SADO and its partners will commence their awareness campaign on 1 September 2025, culminating on 1 November 2025, with the annual walk from Hermitage to Progress Park

View the full post SADO launches 2025 Cancer Awareness Campaign on NOW Grenada.

Gilead Sciences, whose Kite subsidiary was one of the pioneers of ex vivo cancer cell therapy, is joining the pursuit of in vivo therapies with the acquisition of startup Interius BioTherapeutics. The deal follows AstraZeneca and AbbVie acquisitions this year for in vivo cell therapy developers.

The post Gilead Sciences Gains In Vivo Cell Therapy Capability With $350M Interius Bio Acquisition appeared first on MedCity News.

Colorectal cancer rates have soared among younger Americans, new research has found — and there might not always be obvious symptoms.

The lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC) is one in 24 for men and one in 26 for women, according to the American Cancer Society.

It is the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth in women, but is the second most common cause when the numbers for men and women are combined.

ACTOR WITH COLORECTAL CANCER SHARES SIMPLE SIGN THAT HE IGNORED: ‘I HAD NO IDEA’

While there may be no symptoms of CRC before diagnosis, especially in the early stages, the following signs and symptoms should not be overlooked, experts say.

According to the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, some symptoms of the disease can be similar to other causes, like hemorrhoids, infection or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

But a change in bowel habits — including diarrhea, constipation, narrow stools or feeling like your bowels are full even after a movement — can be a sign of CRC.

COLORECTAL CANCER DIAGNOSES SOAR AMONG YOUNGER ADULTS FOR ONE KEY REASON

Fight Colorectal Cancer, a leading patient advocacy group, noted on its website how bowel movements can change due to diet, infections, medications and other medical issues.

A change in bowel movement schedule or stool appearance could also signal CRC.

Fight CRC recommends calling a doctor if your stool is consistently abnormal, if you have sudden urges to pass stool but can’t control it, if the stool is black, clay-colored, red or white, or if there is mucus or pus in the stool.

Skinny, thin or pencil-like stool may also indicate an obstruction in the colon, like a tumor, but can also be caused by other harmless, temporary conditions.

Persistent discomfort in the abdomen is another CRC symptom, the Colorectal Cancer Alliance reported on its site.

This can include feelings of pain, nausea, cramping, bloating or feeling unusually full, even after not eating much.

Severe, "knife-in-my-stomach type" abdominal pains warrant a visit to the emergency room, Fight CRC instructed — but even mild pains shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Blood in the stool, toilet or when wiping with toilet paper can be a major sign of colorectal cancer.

Fight CRC stressed that any amount of rectal bleeding is not normal and should be brought to a doctor’s attention for proper diagnosis.

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Since blood in the stool is a common symptom, Fight CRC instructed paying attention to where the blood is found, how often it occurs and whether bowel movements are painful.

Unexplained weight loss can sometimes be caused by cancer and should be brought to the attention of a doctor, according to the Colorectal Cancer Alliance.

Weight loss is the result of cancer cells "consuming the body’s energy" as they multiply, Fight CRC explained, as the immune system expends more energy to fight and destroy cancer cells.

This can also lead to feeling fatigue, weakness or shortness of breath.

These symptoms may also be a sign of anemia, which can develop from bleeding somewhere inside the body, like from a cancerous tumor.

Weight loss can also be caused by a tumor blocking the colon or intestinal tract, which prevents proper nutrient absorption.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Paul Oberstein, M.D., medical oncologist at NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, commented that the most concerning symptoms are those that are persistent or recurrent.

For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health

"These include pain in the abdomen, changes in bowel habits (including thin, pencil-like stools), diarrhea or new constipation, though these symptoms are very general and are usually only concerning if they are sustained," he said.

Alarming symptoms that warrant prompt medical attention include any sign of rectal bleeding or blood in the stool, unintentional weight loss, or new fatigue that is accompanied by evidence of anemia or low blood counts, according to the doctor. 

James van der Beek has revealed the first warning sign of his colon cancer — and it’s one that did not seem alarming at the time.

The "Dawson’s Creek" actor, 48, who announced his colorectal cancer diagnosis in November 2024, recently told Healthline that "there wasn’t any red flag or something glaring."

"I was healthy. I was doing the cold plunge," he said. "I was in amazing cardiovascular shape, and I had stage 3 cancer, and I had no idea."

COLORECTAL CANCER DIAGNOSES SOAR AMONG YOUNGER ADULTS FOR ONE KEY REASON

The one symptom that he did experience was a change in bowel movements, which the actor chalked up to an effect of his coffee consumption.

"Before my diagnosis, I didn’t know much about colorectal cancer," van der Beek said. "I didn’t even realize the screening age [had] dropped to 45; I thought it was still 50."

He ultimately underwent a colonoscopy, which revealed that the actor had stage 3 colon cancer.

Professor Eitan Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., an oncologist and founder of The Suzanne Levy-Gertner Oncogenetics Unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, confirmed that changes in bowel habits is the primary red flag that should raise the suspicion of colorectal cancer.

Others include fatigue as a result of anemia, blood in stool, weight loss, loss of appetite and abdominal discomfort, Friedman, who has not treated van der Beek, told Fox News Digital.

Dr. Erica Barnell, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-scientist at Washington University School of Medicine — and co-founder and chief medical officer at Geneoscopy — noted that van der Beek’s experience of having no "glaring" signs is common.

"Many colorectal cancers develop silently, without obvious symptoms," Barnell, who also did not treat the actor, told Fox News Digital. "By the time symptoms appear, the disease may already be advanced."

Symptoms are "especially worrisome" for those 45 and older who have at least one first-degree relative with colon cancer or other GI malignancies, and those with active inflammatory bowel disease, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, added Friedman, who is also an advisory board member at SpotitEarly, a startup that offers an at-home breath test to detect early-stage cancer signals.

The overall chance of an average-risk person getting colorectal cancer over a lifetime is 4% to 5%, according to Friedman.

"Colonoscopy at age 45 onwards, at five- to 10-year intervals, has been shown to lead to early detection of polyps that have the potential to become malignant, and to allow for their removal as an effective means of minimizing the risk of malignant transformation," he said. 

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Unfortunately, Barnell noted, "screening compliance in the U.S. remains below national targets, and gaps are widest in rural, low-income and minority communities."

To help close those gaps, she called for greater access to "accurate, noninvasive screening technologies," along with efforts to increase public awareness.

"Most people don’t like talking about bowel habits, but paying attention to changes can save your life," Barnell said. "Screening gives us the chance to find problems early — often before you feel sick — and that can make all the difference."

For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health

Fox News Digital reached out to van der Beek’s representative for comment.

The Host

Emmarie Huetteman
KFF Health News

Emmarie Huetteman, senior editor, oversees a team of Washington reporters, as well as “Bill of the Month” and KFF Health News’ “What the Health?” She previously spent more than a decade reporting on the federal government, most recently covering surprise medical bills, drug pricing reform, and other health policy debates in Washington and on the campaign trail. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that the federal government will cancel nearly $500 million in mRNA research funding is unnerving not only for those who develop vaccines, but also for public health experts who see the technology behind the first covid-19 shots as the nation’s best hope to combat a future pandemic.

And President Donald Trump is demanding that major pharmaceutical companies offer many American patients the same prices available to patients overseas. It isn’t the first time he’s made such threats, and drugmakers — who scored a couple of wins against Medicare negotiations in the president’s tax and spending law — are unlikely to volunteer to drop their prices.

This week’s panelists are Emmarie Huetteman of KFF Health News, Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet, Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Sarah Karlin-Smith
Pink Sheet

@SarahKarlin

@sarahkarlin-smith.bsky.social

Read Sarah's stories.

Sandhya Raman
CQ Roll Call

@SandhyaWrites

@SandhyaWrites.bsky.social

Read Sandhya's stories.

Lauren Weber
The Washington Post

@LaurenWeberHP

Read Lauren's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Explaining the decision to cancel some mRNA vaccine funding, a priority for vaccine critics, Kennedy falsely claimed that the technology is ineffective against respiratory illnesses. Researchers have been making headway into mRNA vaccines for maladies such as bird flu and even cancer, and the Trump administration’s opposition to backing vaccine development weakens the prospects for future breakthroughs.
• Trump’s insistence that big-name drugmakers voluntarily lower their prices underscores how few tools the presidency has to deliver results on this important pocketbook issue for many Americans. Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices took a hit under Trump’s big tax-and-spending law, which included two provisions advocated by the pharmaceutical industry that would delay or exclude some expensive drugs from the dealmaking process.
• A year after Trump promised on the campaign trail to secure coverage of in vitro fertilization, the White House reportedly is not planning to compel insurers to pay for those pricey reproductive services — a change that would require an act of Congress and could raise costs overall.
• And with Congress back home for its August recess and a late September deadline looming, the annual government funding process is in progress — but unlikely to resolve quickly or cleanly. Senate appropriators are further along in their work than usual, but the House of Representatives has yet to release its version, which is expected to cut deeper and hit social issues like abortion harder.

