Healthcare Costs Archives - Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News /topics/health-care-costs/ Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News produces in-depth journalism on health issues and is a core operating program of KFF. Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:31:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=32 Healthcare Costs Archives - Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News /topics/health-care-costs/ 32 32 161476233 Trouble Getting Weight Loss Drugs Covered by Insurance? Here’s What To Know /health-industry/health-care-helpline-glp-1-zepbound-weight-loss-insurance-coverage/ Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2250127&preview=true&preview_id=2250127 A hand-drawn illustration of a hand holding a GLP-1 injector that has a note attached to it, which reads, "GLP-1 APPROVED!"
(Oona Zenda/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

A professional in-home caregiver lost her coverage for Zepbound. She soon realized getting it back was not straightforward.

“I was like: ‘What am I going to do? Hopefully I can just continue keeping this weight off.’”

— Deborah Finley, 50, of Lodi, California


Deborah Finley, 50, of Lodi, California, said her weight started to worry her during the early days of covid. That’s when she noticed a lot of the people who were on ventilators or dying had something in common: obesity.

“It was a scary time,” she said. As a single mom, she was afraid “that I wouldn’t be here for my daughter.”

Finley had been diagnosed with sleep apnea and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and she was prediabetic. Her pulmonologist suggested bariatric surgery but couldn’t get Finley’s insurer to cover it.

She exercised and watched what she ate, but she wasn’t losing weight and her mental health suffered.

She remembers telling her doctor: “Look, I’m at 223 pounds. I feel like I’m hitting this wall. I don’t know what else I can do.” That’s when he suggested Zepbound, a GLP-1 drug for obesity.

Finley said she still had to put in a lot of work to get healthy. But the drug helped. Her sleep apnea improved dramatically. She lost weight.

Then her insurance plan stopped covering Zepbound for weight loss at the end of last year. That’s become common because GLP-1 drugs are expensive for health plans and the employers that pay for them.

“They started sending out notices to all the patients,” Finley said. “And they said: ‘Look, we’re pulling this medication. We’re giving you 90 days’ notice to figure out what you want to do.”

From 2025 to 2026, 12 million people were on plans that for Zepbound and 12 million had plans that dropped Wegovy, another GLP-1, according to , a website that helps patients find discounts on prescription drugs.

If you find yourself in this situation, these tips can help. 

1. Read the fine print on coverage.

A hand-drawn cartoon of a person holding a magnifying glass to their eye while they read fine print.

While many plans don’t cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss alone, they may make exceptions if you have other conditions.

That was Finley’s situation. She learned that her insurer would cover Zepbound if it was used to treat obstructive sleep apnea, or MASH, a fatty liver disease. GLP-1s are also covered for people with Type 2 diabetes.

You can work with your doctors to screen for qualifying conditions, said , a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Undiagnosed diabetes, he said, is “the most likely scenario that would allow for someone to go from not being qualified to being qualified.”

Since Finley had sleep apnea and testing showing that the drug helped, she learned it could still be covered with a prior authorization — that’s when you have to get approval from your health insurance before it will cover .

Finley said her physician told her a prior authorization was on file, but when she tried to refill her prescription, the pharmacist told her Zepbound was denied.

2. File an appeal — and get some help from your doctor.

Don’t give up if your medication is denied, said , the obesity medicine director for UVA Health, the health system affiliated with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Sometimes your insurer will relent on appeal, if you make a good case.

A hand-drawn cartoon of a computer screen that has an insurance appeal and medical test results on its screen.

Finley made several frustrating phone calls and eventually went digging through her online medical records.

“I had to do my own investigative work,” she said.

Those records showed that Zepbound was indeed denied. Her doctor had applied for prior authorization, but it did not go through, because her insurer said there was not sufficient data to back up the request. Somehow, her health information, including the sleep apnea testing results, hadn’t made it to the right people.

Finley eventually got her hands on the 17-page report and got a little help from ChatGPT to write an appeal, showing that the drug was necessary for her based on her diagnosis and covered under her policy.

This kind of appeal can be a lot of work. Luckily, many doctors’ offices will help and know how the system works, Alexander said.

“I don’t think that patients should be expected to navigate these waters on their own,” he said.

3. Carefully document your care.

Sometimes you may have to file multiple appeals if the first one is unsuccessful, said , the vice president for advocacy and research at the nonprofit Obesity Action Coalition, which receives financial support from drugmakers including Zepbound maker Eli Lilly and Wegovy producer Novo Nordisk.

