

Modern Healthcare: What The 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Cuts From Healthcare The House passed a sweeping tax-and-spending cuts bill Thursday that would dramatically reshape the healthcare system by slashing more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and other programs. The majority Republican lower chamber voted 215-214 to approve the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 just before 7 a.m. EDT after an all-night floor debate. Attention now shifts the GOP-led Senate, which has not commenced public debate on its tax measure. Congress is scheduled to begin a recess Friday and will return to Washington on June 2. (McAuliff, 5/22)

The Hill: Federal Judge Extends Block On HHS Termination Of Billions In Public Health Funds A federal judge on Friday indefinitely blocked the Trump administration from pulling back more than $11 billion in public health funding from state and local health departments. The ruling from Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island extends a temporary restraining order she issued in April that stopped the administration from wiping out the pandemic-era funding to a group of 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia. (Weixel, 5/16)

The New York Times: Kennedy And Trump Paint Bleak Picture Of Chronic Disease In U.S. Children President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, set forth their vision on Thursday for how to “make America healthy again” with the release of an expansive report on a crisis of chronic disease in children. The report lays the blame on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, stress, lack of physical activity and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants. The product of a presidential commission led by Mr. Kennedy, the report paints a bleak picture of American children, calling them “the sickest generation in American history.” (Gay Stolberg and Blum, 5/22)

For a Deeper Dive...

Modern Healthcare: GOP Senators Promise Changes To Medicaid Cuts In Tax Bill Deep cuts to Medicaid and other healthcare programs the House passed Thursday are unlikely to survive Senate debate intact, key Republicans said. The House approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 by a single vote, and the internal GOP fight in the Senate is likely to be just as hard to resolve as it was in the lower chamber. Hard-line conservatives and swing-state senators are already facing off in a battle to change the House measure. (McAuliff, 5/22)

Politico: House GOP's Medicaid Revisions Aim To Please Hard-Liners House Republicans made substantial changes to the Medicaid portion of the GOP megabill in amendments unveiled Wednesday night, including accelerating work requirements and paying states not to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. The proposal will move up the start date of Medicaid work requirements from Jan. 1, 2029, to Dec. 31, 2026, in a concession to conservative hard-liners who have been pushing for deeper cuts to the program. (Leonard, Lee Hill and King, 5/21)

KFF Health News: Republicans Aim To Punish States That Insure Unauthorized Immigrants President Donald Trump’s signature budget legislation would punish 14 states that offer health coverage to people in the U.S. without authorization. The states, most of them Democratic-led, provide insurance to some low-income immigrants — often children — regardless of their legal status. Advocates argue the policy is both humane and ultimately cost-saving. (Galewitz and Mai-Duc, 5/23)

Fierce Healthcare: Trump Budget Bill Would Modernize HSAs, Prompt Shift To ICHRAs Not to be lost within a sprawling Republican-backed budget bill are new flexibilities designed to increase usage of heath savings accounts (HSAs), individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (ICHRAs) and direct primary care (DPC) arrangements. These changes, wrapped inside a one-sided reconciliation bill, are much less controversial than other provisions to reduce Medicaid spending, drive down enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges and impose a long-term moratorium on artificial intelligence regulations. (Tong, 5/21)

Politico: Kennedy Set For Another Hill Face-Off HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will again make the case this week for an unprecedented downsizing of federal agencies — this time before a Senate Appropriations panel on Tuesday. The panel’s chair is someone who’s already found fault with the downsizing: West Virginia Republican Shelley Moore Capito. ... Kennedy will need Capito, whose state still has a significant mining industry, on his side to enact President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for fiscal 2026. It calls for a more-than-$30 billion cut to HHS’s budget — more than a quarter of the agency’s funding. (Zeller, 5/19)

The New York Times: As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, A Major Study Shows It Saves Lives The expansion of Medicaid has saved more than 27,000 lives since 2010, according to the most definitive study yet on the program’s health effects. Poor adults who gained Medicaid coverage after the Affordable Care Act expanded access were 21 percent less likely to die during a given year than those not enrolled, the research shows. By analyzing federal records on 37 million Americans, two economists found that deaths fell not only among older enrollees but also among those in their 20s and 30s — a group often assumed to have few medical needs, and who would have been far less likely to qualify for Medicaid before the expansion. (Kliff and Sanger-Katz, 5/16)

KFF Health News: How The Trump Administration Aims To Slash Health Care Spending Health care has proved a vulnerable target for the firehose of cuts and policy changes President Donald Trump ordered in the name of reducing waste and improving efficiency. But most of the impact isn’t as tangible as, say, higher egg prices at the grocery store. One thing experts from a wide range of fields, from basic science to public health, agree on: The damage will be varied and immense. “It’s exceedingly foolish to cut funding in this way,” said Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. (Rosenthal, 5/20)

What is Changing...

NPR: Diseases Are Spreading. The CDC Isn’t Warning The Public Like It Was Months Ago To accomplish its mission of increasing the health security of the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that it "conducts critical science and provides health information" to protect the nation. But since President Trump's administration assumed power in January, many of the platforms the CDC used to communicate with the public have gone silent, an NPR analysis found. Many of the CDC's newsletters have stopped being distributed, workers at the CDC say. Health alerts about disease outbreaks, previously sent to health professionals subscribed to the CDC's Health Alert Network, haven't been dispatched since March. (Eisner, 5/21)

The Hill: Universities Struggle To Keep Cancer Research Afloat Amid Trump Funding Cuts The pause of billions of dollars in research funding to universities has had devastating effects on cancer research as lab work is put on hold and schools are halting the acceptance of new Ph.D. students. The Trump administration’s war with higher education, combined with efforts to reduce government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, has left significant casualties in cancer research, which in the U.S. is largely done at colleges and universities. (Cochran, 5/21)

For the Visual Among Us...

A few years ago I started a weekly e-mail for friends and colleagues who want to keep up on major federal health policy developments but did not have time to plod through all the minutiae--they were busy doing important things like running organizations and taking care of patients! Much to my surprise, it became pretty popular. I have now converted to a weekly newsletter format so you can manage your own subscription preferences and forward to others that might be interested.

These summaries represent my judgement on health policy issues that may not on the front pages, but are relevant to clinicians, administrators, and educators. I monitor many news sources and clipping services to identify content for this newsletter and I try hard to be as factual, balanced, and non-partisan as possible. While the articles are written by others (with credit attributed), the choice of what to include is entirely mine. If you are interested in receiving a daily summary of health policy news, you might consider signing up for the KHN Morning Briefing. If you enjoy podcasts, I suggest What the Health? and Tradeoffs.

-Gregg S. Margolis, PhD