Plus, for “extra credit” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read (or wrote) this week that they think you should read, too: 

Emmarie Huetteman: KFF Health News’ “New Medicaid Federal Work Requirements Mean Less Leeway for States,” by Katheryn Houghton and Bram Sable-Smith. 

Sarah Karlin-Smith: Slate’s “Confessions of a Welfare Queen,” by Maria Kefalas. 

Sandhya Raman: CQ Roll Call’s “Sweden’s Push for Smokeless Products Leads Some To Wonder About Risks,” by Sandhya Raman. 

Lauren Weber: The New York Times’ “‘Hot Wasps’ Found at Nuclear Facility in South Carolina,” by Emily Anthes. 

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

• The Washington Post’s “How RFK Jr.’s mRNA Crackdown Affects Vaccinemaking and Future Pandemics,” by Carolyn Y. Johnson and Lauren Weber.
• The AP’s “Fact Focus: Trump Says He’s Cut Drug Prices By Up to 1,500%. That’s Not Possible,” by Melissa Goldin.
• The Washington Post’s “Medicare, Medicaid Plan To Experiment with Covering Weight Loss Drugs,” by Paige Winfield Cunningham.
• The Washington Post’s “White House Has No Plan To Mandate IVF Care, Despite Campaign Pledge,” by Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein.

click to open the transcript

Transcript: Kennedy Cancels Vaccine Funding

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.] 

Emmarie Huetteman: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Emmarie Huetteman, a senior editor for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, Aug. 7, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast, and things might have changed by the time you hear this. Here we go. 

Today, we’re joined via video conference by Lauren Weber of The Washington Post. 

Lauren Weber: Hey, everybody. 

Huetteman: Sandhya Raman of CQ Roll Call. 

Sandhya Raman: Good morning. 

Huetteman: And Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet. 

Sarah Karlin-Smith: Hi, everybody. 

Huetteman: It’s August, and here in the nation’s capital that means Congress has flown the coop, and a lot of the federal city has gone with them. No interview this week. And you may be wondering why you’re hearing my voice instead of the incomparable Julie Rovner. Julie’s out this week having surgery to repair her broken wrist. Good news: She’s on the mend and she’ll be back in your podcast feed very soon. Get well soon, Julie. Let’s get to the news. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has canceled almost $500 million in federal grants and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. That technology, of course, was responsible for the first covid vaccines, and researchers have been working on new ways to use mRNA, including against bird flu and even cancer. But in explaining his decision, Kennedy made false claims about mRNA vaccines, including that they do not protect against respiratory illnesses. Kennedy’s opposition to the covid vaccine, in particular, is well-documented. But before becoming health secretary, he advocated for federal officials to revoke approval for mRNA-based covid shots. 

Sarah, you’re our pharmaceutical industry expert. What will this mean for vaccine development? Without this government funding, can that research continue? 

Karlin-Smith: I think people are really concerned, particularly about the speed of vaccine development for pandemic situations. That’s a classic market failure in that companies aren’t that incentivized to work on developing products for hypothetical situations that may never come to pass, but we obviously want to be prepared for strains of the flu that can be particularly harmful and stuff. So I think that’s where people are really concerned. 

I think, in general, this is just another mark in some of the vaccine actions that have taken place since this administration took over that makes people a little more nervous about just investing in the vaccine field, whether it’s mRNA or vaccines in general. FDA has made some unusual decisions around the indications for covid vaccines moving forward. The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] whole [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] has changed. So I do think there’s broader concern beyond the mRNA vaccines and our need to have this technology to really prepare for a pandemic about how confident industry will be in the places they normally would invest money on their own. 

Huetteman: Lauren, you had a story yesterday about how Kennedy’s decision is intensifying concerns about our ability to fight future pandemics. Can you tell us what you’re hearing from public health experts? 

Weber: Yeah. We spoke to a number of public health experts and vaccine experts, mRNA experts, who said, Look, this is the technology that you want to be spry, to be able to alter something, to fight potentially a bird flu. It’s also used in revolutionary ways to fight maybe even cancer here in the future. There’s a lot of fear about how this could have a chilling effect, as Sarah was pointing out, on the development pipeline and what that means in a pandemic situation. 

I do think it’s important to note that just this morning, Trump was asked about this and said he was going to have a meeting on it at noon. Not sure exactly what that means, but potentially that could be something. Robert Malone, who’s an ACIP member, sent out an email trying to rally MAHA [“Make America Healthy Again”] supporters to make sure that they backed up Kennedy’s decision. 

I think it’s also important to take a step back and look at Kennedy’s past remarks on mRNA, as you alluded to. This is a man who falsely called the covid vaccine “the deadliest ever made.” He’s described it as a poison in the past. Some anti-vaccine factions of MAHA have really been pushing to try and limit access to mRNA technology. You’ve seen this also in some Republican and far-right states, that are more right. You’ve seen some legislation suggested to remove access to mRNA technology. There’s a big question among some of the folks we talked to on if this is a bit of a signal to the base. 

Karlin-Smith: I was going to say, ironically, the mRNA vaccines was probably the biggest success of the Trump administration’s first term in office. He was instrumental in spearheading the fast development of the vaccines for covid. 

Huetteman: Right, Operation Warp Speed. Interesting how far we’ve come. To be clear, this isn’t all of the government’s mRNA contracts, right? This is just a piece of the research funding? 

Karlin-Smith: This is a piece of it coming through BARDA [the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority], which is particularly designed to help fill those market gaps in pandemic preparedness, but they’ve also cut other mRNA vaccine contracts previously in this administration, including a big one around bird flu, which people are concerned about right now. I’ve even seen some media reports where people, researchers in the cancer but mRNA space, were concerned about grants just being flagged just because they had the terminology. It’s not everything, but I think there’s certainly fears that this is just a step in a bigger process that is problematic. 

Huetteman: Absolutely. We’ll be keeping an eye on that. And vaccine contracts aren’t the only thing that President Trump’s team is undoing this week. Under a new federal rule, VA hospitals would no longer be able to perform abortions in cases of rape, incest, or health endangerment. You may remember that the Biden administration introduced that policy at the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2022, after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion. The policy has allowed veterans and their relatives to obtain abortion services even while they are stationed in states with restrictions. 

Meanwhile, lots of news to get to this week. In prescription drug news, late last week, President Donald Trump sent letters to more than a dozen drugmakers insisting that they drop their prices within 60 days. Specifically, the president demanded that pharmaceutical companies offer many American patients the same prices that drugmakers charge abroad. Over the weekend, Trump told reporters that his administration is dramatically lowering drug prices, “up to 1,500%,” he said — which, well, I think that technically means the drugmaker would pay you. 

Anyway, Trump told drugmakers that if they don’t lower drug prices, “We will deploy every tool in our arsenal.” What can the president do to force drugmakers to comply? 

Karlin-Smith: I think, in some ways, he doesn’t have as many tools in the toolbox as he probably would like to think. At least, not ones that are making the industry particularly fearful right now. He doesn’t have the power to just issue a regulation saying, “The Medicare-Medicaid reimbursement rates are tied to the rates countries are paying abroad.” That would have to be through legislation. And I think there are reasons that both Republicans and Democrats don’t really like this most-favored-nation approach to drug pricing. There is some sort of limited authority for them to do a demonstration project through CMS’ [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’] Medicare-Medicaid Innovation Center. They could come up with a test of this in some kind of limited area. They tried to start implementing that [in] his last term and they got scuttled by lawsuits, so we’ll see if they have a way to avoid that problem this time. 

But the ironic thing is that when the administration issued this executive order in May calling for this most-favored-nation pricing, he set this 30-day-ish deadline of saying, OK, we’ll tell you what prices we want, you guys lower them. If not, we’re going to do rulemaking. One thing that came up when he issued this letter, these letters on Friday, giving industry another 60 days is, Well, why are they not just going through with some kind of rulemaking or next steps? It almost seemed to some people like almost a more muted threat because they haven’t done the follow-through yet or come up with what the follow-through is here.  

Huetteman: Now, where is the Medicare’s drug negotiation ability in this equation? Why isn’t the president doing more to leverage Medicare’s power to negotiate at this point? 

Weber: Well, that’s really interesting because in the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” there were two provisions that a lot of people missed that limited the ability to negotiate on some key drugs, which has been estimated to likely cost the American taxpayer and the government billions of dollars over the next couple years. 