A hand-drawn cartoon of a folder stuffed with papers. On the front, it reads, "care record / all documents."

Zvenyach also recommends keeping meticulous records. Some plans require something called step therapy, meaning patients have to try and fail on other drugs or treatments before getting covered for the one their doctor wants them to take.

“Keep a history of other meds you’ve taken so you can provide documentation for step therapy requirements,” she said. “Document dates of participation in any nutrition and physical activity program or membership.”

Finley filed an appeal on Feb. 4, and although she expected a hearing within 90 days, it hadn’t been scheduled yet as of mid-June.

She said it’s been stressful because she hasn’t been able to get new injections of Zepbound since mid-January.

4. Look for discounts if you pay out-of-pocket.

The drugmakers that make Zepbound and Wegovy sell the medicines at a discount to people who pay out-of-pocket instead of using insurance. (Try discount sites like TrumpRx or GoodRx.)

Even with discounts, the drugs are not affordable for everyone. If you have a or a flexible spending account, you can use it to pay for them with pretax dollars.

5. If you’re considering compounded GLP-1s online, watch for red flags.

A hand-drawn cartoon of a hand holding a vial of GLP-1 liquid. The label has a red flag on it and question marks.

You might have seen ads for affordable off-brand obesity drugs prescribed by online providers. These are compounded products — that is, made by specialized pharmacists instead of a drug company.

Compounded medicines are prepared using the same active ingredient as the brand-name drugs. But they aren’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Look out for . Check the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s . Make sure the pharmacy preparing your drug is . If it’s not, it may not be undergoing inspections or complying with other laws.

After stretching out her remaining supply of Zepbound as long as she could, Finley is taking a compounded version of the drug while she continues the insurance appeals process.

6. Be persistent. And remember to breathe.

Being told no by an insurer is maddening. But Alexander said you often have other options.

“If any appeal that we make is unsuccessful, there are other treatments that we can use,” he said — for example drugs like Contrave, or a cheaper combination of generic naltrexone and bupropion.

UVA Health’s Varney, who has consulted for Eli Lilly, said not to give up on trying to get GLP-1s covered. “Take a breath, but go right back to it,” she said, adding that GLP-1s are superior to the older drugs on the market.

Alexander said he thinks obesity drugs will eventually become affordable — cheap even. Statins, which are used to treat high cholesterol, were once expensive and hard to get covered. Now, Alexander notes, they’re generic and often cost just a few bucks.

“I know it’s hard to imagine,” he said. “But there will come a day when we no longer see these access barriers for GLP-1s.”

Healthcare Helpline helps you navigate the health system hurdles between you and good care. Send us your tricky question and we may tap a policy sleuth to puzzle it out. Share your story. The crowdsourced project is a joint production of NPR and Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

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Trump Officials Still Delaying Funds /podcast/what-the-health-452-trump-grant-delays-abortion-dobbs-june-25-2026/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:04:57 +0000 /?p=2253740&post_type=podcast&preview_id=2253740 The Host
Julie Rovner photo
Julie Rovner Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl 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.

For the second year in a row, Trump administration officials are delaying the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in health-related grant funding as political appointees seek to ensure the funding adheres to the administration’s priorities — despite promises to Congress that the money would be spent as directed.

Meanwhile, four years after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, nearly half the states have banned or substantially restricted the procedure. But while most voters say they support abortion rights — and majorities in several states have approved ballot measures to enshrine them — that sentiment has not translated into major gains for Democrats running for office.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, Maya Goldman of Axios, Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico Magazine, and Rachana Pradhan of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

Panelists

Maya Goldman photo
Maya Goldman Axios
Joanne Kenen photo
Joanne Kenen Johns Hopkins University and Politico
Rachana Pradhan photo
Rachana Pradhan Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Read Rachana's stories.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • Federal funding for health grants and international humanitarian aid is not reaching its recipients, demonstrating that congressionally authorized and appropriated funding is still encountering roadblocks under the Trump administration. At least some of the money is being tied up in review, with political appointees requiring personal signoff on any and all disbursements. While many lawmakers have made their frustrations known, Congress has few levers to ensure the money goes where lawmakers say it should.
  • This week marked the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court case that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. Yet research shows there were more abortions performed in the U.S. last year than there were in the year before the court’s decision. Access to medication abortion and telehealth prescribing are credited for that increase — two methods that activists who oppose abortion have targeted in their continuing efforts to eliminate it.
  • In vaccine policy news, a study showing the effectiveness of the covid vaccine that was spiked by Trump administration officials was recently published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reinstated a flu vaccine mandate for the military after a significant flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
  • Amid concerns over healthcare affordability, two states are taking measures to address prices. A new Indiana law imposes price controls on hospitals, and Colorado has received federal approval to import drugs from Canada — though Canadian distributors have shown no interest in working with American states.