Huetteman: Yeah, the CBO says that those changes will cost Medicare at least $5 billion in missed savings over 10 years. 

Weber: Yes, that’s what’s called effective lobbying. Essentially, what happened is some pharma companies were able to tuck in provisions that key drugs, I think it was Keytruda, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that right, or Keytruda, which is used to treat cancer, it’s a drug by Merck. It had $17.9 billion in U.S. sales in 2024. That’s the kind of drug that they won’t be able to negotiate prices on for a bit.  

Huetteman: Yeah, that’s right. Of course, that also means that Medicare patients will be subject to paying their percentage of those higher prices as well. On top of talking about this CBO score there, we’re talking about drug prices that real people are paying for their expensive cancer drugs right now. I guess I’m curious why Trump isn’t using the negotiation process in order to lower those drug prices? 

Raman: I would add that something that makes this more difficult is that Trump has been very back-and-forth about a lot of his opinions on different things that he’s going to do throughout the last several months in this process. Even if you look at something like how we would deal with tariffs on the pharmaceutical industry, we’ve been a little bit all over the place. I think even if he’s not demonstrating the clear idea of which way he’d want to go, it makes it a little bit harder for the regulators, whether it would be in Congress or through the FDA, to do anything, given that he’s been changing a lot what he’s hinting at wanting to do.  

Huetteman: Yeah, that’s right. Actually, Sarah, you brought up the CMS innovation option. There’s a story out about this this week. The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is considering using that center to do a pilot project to expand access to GLP-1 drugs for weight loss purposes by allowing state Medicaid and Medicare Part D plans to cover them. 

Now, insurance premiums are slated to go way up next year. If I’m not mistaken, the cost of covering GLP-1 drugs is one reason that insurers have cited for those premium hikes. If this happens, can we expect that the cost of those drugs would strain state and federal budgets? 

Karlin-Smith: Actually, one I guess positive thing is that some GLP-1 drugs are slated to be subject to negotiation through the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] program next year, so that there’s maybe positive news around the prices of those going down. Again, that’s obviously only for Medicare. But the problem on the back end is that, based on law, Medicare is not allowed in Part D to cover drugs for weight loss. 

The Biden administration had tried through rulemaking to make an argument that weight loss drugs and drugs that treat obesity are two different things, hearkening back to — when that law was written we really didn’t understand obesity as a disease process and all the health problems it has on your body. We thought of weight loss as more of a cosmetic thing. The Trump administration actually pulled that rule, so this would be a much more small step in the direction of trying to get coverage. The report says it would be a “voluntary demo.” 

The biggest question in my mind, which is again, knowing that these drugs, even with cheaper prices, would likely raise costs, is what is the incentive for health plans to voluntarily want to participate in this? What would the government have to do to incentivize this? Without some sort of push there for states and for Medicare Part D plans, I’m not sure the private plans are just going to pick up these products given the amount of people that would qualify for them. I think we need a lot more details from the Trump administration to know if they can actually make this feasible. 

Weber: I just find this to be such a fascinating move considering [CMS Administrator Mehmet] Oz and Kennedy have such different opinions about weight loss drugs, as does MAHA as a whole. We at The Washington Post had reported previously that Oz does have financial ties to Ozempic through his show — they had to run a sponsored ad to some extent — and also through other means. It’s fascinating to see that clearly this is going forward, despite Kennedy having said repeatedly, often, constantly that he does not want to pay for these drugs, that he thinks other interventions, healthy diet and lifestyle, should be implemented. Which Oz has also really promoted as well. So fascinating to see how this experiment plays out. I agree with Sarah; I’m not sure where the incentives are, considering the cost that this will be to see it play out. 

Huetteman: And one year after Trump promised coverage for in vitro fertilization services on the campaign trail, The Washington Post reports that the White House does not plan to require health insurers to cover IVF. The president had said that “if he were elected, the government would either pay for IVF services itself or require insurance companies to do it.” 

What’s standing in the way here? What’s involved in making something an essential health benefit? 

Raman: I think this whole process has been interesting. In February, Trump had put out an executive order directing his administration to come up ways to reduce the out-of-pocket costs for IVF. At the time, it’s pretty vague in terms of what that would entail. After the deadline passed, in part, I think a lot of people weren’t surprised because a) IVF is very expensive. And b) I think there are a lot of complicated nuances to some of his base and whether or not they fully support IVF. We had a lot of this last year, with people saying that they support it, but then also some of the folks that are more pro-life have some stipulations about not wanting embryos destroyed. It just complicated that some of the people that were talking to him about some of the other abortion-related issues were not on board with all of the IVF things. I think that has played definitely a factor in what they’re going to do with this. 

But it’s also a hard thing to do, to just make this something that — even with prescription drugs, reducing the costs of those is not simple. In order for them to make it an essential health benefit, I think, is also more complicated given the issues that we’ve been having with preventative care, and just the concerns about the [U.S. Preventive Services Task Force] getting removed and what that’ll do to different things that are covered. It’s complicated and I wouldn’t really see this changing on IVF in the near future, at least from the executive level. 

Karlin-Smith: It needs to go through Congress to be an essential health benefit. I think there’s a theme in some of the topics we’re coming up to today where Trump is clearly coming up to the limits of his bully power and his threats of negotiation. I think Martin Makary, the head of the FDA, said, “You get more bees with honey.” Well, unfortunately, sometimes it’s just not enough to attract these industries to make major changes. 

Yes, they’ve gotten some sort of minor concessions, I think. I know they would like to think they’re transformative, but I think a lot of what they’ve gotten voluntarily is pretty minor, in terms of both health impact, and also how much it harms industry in terms of, like, food dyes. Or even the insurance companies saying, Oh, sure, we’ll do better on not going crazy on prior authorization. 

I think Trump now has to actually double-down and work with policymakers on rule writing, or work with Congress. It’s more complicated, especially again, as Sandhya said, IVF is something that’s complicated for his base to support. 

Huetteman: That’s right. This all came out of the blowback about how far towards banning abortion the country was going to go under Trump. This was a way to say, We’re preserving some parts of the reproductive health that are really important to people in our base, right?  

Raman: Yet even when Congress has tried to look at any of the IVF legislation in the past, it’s fallen on party lines. There have been ones that have been more messaging on either side. I think the closest we’ve gotten is that, on the defense side, trying to consider measures there for folks with Tricare, but it’s difficult to get folks on board with things like this through Congress. 

Huetteman: Well, speaking of Congress, Congress has left the building. August recess has begun and lawmakers are back home. Say, how is that government funding coming along. Sandhya?  

Raman: I think we’re in a similar place to many years in that it’s August, they’re out. We need government funding by the end of September, and we’re nowhere close to getting that. I would say on the plus side, the Senate is further along than they usually are. Before they left, they did mark up the Labor, HHS, Education funding bill, and that was overwhelmingly bipartisan. It included some money that would be a boost for NIH [the National Institutes of Health], which I know was a big concern for a lot of folks given what was in the White House proposal. It maintains funding for some of the programs that would be cut under the White House, things like Title X, Ryan White HIV. It also has a little bit of a pushback on making sure that the agencies continue the staffing to keep up some of their statutory duties.  

But again, it’s just the Senate. The House has not put out their bill. I would expect theirs to be a bit more conservative, given that the head of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate is Susan Collins, who’s been a little bit more moderate. The House is expected to release theirs and mark up theirs right after they get back. They meant to do it before recess but got pushed back because of reconciliation and that changing their schedule. 

It depends what they say in theirs and how much difference there is. I would expect there to be a lot of differences. It seems like we’re headed toward the usual of at least some sort of temporary spending to kick it down the line. Whether or not that ends up being a year again, like we did this year, or a short-term thing, we’re not sure yet. It depends on where we are in September.  

Huetteman: Right. And possibly preceded by a lot of fighting over social issues that get thrown into the health bill, and fights over the actual funding levels, if I had to guess, based on how House lawmakers have been talking about it so far.  

Raman: Oh, no. I think just the fact that we had such a big rescissions debate this year and the fact that we might do that again, it has definitely left a sour taste for a lot of Democrats who are worried that if whatever they vote for here might just get clawed back later on down the line. That’ll be another thorn in it.  

Huetteman: Awesome. Well, thanks for that take. That’s this week’s news. Now it’s time for our extra-credits segment. That’s where we each recognize a story we read this week that we think you should read, too. Don’t worry if you miss it; we’ll put the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device.  

Lauren, why don’t you go first this week?  

Weber: I have a doozy of a story from The New York Times titled “‘Hot Wasps’ Found at Nuclear Facility in South Carolina,” by Emily Anthes. Yeah, it’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s all about how wasps became radioactive — four wasps’ nests near a South Carolina nuclear facility.  

Huetteman: Yikes.  

Weber: If this gave you bad dreams, it definitely did for me. Essentially, what some of the researchers have posited is that wasps could have burrowed in some sort of bad wood or wood that was contaminated or other parts of the area that are contaminated. But this idea that it sounds like something out of Chernobyl, or something like that. But this idea that in the U.S., you could have a nuclear facility that is potentially transforming some of the near-wildlife is concerning in terms of cleanup efforts, and also concerning in terms of contamination control. Clearly, there’s more that needs to be dug into there. Hopefully everyone sleeps after hearing about this.  

Huetteman: Woof, yeah. I might need to take an Ambien tonight. Sandhya, how about you go next?  

Raman: My extra credit is from me in Roll Call. It’s my last dispatch from my reporting trip in Sweden earlier this year. And it’s called “Sweden’s Push for Smokeless Products Leads Some To Wonder About Risks.” It looks a little bit at some of the public health impacts as Sweden has really tried to reduce their smoking rate to become smoke-free. The U.S. is also at a low from smoking. Some of the things that public health experts are thinking about as people shift to other products and how they’re able to message to the remaining smokers that are not willing to give that up still.  

Huetteman: Awesome. Thanks for telling us about your work there. And Sarah?  

Karlin-Smith: I looked at a story from Slate, “Confessions of a Welfare Queen: I Study Poverty for a Living, and I Never Thought I’d Need Medicaid. Then My Child Was Diagnosed With a Terminal Illness,” by Maria Kefalas. It’s a personal story from a mother whose family needed Medicaid when their young child was diagnosed with an illness that was going to severely require intense medical care and limit her lifespan. They were able to take advantage of what are known as “Katie Beckett waivers” that were instituted by Ronald Reagan to allow states to voluntarily allow higher income requirements so that people could get Medicaid and care for their children at home. The original girl it was named for was otherwise basically going to be stuck living her life, and she lived until 34, in a hospital.  

The purpose of the story is really to point out that now that the “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed and there are $1 trillion in spending cuts to Medicaid, that these are some of the sorts of people and programs, because it is not a mandatory program, that may unfortunately be on the first for the chopping block. I think the piece does a good job of pointing out, while there’s been a lot of rhetoric around the people who are going to get hurt by this are people that are not working or somehow abusing the system, and the mother does a pretty good job of talking about how both she and her husband continue to work. Most of the families that need this program, to the extent they can, want to keep working. You just get a really human picture of the type of people that are at risk of losing services.  

Huetteman: Yeah, for sure. It’s a really illuminating story. Thanks for talking about it. My extra credit this week is from my colleagues here at KFF Health News. The headline is “New Medicaid Federal Work Requirements Mean Less Leeway for States.” It’s by Katheryn Houghton and Bram Sable-Smith. 

They report that at least 14 states are in progress designing their own work requirement programs. But now, with the passage of Trump’s law last month, which institutes federal work requirements, those states must make sure that their programs meet federal standards. In some cases, the states are actually going even further than federal requirements, my colleagues report. For instance, Arizona state law would institute a five-year lifetime limit on Medicaid coverage for “able-bodied adults.” 

OK, that’s this week’s show. Thanks as always to our producer-engineer, Francis Ying, and to Stephanie Stapleton, our editor this week. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left a review; that helps other people find us, too. Also, as always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Where are you guys these days? Sandhya?  

Raman: I’m on X and Bluesky @SandhyaWrites.  

Huetteman: Sarah?  

Karlin-Smith: A little bit of everywhere, but X, Bluesky, LinkedIn @SarahKarlin or @sarahkarlin-smith.  

Huetteman: And Lauren?  

Weber: I’m at X and Bluesky @laurenweberhp. Yes, the HP is for “health policy.” 

Huetteman: We’ll be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy. 

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Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, “What the Health?” A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book “Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z,” now in its third edition.

In his ongoing effort to reshape health policy, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly plans to overhaul two more government entities: the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Ousting the existing members of the task force would give Kennedy a measure of control in determining the kinds of preventive care that are covered at no cost to patients in the United States. And while it’s unclear what the secretary would do to the vaccine injury program, Kennedy has made no secret of his belief that vaccines can do more harm than good.

Meanwhile, last week marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would enable local and state governments to forcibly hospitalize some people who are homeless and struggling with mental health problems.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KFF Health News, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico Magazine, and Shefali Luthra of The 19th.

Panelists

Anna Edney
Bloomberg News

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Read Anna's stories.

Joanne Kenen
Johns Hopkins University and Politico

@JoanneKenen

@joannekenen.bsky.social

Read Joanne's bio.

Shefali Luthra
The 19th

@shefali.bsky.social

Read Shefali's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Less than two months after Kennedy removed all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, he is reportedly considering a similar purge of members of the task force that recommends the preventive services insurers must cover — a list whose services, some of them controversial among Trump officials, include drugs that prevent HIV and certain cancer screenings. He is also considering changes to the federal program that compensates people who experience adverse effects from immunizations.
• This week Vinay Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, resigned just months into his tenure. Prasad had come under attack, notably by right-wing personality Laura Loomer, and had been blasted for some agency decisions about new drugs for rare diseases — despite his work limiting the use of covid shots.
• Trump’s newly announced trade deal with the European Union includes a 15% tariff on brand-name pharmaceuticals, which would include, for example, the diabetes drug Ozempic, often used for weight loss. But it would be difficult to lower prices on brand-name drugs through tariffs; it is unlikely that drugmakers, facing higher import costs, would relocate production to the United States.
• Also, Trump’s big tax and spending law, hastened through Congress weeks ago, renders some lawfully present immigrants ineligible for Affordable Care Act subsidies. But a new KFF Health News column points out that the change would actually raise premiums for everyone else, taking more healthy people out of the insurance pool.

Also this week, Rovner interviews George Washington University health policy professor Sara Rosenbaum, one of the nation’s leading Medicaid experts, to mark Medicaid’s 60th anniversary this week.

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: KFF Health News’ “Cosmetic Surgeries Led to Disfiguring Injuries, Patients Allege,” by Fred Schulte.

Anna Edney: The Washington Post’s “Morton Mintz, Post Reporter With a Muckraker Spirit, Dies at 103,” by Stefanie Dazio.

Joanne Kenen: ScienceAlert’s “New Kind of Dental Floss Could Replace Vaccine Needles, Study Finds,” by David Nield.

Shefali Luthra: The New Yorker’s “Mexico’s Molar City Could Transform My Smile. Did I Want It To?” by Burkhard Bilger.

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

• The New York Times’ “Top F.D.A. Official Resigns Under Pressure,” by Christina Jewett.
• KFF Health News’ “Lawfully Present Immigrants Help Stabilize ACA Plans. Why Does the GOP Want Them Out?” by Bernard J. Wolfson.
• The Texas Tribune’s “Texas Man Sues California Doctor in Federal Court, Testing a New Angle to Crackdown on Abortion Pills,” by Eleanor Klibanoff.

click to open the transcript

Transcript: Next on Kennedy’s List? Preventive Care and Vaccine Harm

[Editor’s note: This transcript was generated using both transcription software and a human’s light touch. It has been edited for style and clarity.] 

Julie Rovner: Hello, and welcome back to “What the Health?” I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News, and I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, July 31, at 10 a.m. As always, news happens fast and things might have changed by the time you hear this. So, here we go. 

Today we are joined via videoconference by Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico Magazine. 

Joanne Kenen: Hi, everybody. 

Rovner: Shefali Luthra of The 19th. 

Shefali Luthra: Hello. 

Rovner: And Anna Edney of Bloomberg News. 

Anna Edney: Hi. 

Rovner: Later in this episode we’ll have the second of our two-part series marking the 60th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid, which was yesterday, for those keeping track. This week, Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University, one of the nation’s leading Medicaid experts, takes us through the history of that program and what the next 60 years could bring. And if you want to hear more from both our Medicare and Medicaid experts, we’re going to put the full-length versions of both interviews together for a special episode later in August. But first, this week’s news. 

Before we start, I hope you’ll bear with me this week. I slipped and fell and broke my wrist. So my typing and some of my thinking skills are a little lacking at the moment. But on this week of the 35th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which we will talk about in a few minutes, I am very grateful for all the various technological advances that are now available to those of us with disabilities, whether permanent or temporary, and which allowed the podcast to actually come to you this week. So, now, here we go. 

It was another busy week at HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services]. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., having already fired all the members of the vaccine advisory board, is reportedly now taking aim at the U.S. preventive health services task force. Now, this was not wholly unexpected. When the Trump administration switched sides on that lawsuit over the task force brought in Texas earlier this year, we assumed that RFK Jr. wanted to do something exactly like this. Right, Shefali? 