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

Julie Rovner: The Washington Post’s “,” by Silvia Foster-Frau.  

Maya Goldman: Stat’s “,” by O. Rose Broderick.  

Rachana Pradhan: Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Arrests of Immigrant Parents Create Mental Health Crisis for Children,” by Claudia Boyd-Barrett.  

Joanne Kenen: The Washington Post’s “,” by Sarah Kaplan.  

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

Click to open the transcript Transcript: Trump Officials Still Delaying Funds

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

Julie Rovner: Hello from Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and WAMU Public Radio in Washington, D.C. Welcome to What the Health? I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, and as always I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters covering Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, June 25, 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 Maya Goldman of Axios News. 

Maya Goldman: Hello. 

Rovner: Joanne Kenen of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Politico Magazine. 

Joanne Kenen: Hey, everybody. 

Rovner: And my Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health news colleague Rachana Pradhan. 

Rachana Pradhan: Hey, Julie. 

Rovner: No interview this week, but way too much news, so let’s see how much we can squeeze in. We’re going to start this week at the Department of Health and Human Services, where we have a pair of stories about grant funding passed by Congress and signed into law by President [Donald] Trump still not getting where it’s supposed to go. , our podcast pal Paige Winfield Cunningham reports that states and health organizations are waiting for nearly half a billion dollars for a variety of programs, including suicide hotlines and opioid addiction treatment centers, because of a convoluted clearance process that involves artificial intelligence and political appointee sign-offs to, quote, “ensure alignment with Agency priorities.” Quoting from Paige’s story: “One former career staffer at the CDC who served under four administrations said fewer than five or six grant notices in a year would typically get reviewed at the HHS level. Now it’s all of them.” , except this one is about delays in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, where with just three months left in the fiscal year, 90% of the $37 million in grant funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation [Research] has yet to be released. I know I sound like a broken record, but that’s not how any of this is supposed to work, right? 

Goldman: Right. 

Pradhan: No, I think this is, more or less, some version of this has been going on since January, February of 2025, but I think now it’s being more institutionalized in federal policy. That’s what they’re attempting to do. Whereas in the first few months of the current Trump administration, it was instituted at â€” “haphazard” probably doesn’t really do it justice â€” but it was sort of this very chaotic process of instituting these new layers of political appointee review on what federal money was funding, ultimately, right? And whether political appointees decided that it was something that they thought the federal government should be doing. 

Rovner: At the beginning, they just froze everything. 

Pradhan: Right. 

Kenen: They cut everything. 

Pradhan: And then they— 

Rovner: Then they cut everything 

Pradhan: â€”started cutting things. Right. Things like which we’ve all talked about and done plenty of reporting on, right? Things that aren’t supported by political appointees, regardless of their scientific merit, right? And so now this has sort of taken on an even broader evolution, so that it is formal federal government policy regulation that political appointees can review every dollar that goes out for anything, almost, right? All grantmaking, which is just an extraordinary sum of money. 

Goldman: Yeah. 

Rovner: And Congress, remember Congress, which owns this spending power, said in last year’s appropriations, You will spend this money the way we are telling you to. And the president signed those bills, promising to do that, and now is not. Maya, you wanted to say something. 