Luthra: We certainly did, because it wouldn’t have otherwise made a lot of sense to argue that they could continue to make recommendations unless, perhaps, RFK Jr. wasn’t going to listen to them. It just, once again, really bears noting that this was something many people discussed as a likely possibility, given his record, when he was nominated to be secretary. And there were some senators who suggested that perhaps he had made individual promises, commitments, to actually keep the expert panels in place. And here we are. He did not do that. 

Rovner: Yeah. And we should say he has, at least as of this moment, he has not yet fired all of the members, but certainly there are indications that he’s considering it. And obviously that was what they argued to the court, was that, Hey, it’s OK for the Senate not to confirm the members of this task force, because the secretary has control over them. So here’s the secretary suggesting that he’s going to take control over them. 

Edney: And now the senators show support for the task force. It’s just this circle that keeps on going where they need to try to bolster the backing, but the writing was on the wall when they voted to confirm him. 

Rovner: Well, apparently the secretary isn’t finished with vaccine policy, either. He’s also taking aim at the 1980s-era Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP. That’s what provides a no-fault way for people injured by vaccine side effects to get compensation for those injuries. This program was literally created to prevent the vaccine industry from going out of business in the 1980s because it was being sued into oblivion. I know that RFK Jr. said the program is, quote, “broken” and he intends to, quote, “fix it.” But does anybody have any idea what he might be planning for it? I will remind people, like, I’m shouting into the wind, that this was an act of Congress created by Congress, reformed by Congress. I don’t know whether the secretary can just take it apart on his own. 

Kenen: He can try, or leave it intact but create some kind of barriers to filing, or— 

Rovner: Actually, I think he wants to make it easier for people to get compensation. 

Kenen: He wants it easier to get compensation. We don’t know what it will do. But they keep finding workarounds or just ignoring things. So we can’t say we can or cannot do, because we don’t know what they’re going to do. But his whole health persona really is built on the fact that he believes that vaccines are damaging or dangerous and they kill more people than they save. And therefore, apparently all of us could just get a payout because we had a shot. But it’s not as much of a moneymaking business in general, not for a specific new shot, but vaccination is not as profitable as the public may perceive. Yes, the covid shots, there was some exceptional things about the speed and scale, etc.— 

Rovner: Right. Because everybody got one at the same time. 

Kenen: And they’re subsidized, etc., or some of them were. So Anna knows more about this than I do. Basically, it was designed to both protect people who were — nobody, even the strongest pro-vaccine people, nobody denies that there is such a thing as an injury. They would say it’s rare and not autism, but when it is, it is rare, but someone should get compensation and the care they need. 

Rovner: And Anna, we’re really looking at the potential for some of these vaccine makers to just say, We’re going to wash our hands of making vaccines. Right? 

Edney: Yeah, absolutely. The point of this program was to, like Joanne said, admit that there can be injury but to make it no-fault so that the vaccine makers could continue providing vaccines for the majority of people who respond well to them and to not be caught up in court battles for millions and billions of dollars all the time. And there may be some complaints, but it does seem that people, by and large, are able to get some compensation from this. And you mentioned covid vaccines. Those aren’t included in this program, so that may be something he is looking at, because they’re done through a different program, which is maybe some complaints about it or that it’s a little less likely to pay out or to give as much compensation. And so maybe a way of expanding it is to include the covid vaccines. But if it becomes that — Well, you can keep using this program, but we’re also going to make it easier to sue the vaccine makers — we’re going to see the companies be wary of being involved in providing vaccines at that point. 

Rovner: Well, in still more vaccine-related news, the controversial head of the FDA’s [Food and Drug Administration’s] vaccine division resigned unexpectedly this week. Anna, tell us why Vinay Prasad was so controversial. And why did he leave after only three months on the job? 

Edney: Yeah, this was a huge amount of drama at the FDA. So Prasad himself can be a polarizing figure. He has been at UCSF [the University of California-San Francisco] for a long time and gained prominence as someone who criticized the agency for what’s called accelerated approvals, getting certain drugs, particularly cancer drugs, quickly to patients even when they hadn’t proven necessarily that they worked. And he criticized that program. He got to the FDA. He was head of the vaccines division, which also covers biologic drugs. And under this division was a drug made by a company called Sarepta. Every one of their drugs that has come to market has had a lot of drama surrounding it because these are drugs for very, very sick, usually young boys who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and it’s a huge parent population that wants these drugs, even when maybe they don’t always show that they work very well. 

Well, a few kids have unfortunately died while taking these drugs in recent months, and so the FDA was looking at that, and it came out that there was another death in a clinical trial of an older gentleman, and no one knew definitely if it was related to the drug. And so once that became public, it’s not like the FDA or the company came out with it, but once it became public, the FDA kind of seemed to overcorrect and try to have the drug be paused, and then maybe take it off the market. And so Vinay Prasad was at the center of this debate. Already he was disliked by some of [President Donald] Trump’s higher-up people, particularly Laura Loomer. We may have heard her name before. 

Rovner: We have. 

Edney: She goes after some nominees, successfully in many cases. And Rick Santorum also got involved at this point. He has a daughter with a rare disease and didn’t like the way that this rare-disease drug was being treated. So essentially Prasad, who clearly for the last several years has only wanted to be at the FDA, has left after three months, was pushed out after three months. 

Rovner: Wow. It’s quite the drama. I’ll link to a story or two if you actually want to go deeper. 

Kenen: But one of the criticisms that Laura Loomer had is that he used to be a Democrat. 

Edney: Right. 

Kenen: Well, that would also apply to RFK Jr. 

Edney: Right. That’s true. 

Rovner: It would. Oh, I’m sure the drama, both at FDA and at HHS writ large, is far from over. Well, speaking of turning the clock back, President Trump issued a new executive order that would end the, quote, “housing first” policy that has driven homelessness strategy since the late 1990s. I guess this is also not a surprise. Trump complained repeatedly on the campaign trail about how homeless encampments were destroying cities. We’ve had a recent Supreme Court case on this, but this new policy seeks to not just allow but encourage localities to force at least some homeless people off the streets and into residential treatment. I imagine this is going to make for another long line of lawsuits, right? 

Kenen: Well, there’s housing first itself. It’s not without controversy. There’s a philosophical divide. Housing first means you house people and then you deal with their social and economic and physical and psychological and drug abuse, etc. Get a roof over their head and then you deal with everything else. Other people say, No, get them into treatment and stabilize them, and then you put them in housing, and they have to … Housing first has been the dominant philosophy in addressing homelessness in recent years. That’s a different debate. This is, like, put them in an institution against their will, which the courts have power to do in limited cases. There are times when a court can say, This individual doesn’t want to be hospitalized, but for their own safety they really need to be. But that’s one by one and not that common, and it’s limited. I believe it’s 30 days. I might be wrong about that. 

But this is a whole different thing. It’s a combination of this, We’re going to force them into institutional settings for treatment, whether they want it or not, combined with the Supreme Court decision of about a year ago allowing cities and local government, not just cities but governments, to forcibly clear away, to dismantle encampments, to force people out. So you have it coming from both the administration’s policies and the court decisions. This creates a whole — and housing money is being cut. Housing assistance is being cut. So you really have this tremendous shift in how we approach homelessness at a time when homelessness is high, while homelessness has been high. And nobody’s saying that there’s not a mental health component for some, but by no means all, people who are homeless. But this is not in accord with how the health and homelessness advocacy and treatment world has been approaching it. This is a significant shift. 

Rovner: And as you point out, this is a health and social service issue, too, because we are seeing money cut and money diverted that, basically this executive order will say, We’re going to give more money to localities that sort of handle this the way we want and less money to others. So I imagine this is going to have trickle-down effects for some time to come. 

Kenen: Yeah. And the clearing the encampments is going on, and we should know it’s not only a conservative state. California has done it. Other states have done it. So the idea of dismantling these — we’ve all seen these encampments — that is happening in various places in the country already, and this is sort of an extra step. It’s not only do you clear them, but this would envision forcing them into treatment, often in an institutional setting. 

Rovner: Well, meanwhile, as I mentioned at the top, this week marks the 35th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which I also covered, by the way. Secretary Kennedy spoke at an event marking the occasion on Monday. But an awful lot of the disability community is up in arms about the cuts to Medicaid, which they say will roll back much of the progress the movement has made in the past three and a half decades, much of it for people getting in-home types of assistance. And yet the ADA was pushed hard and signed by a Republican administration, that of President George H.W. Bush. Is this yet another formerly Republican priority being kind of tossed out the window? 

Luthra: I think to your point, a lot of things that used to be bipartisan in the health policy world are not anymore. The other example is something like Title X, and it’s just we have really seen this shift of things that used to be broadly uncontroversial, because the health implications are clear, become much more so and largely become rejected by Republicans in a way that is just really, really different from what you might’ve imagined even, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago. 

Rovner: And my favorite piece of Title X trivia: It was signed by Richard Nixon, but it was sponsored in the House by then-Rep. George H.W. Bush. So he both sponsored Title X, the Family Planning Program, and signed the ADA into law. Boy, it feels like a million years ago and not 35. 

Well, moving on to health care costs. It is tariff week in Washington — again — and not surprisingly, prescription drugs are a big part of that conversation. The trade deal that President Trump announced with the EU while he was in Scotland last weekend includes a 15% tariff on brand-name prescription drugs imported from Europe. That will include things like, I don’t know, the blockbuster weight loss drug Ozempic? Anna, how does Trump think this is going to eventually lower drug prices in the U.S.? It sounds like it’s just going to raise them. 

Edney: Yeah. I think most people agree with your sentiment that it’s going to raise them. I think a lot of this is focused on bringing drug-making back to the United States and trying to get companies to do more of that here. Whether you see that from brand-name companies seems like it could be really difficult. I know Botox is made in Ireland, and this is a facility where, because it’s essentially a toxin, a very deadly toxin if released— 

Rovner: Yes, it’s botulism. 

Edney: Right. This is a facility that is highly guarded. A colleague of mine wrote a story on it many years ago now, but you had to go underground. They’re not just moving this thing over to the United States. So I think for brand-name drugs that it’s going to be particularly difficult to lower the prices based on tariffs, or to say We’re moving production over here in any capacity. So what the thinking of how exactly this works or is beneficial will be interesting to see, because they’re also still doing — this would not apply to these — but they’re doing this national security assessment for tariffs on drugs from other places and trying to figure out if there’s a national security reason to be putting tariffs on them. For the most part, when drug quality comes into question, it’s not usually the European drugmakers that we’re concerned about. 

Rovner: And we’re still waiting to hear about the generic-drug makers in India and China, right? 

Edney: Yeah, exactly. We’re waiting to see what they’ll decide. They’re still doing their investigation, the administration is, to see what those tariffs might be from India or China, or any other countries that are making generic drugs. 

Rovner: Another story that we will continue to watch, and glad to have Anna here to continue to help us watch that. Now, it’s time for this week in what we’re still learning about the impact of the big tax and spending bill that President Trump signed on July Fourth. This week’s installment comes from my KFF Health News colleague Bernard Wolfson, whose column points out that eliminating eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies for immigrants who are here legally will mostly just raise premiums for everyone else by taking more healthy people out of the insurance pool. I get the administration’s insistence on not having people who are not here legally collecting benefits. We’ve talked about emergency Medicaid, but that’s a different issue. But what’s the justification for taking coverage away for people who are here because they’re refugees or victims of abuse, or those with temporary protected status? I don’t honestly understand what the point is of this. 

Kenen: There’s a stigmatization across the board as being an immigrant, right? So the administration is not embracing immigrants who are here legally. We’ve all seen reports of people who are here legally still being picked up by immigration officials. It’s very messy. Sometimes people just say, OK, we’ll save money this way, not understanding that the costs pop up someplace else in the system and it may be more expensive. So not just in terms of that individual, but if things are going untreated in communities because people aren’t seeking care, communicable diseases can also spread. So there have been attempts to blame disease outbreaks on immigration when that’s not the case. 

Rovner: Going back hundreds of years. 

Kenen: Right. Smallpox was brought here by immigrants, right? 

Rovner: Yeah. 

Kenen: Hundreds of years ago. 

Rovner: By the European immigrants. 

Kenen: Right. That’s what I— 

Rovner: And given to the Native population. 

Kenen: Right. Right. So it’s just part of an overall gestalt about immigrants and immigration, and sort of treating them as leeches, not as people who live here. 

Rovner: But I feel like both — it’s funny because this connects back to the whole tariff issue. The idea that Trump has here is to make things more “America First,” have more things made in America, and obviously more people made in America, and more Americans here to be served in America. But both of these things would take a long time. I guess the idea of not allowing legal immigrants to have benefits is to discourage people from coming here legally. One can’t see any other thing that would make that logical. And the idea of the tariffs, Anna, as you said, is to have companies build more manufacturing here. Both of those things would take a lot longer than Donald Trump is likely to be president. He doesn’t usually have a long-term view of things, and yet both of these issues are long-term issues, right? 

Edney: Yeah. I think at least for the tariffs and for — there’ve been these small announcements with certain companies where they’ll say, Well, because of Trump, we’re going to build a new plant in Indianapolis. And that plant sure isn’t, like, it’s five years away, but he can make these announcements. And Joanne, and you’re absolutely right that he obviously wants to degrade immigrants in any way that he can, but also Obamacare, right? That’s still a thing that they’re in certain ways willing to go after. 

Rovner: Good point. It’s a twofer. 

Edney: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So if you can erode Obamacare some and have a sicker population, and people being angry that they had to pay more, but Republicans have been good at still attaching that to Democrats: Oh, Obamacare. So I don’t know, maybe that comes back around. 

Rovner: Yeah. Well, question answered. OK. Turning to abortion, the on-again, off-again Planned Parenthood funding is apparently on again, at least for now. You may recall last week a judge had allowed some of the defunding included in the budget bill to begin, but now another federal judge has said, Nope, you’ve got to keep letting Planned Parenthood collect from Medicaid for non-abortion-related services. Shefali, what comes next? 

Luthra: The case continues to go through the courts. We know that right now that is in a federal district court. It could eventually go to the appellate courts. It could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, including the debate over whether this proceeding is allowed to take effect or not. In the meantime, I’ve been talking to a lot of clinics, and they are preparing for the real possibility that they lose their Medicaid funding. Some of them are not optimistic about the long-term legal viability of this injunction, and so they’re thinking: What will we do if we lose all of these Medicaid dollars? Will we be able to see patients in the volume that we do? Will we be able to get funds from the state? Some are in active conversations with state governments. Some are looking to private fundraising. Others are thinking about which clinics they would close and also how they would do that in a way that minimizes service loss to patients, while acknowledging that some ability to access care — whether that is abortion or STI [sexually transmitted infection] screening or contraception or cancer screening — will simply not be replaced. 

Rovner: Yeah, and I have to say, for all the million times I have said on this podcast, an administration can’t cut off Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, because it’s written into the Medicaid law, that doesn’t mean that Congress can’t cut off Planned Parenthood, because they can change the law. So I’m also a little bit wondering what the justification for Planned Parenthood being able to argue — I know that they’re arguing that they’re going after Planned Parenthood specifically, and that that’s not allowed. But certainly Congress can change the Medicaid law if it wants to. Congress wrote the Medicaid law. 

Luthra: And I think it’s worth throwing in a couple of other components as well, considering there are multiple lawsuits at play right now, not just the original from Planned Parenthood. There’s the liberal states’ attorneys general. There’s the Maine Family Planning suit, as well. But conservative states do have an avenue to block Medicaid funds going to Planned Parenthood now, if they choose. The Supreme Court gave them that opportunity in the South Carolina case earlier this year. So no matter what happens in this case, there is a very real likelihood that in many parts of the country, Planned Parenthood clinics will lose funding they are reliant on and will probably have to close many facilities. 

Rovner: Yeah. And just to reiterate, this goes back to the Title X Family Planning Program that we were talking about earlier, so it all comes full circle this week. This week we also have the latest chapter in the continuing fight between states with abortion bans and those with shield laws to try to protect doctors who are sending abortion pills through the mail into those states with abortion bans. According to The Texas Tribune, a man from Galveston is suing a doctor in California for sending his girlfriend pills to end her pregnancy. The man is being represented by Jonathan Mitchell, whose name may well be familiar to you as the originator of, most now, of Texas’s various abortion bans. The suit seeks both damages for the man who’s suing and an injunction on behalf of, quote, “all current and future fathers of unborn children in the United States.” Shefali, that feels pretty broad. 

Luthra: It certainly does feel very broad. When I read it, I really wondered: How do you decide who are future potential parents of unborn children? Is that— 

Rovner: Fathers, fathers. 

Luthra: Excuse me. Yes. Potential fathers. Even more, how — is it everyone who has sperm? I don’t know. But this is part of a really central strategy to where the anti-abortion movement is right now. They are very upset about shield law prescription and provision of abortion medication. In Texas, they are trying a bunch of things to try and block this, whether that is this particular suit, whether that is one from the attorney general that continues to move back and forth, whether that is trying to get new state laws enacted during this special session. We’ll see if that happens with all the redistricting that is going on. 

Rovner: This is all about Texas, by the way. 

Luthra: And Texas is a really important player. But we did just see a group of attorneys general around the country from conservative states just reach out to members of Congress this week and say, Can you pass some kind of law that will block shield law prescription? We’ve also seen a case out of Louisiana that is held up in court right now because it’s a criminal case. But this is just such an important goal for them, because the reason abortions haven’t gone down is because people can keep accessing care through the mail. And if they can stop that, it will have tremendous implications for people in states with abortion bans, but also in other parts of the country where maybe it’s just too much of a pain or too far to go to a clinic and you can have a doctor mail you that care. 

Rovner: Yeah. Well, clearly the abortion fights continue. We will continue to follow them. All right, that is this week’s news. Now, we’ll play excerpts of my interview with Medicaid expert Sara Rosenbaum, and then we will come back and do our extra credits. 

I am so pleased to welcome Sara Rosenbaum to the podcast. Sara is professor emerita of health law and policy at George Washington University, one of the, if not the, leading experts on Medicaid. She’s also the person who has taught me at least 80% of what I know about the program. So I am extra thrilled that she’s agreed to come be our guide. Sara, welcome. 

Sara Rosenbaum: Well, and thank you for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be on the show. 

Rovner: So let’s start at the beginning. Medicaid was kind of an afterthought to Medicare when they were both created 60 years ago. How did Medicaid come to be? 

Rosenbaum: It’s a really interesting question. This is, of course, the lore, that Medicaid was an afterthought. If you look at the original act, which had been enacted about five years before, and you read the original statutory language — which we lawyers revel in doing — you are amazed. This was not such a big afterthought. I would say that Wilbur Cohen and Wilbur Mills and Lyndon Johnson and everybody else had a good idea of what they were doing. They knew that they were planting the seeds for a program that ultimately would come to be the foundation of health insurance for low-income people across the United States, as well as, of course, specific categories such as people with very severe disabilities. 

Rovner: So what was the difference between Medicare and Medicaid supposed to be when they were signed into law 60 years ago? 

Rosenbaum: Yeah. So Medicaid was very much structured in the classic style of a state grants program. It has come, of course, to be so much more than that, but it was a grant to states, and states would set up state plans. This is all language that has become very familiar to us. And they would provide medical assistance, as it was called, to certain categories of poor people. And the theory was that the program would start with these people, but tucked into — the categories were cash welfare recipients — but tucked in there were a group of people known as the medically needy, in the early days. And the medically needy, I always felt, was sort of the first seeds of something much bigger, because the point was that it was a program for people who were low-income, who couldn’t afford their medical care, but didn’t get cash welfare. 

So the theory was exactly the theory that has carried the program for 60 years now. And originally the thought was that it would really — and of course, this has turned out to be the case — that that would enable people who had very serious health care costs for things that Medicare did not cover — nursing home care, home health benefits ultimately, those kinds of really big-ticket long-term care items outside of Medicare — because Medicare was really sort of like Blue Cross Blue Shield for old people like me. 

Rovner: You weren’t old at the time though? 

Rosenbaum: I was not. Right. I was just a kid. But the program was meant to replicate what folks had had during their working years, and so it was very important and very profound, but limited. 

Rovner: So Medicare’s long been the more politically popular of the two programs. 

Rosenbaum: Yes. 

Rovner: Primarily because of the political clout of older voters, which is how it was created. How was it that Medicaid became the program that grew so much? 

Rosenbaum: What would propel Medicaid forward is that, unlike Medicare, which is tied to a premium structure, right? Medicare is funded through premium payments, which is great, but premium payments are quite unique. Because they are actuarially based, they are a very tightly controlled form of financing, because you’re asking — whether it’s the government or, now, of course, private insurers that contracted the government — you’re asking them to take on a lot of financial risk, and so everybody wanted the assurance of premium structure. Well, Medicaid was not. Medicaid is a classic public health statute. It’s general revenue. And so every time something happened that required an intervention by the federal government where health care was concerned, you could just add a few pages to the Medicaid statute and end up with, voilà, a fix. And by the mid-’70s, people said, Well, what if we decoupled this category from cash welfare funding levels and just let poor children have Medicaid? And there then ensued, essentially, a decade-long effort to add poor children and pregnant women as groups in their own right to the Medicaid program. 

Rovner: I feel like in 2017, in the fight over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, that was sort of a big change for Medicaid. I think people had finally realized that Medicaid had grown larger than— 

Rosenbaum: Yes. 

Rovner: —Medicare, that it was not just a program for the poorest of the poor, that it did all of these other things that you’re talking about, and that really a lot of, I guess, the stigma had been taken away. And yet this Congress felt comfortable — I don’t know if I’d say comfortable — but a majority of them voted to make these really deep, profound changes. What is that going to mean going forward, both to the health care system and to the political system? 

Rosenbaum: Well, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking in this post-enactment period about when was the die cast that’s had everybody spinning. And I think congressional leaders and the White House leadership understood the fatal error they’d made in 2017, which was separating the tax reforms from the spending reforms. Because, of course, we were then able to battle the spending reforms on our own turf, right?. Here, because of the decision that was made back, I’m sure, almost a year ago— 

Rovner: Literally the idea to do one “big, beautiful” bill. 

Rosenbaum: Yes. And that meant that Medicaid, along with food stamps, or SNAP [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], along with everything else, just became pay-fors. They just became offsets. And the name of the game then became beating back every attempt to deprive Congress of pay-fors to do the thing that it really wanted to do, which was tax reform. And so we were all reduced to — “we” in the sense of people who worked on social welfare policy — to bystanders in this effort to get to a trillion dollars. And therefore— 

Rovner: A trillion dollars in cuts. 

Rosenbaum: A trillion dollars in cuts, and therefore it opened the door to extraordinary things. 

Rovner: So what happens next? Does this happen? And if it happens, does it undergird or take out the underpinnings of the entire health care system? Or does Congress eventually realize what it’s done and change its mind? 

Rosenbaum: Well, I think the hope is that — some people are saying: Well, the two-year runway. It’s like two years until it becomes effective. The two-year runway is sort of going to make people forget about this, and then boom, it’ll be upon us. I don’t think so. I think the two-year runway will end up shining a huge light on the fact that states cannot implement the whole system. While we are very focused on the number of people who will lose their coverage, the states are confronting an insurmountable problem here. They’ve never had to link Medicaid to work records, and Congress did everything it could to make matters so much worse. For example, they could have just said that, We’re going to import the same requirements that apply to SNAP to Medicaid, and so if you’re getting SNAP in your working age, then you automatically enroll in Medicaid. They didn’t do that. They didn’t do that. It’s a different-enough set of eligibility criteria and exemption categories. For example, SNAP ends, I think, at about 60, and the Medicaid work requirements go all the way to 65. 

Rovner: Age 60 and 65. 

Rosenbaum: Yes, exactly. But the exemptions are different. The requirements are different. And so states — people are talking about, Oh, well, it’s just the line reporting systems. No, no, no, no. You are liable for all kinds of error rate penalties. If you just rely on SNAP, you can’t. So states have no way to deal with this. So there’s no mitigation strategy for this, and I think the hope is that Congress will call it back. 

Rovner: If it doesn’t, is this — the one sort of silver lining that I’d been sort of thinking about is, well, maybe if we tear down the health care system, we’ll have to start again and build a better one. Is it possible that we could get there, or are we just going to limp along? 

Rosenbaum: I have those thoughts often, and then I stop and think, well, those of us with health insurance could sit there and say, Yeah, maybe we just tear down the health system to start again. Meanwhile, of course, we will have millions of people without health care. So I — interestingly, the Affordable Care Act, of course, was designed not to tear down the health care system but to strengthen the health care system. But it was the brilliance of the Affordable Care Act was that it saw the holes and it sort of tried to fix them. And if we’d left it alone with everybody in this what I consider to be sort of an intermediate arrangement, we could have done exactly what you are talking about. With just about everybody in the United States covered, we could have begun to really do the serious work of moving to something more unified, better— 

Rovner: Cheaper. 

Rosenbaum: And of course, cheaper. 

Rovner: More efficient. 

Rosenbaum: More efficient. That’s right. Far easier to use. But we have decided instead to tear the Affordable Care Act apart, both the access to the marketplace by rolling back the assistance and, of course, the Medicaid reforms. 

Rovner: Well, happy birthday, Medicaid. 

Rosenbaum: Happy birthday, Medicaid. 

Rovner: Thank you so much, Sara Rosenbaum. 

Rosenbaum: Thank you for having me. It was a — it was both uplifting and sad. 

Rovner: OK, we’re back. And now it’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s where we each recognize the story we read this week we think you should read, too. Don’t worry if you miss it. We will put the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Joanne, why don’t you go first this week? 

Kenen: The story I’m doing is in ScienceAlert: “New Kind of Dental Floss Could Replace Vaccine Needles, Study Finds,” by David Nield. OK, I should begin with a caveat, which is I basically don’t like it when journalists hype findings. It’s something that was only in a dozen mice or something. My exception is when something is really, really sort of just interesting to learn about. Then it’s OK to report it as long as you just sort of shout: This is only in mice! We don’t know if it’s going to work in people! But it is an interesting study. 

One reason people don’t get vaccines is they’re afraid of needles. And if you could actually apply the vaccine to a dental floss pick and get it — because the line between our gums and our teeth is permeable, stuff can get in and out. That’s why we have to clean it. If you could treat a dental floss with the vaccine instead of just plain old dental floss or a needle in your arm or leg or whatever, maybe that could be a way of improving. And so these animal studies have been suggestive that this is a worthwhile course to follow. But before you go out to the drugstore with your dental floss and ask them to put the vaccine stuff on it — they’ve done it with a couple of people with dye, not with vaccine, just to sort of trace it. We are a long way away, but it was interesting enough for me to decide that we could discuss it. 

Rovner: I thought it was pretty cool. Shefali? 

Luthra: My piece also is dentistry adjacent, even dentistry directly relevant. It is from The New Yorker. It is by Burkhard Bilger. The headline is “Mexico’s Molar City Could Transform My Smile. Did I Want It To?” This is a really fun read. He travels to this town. Los Algodones, in Mexico, is right across the border, and it is where a lot of people go to get dental work. It is much cheaper there than getting it in America. So he goes through the history of dental work, why it has been something that people really do not enjoy, the pain associated with it, how many bad dentists are out there, also the stigma and violence against dentists. And then he talks through his own personal journey of trying to figure out: Does he need this dental work? How much would it cost to get it in this Mexican town compared to getting it in the U.S.? 

He talks to a dentist there, talks to a celebrity dentist as well, and in the end decides to keep his teeth as they are, which is very beautiful to me as someone who hates going to the dentist. But it’s a really fun read to think about how expensive health care is, how often things are marketed to us that maybe we do or don’t need, and also why dentistry has really been siloed out of all other health care for basically all of our history. 

Rovner: Yeah, it really has. It’s a wonderful combination of stories. Anna. 

Edney: Mine is not dental-related. I apologize. But this is an obit in The Washington Post by Stefanie Dazio, “Morton Mintz, Post reporter with a muckraker spirit, dies at 103.” And I wanted to talk about him because he was the reporter responsible for bringing to light everything that was going on with thalidomide. He wrote a 1962 front-page Washington Post profile on Francis Kelsey, the FDA pharmacologist who essentially blocked thalidomide from getting to market in the U.S., and she faced a lot of pressure and a lot of name-calling and things to stand in the way. And he took on the story, and he did many amazing stories, so it’s just, it’s worth a read. He wrote a lot about the pharmaceutical industry as well, and so I think it’s just nice to remember him. 

Rovner: It is. I will point out he was a fellow Michigan Daily alum, a close family friend. My mother actually worked on the Michigan Daily with his younger sister and then later worked with him at The Washington Post for years, so I can attest, not just a great reporter but a really swell guy. All right, well, my extra credit is not dental-related, either. It’s another great investigation from my KFF Health News colleague Fred Schulte. It’s called, “Cosmetic Surgeries Led to Disfiguring Injuries, Patients Allege.” And it’s mostly about a chain you’ve probably seen advertised called Sono Bello and how this private-equity-owned business and some others like it are being sued in scores of medical malpractice and negligence lawsuits, claiming under-trained medical professionals have caused disfiguring injuries and, in at least a dozen cases, wrongful deaths. The subtext of this story, of course, is that this is another one of those not quite med spa but not quite ambulatory surgery center categories that’s not very well regulated by either the FDA or most states. So it’s yet another good case of buyer beware when it comes to protecting your health. 

OK. That’s this week’s show. As always, thanks as always to our editor, Emmarie Huetteman, and our producer-engineer, Francis Ying. Extra-special thanks this week to Taylor Cook, who’s editing our Medicare and Medicaid anniversary interviews. If you enjoy the podcast, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate it if you left us a review. That helps other people find us, too. Also, as always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can still find me on X, @jrovner, or on Bluesky, @julierovner. Where are you folks hanging these days? Shefali. 

Luthra: I am at Bluesky, @shefali. 

Rovner: Joanne. 

Kenen: Bluesky and LinkedIn, @joannekenen. 

Rovner: Anna. 

Edney: Bluesky or X, @annaedney. 

Rovner: We’ll be back in your feed next week. Until then, be healthy. 

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A man with the deadliest form of brain cancer has no signs of the disease after taking an experimental drug.

Ben Trotman was 40 when he was diagnosed in 2022 with glioblastoma, the most aggressive cancerous brain tumor. Patients typically live an average of 15 months after diagnosis, and the five-year survival rate is just 6.9%.

Trotman was referred to The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), where he was treated by consultant UCLH medical oncologist Dr. Paul Mulholland, as detailed in a press release.

ANCIENT 'PHARAOH'S CURSE' FUNGUS SHOWS PROMISE IN KILLING CANCER CELLS

As the only person enrolled in a trial that ultimately closed due to lack of patients, Trotman received a medication called ipilimumab, a targeted immunotherapy treatment.

Ipilimumab is an antibody that binds to a protein on immune cells (T cells). It keeps cancer cells from suppressing the immune system so it can then attack and kill the cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Trotman also received radiation and chemotherapy. 

More than two years later, his quarterly scans show no signs of cancer.

"It is very unusual to have a clear scan with glioblastoma, especially when he didn’t have the follow-up surgery that had been planned to remove all of the tumor that was initially visible on scans," his oncologist, Mulholland, said in the release. 

"We hope that the immunotherapy and follow-up treatment Ben has had will hold his tumor at bay — and it has so far, which we are delighted to see."

Two months after receiving the ipilimumab, Trotman married his wife, Emily. In April 2025, they welcomed their daughter, Mabel.

"Getting this diagnosis was the most traumatic experience — we were grappling with the fact that Ben had gone from being apparently perfectly healthy to having months to live," Emily Trotman said in the release. 

"Had we not met Dr. Mulholland, that would have been it for us. We felt we had a lucky break in an otherwise devastating situation."

Ben Trotman added, "We obviously don’t know what the future holds, but having had the immunotherapy treatment and getting these encouraging scan results has given [us] a bit of hope."

"We are focused on rebuilding the life we thought we had lost and enjoying being parents."

Mulholland and his team have now opened another clinical trial for patients who have been newly diagnosed with glioblastoma.

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Sixteen patients will be recruited for the trial, which is sponsored by UCL. 

The treatment will be administered at the NIHR UCLH’s Clinical Research Facility and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, according to the press release.

The patients will receive ipilimumab before proceeding to standard treatments that may include surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

"The crucial element of this trial is that patients will have their immune system boosted by the drug before they have any other treatment, when they are fit and well enough to tolerate the immunotherapy," Mulholland said in the release.

The Win-Glio trial — nicknamed "Margaret’s Trial" — is funded by the efforts of Dame Siobhain McDonagh, sister of Margaret McDonagh, a London woman who died of glioblastoma in 2023 and was treated by Mulholland.

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Ben Trotman said he is "delighted" that the new trial is moving forward with the same immunotherapy drug he received. 

"It will give people newly diagnosed with glioblastoma some hope."

Beyond the cancer risks of old oil, fried foods themselves can lead to a range of health issues, all of which negatively impact health over time

View the full post GFNC: Cooking in old oil is associated with many cancers on NOW Grenada.

AbbVie has acquired rights to a multispecific antibody that IGI Therapeutics designed to bind to three targets to treat multiple myeloma. Early Phase 1 results showed encouraging responses in a heavily pretreated patient population and a favorable safety profile.

The post AbbVie Pays $700M for Drug Engineered to Overcome Resistance in Multiple Myeloma appeared first on MedCity News.

AbbVie said Monday that it would pay up to $2.1 billion to acquire Capstan Therapeutics, a startup developing CAR-T therapies for autoimmune conditions, fibrosis, and cancer. 

AbbVie will pay up to $2.1 billion in cash when the deal closes, according to a press release. The companies did not give further details about the financial terms or a timeline for completing the acquisition. 

Capstan launched in 2022 and has raised around $340 million from OrbiMed, Vida Ventures, RA Capital, Polaris Partners, and the venture teams at Pfizer, Bayer, Eli Lilly and Company, and Bristol Myers Squibb. It was last valued at around $500 million, according to Pitchbook. 

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