Goldman: I was just going to say, I think there was so much focus â€” like Rachana said, when in the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] era â€” on federal funding in healthcare and getting trapped in this purgatory space, and I think there’s maybe a misconception that that has kind of stopped. But it’s still, like you said, it’s becoming institutionalized. It’s the opposite of stopped. And like you said, Congress, this was not Congress’ intention. So it’ll be very interesting to see what happens, especially as these OMB [Office of Management and Budget], this OMB guidance for— 

Rovner: Which we’ll get to in a second. But before we get there, this is not just happening at HHS. It’s happening in other parts of the Trump administration. Former KFF Health Newser Anna Maria Barry-Jester  that over at the State Department, the administration is defying congressional orders to continue to spend money on food, medicine, and other humanitarian foreign aid that used to go out under the auspices of USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development], which the administration dissolved last year without congressional permission. As at HHS, State Department officials are not only not spending the money as Congress directed, but when members of Congress have asked, officials have simply not responded to their request. Not surprisingly, for those who have been paying attention, a lot of this circles back to Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, who has said many times he believes that the president, rather than Congress, should exercise the majority of federal spending power, regardless of what the Constitution said. Is there a point where Congress, which is increasingly unhappy with the president over a lot of things right now, including a lot of Republicans, does take its spending power back? 

Kenen: But they can’t cut the check. Congress has made its displeasure on the spending, they voiced it before. Congress is getting a little friskier right now, but they yielded a lot of their power to the executive branch, and there’s a lot more tension going on right now on other things. They can yell and scream and pass bills, but if the executive branch of OMB, which has explicitly basically said: Congress, you give advice. You don’t decide. Even though that’s pretty much what they’ve said since 2025. So Congress can’t run over to the OMB and get into the federal treasury and take out a bunch of cash and go give it to some rural hospital somewhere, or NIH, or some scientists. They can pass the law, but they can’t â€” it’ll probably, this too, will end up with the Supreme Court at some point. But they’ve been reluctant to, certain battles they have, everybody’s sort of constitutional crises, they’ve tried to avoid to date, although not entirely. 

Pradhan: Well, like Joanne said: What can they really do? I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know. What beyond sort of kicking and screaming can they do? 

Kenen: Well, they can, I think they could probably take it to court on a separation of powers or constitutional powers, but I think that that’s the ultimate constitutional crisis that people have been afraid to hit that button. 

Rovner: There was a Supreme Court decision in the Nixon administration that said the administration can’t impound money appropriated by Congress, and that’s what Russell Vought would like to have go back to the Supreme Court, because he thinks this Supreme Court might overturn it, but they haven’t yet. I guess everybody’s afraid to kind of call the bluff. 

Kenen: Because it gets us into an even messier territory than we are already in, and we are in a very messy territory. 

Rovner: We are definitely in a very messy territory. Algae filled. 

Kenen: Algae-filled, yes. 

Rovner: We’ll get to that. Moving on, as Maya already hinted, there are these proposed new rules from the aforementioned Office of Management and Budget that would give political appointees even more power over how federal grant funding is distributed. It turns out that buried in that proposal is language that would effectively disqualify from funding most research into diversity, equity, and inclusion, what this administration defines as, quote, “woke.” I would add, this comes as the journal Science reports that  of scientists who are women or from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups found that those who participated in a special undergraduate program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health were twice as likely to earn their PhD than peers who didn’t participate in those programs. In other words, at least in this case, DEI works if your goal is to achieve more representation in science. But I guess that’s no longer the goal, right? 

Goldman: I think there’s also so many research questions that have real impact on people’s health that just must by nature incorporate words that would be flagged as DEI, and so we could miss out on real scientific breakthroughs if this goes through. 

Rovner: Yeah, they’ve apparently got these AI programs that are just grabbing off words like “gender” or things that might in scientific contexts have nothing to do with DEI. 

Pradhan: And I think one of the things about DEI, too, that probably gets lost in the current era is that it definitely has, of course, a racial and ethnic component, but also it has a big gender component. In science and across fields, DEI programs have benefited women, wholesale. So I think, and if that’s the goal, to undo these things, it won’t necessarily just have consequences for racial and ethnic minorities but women scientists in other fields also. 

Rovner: One of the big stories I covered in the early ’90s was the fact that women weren’t allowed to participate in most clinical trials, because scientists were afraid that they would, the fact that: Oh my God. They have hormones. They would mess up the results. And as a result, so many medical breakthroughs, we had no idea if they worked on women or not, because women were never tested. That only changed when women members of Congress insisted that the NIH start including women in their clinical trials. And again, a lot of these programs to bring more women into science have helped. There have been blind spots about gender, so it really has been, if not for quote-unquote “affirmative action” for women, there would be an awful lot of stuff that we simply would not know about women’s health. I only add that up as: These things in the 1990s were really bipartisan.  

So Wednesday was the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned the five-decade-old right to abortion under Roe v. Wade. And in a twist I don’t think any of us could have predicted, even though nearly half the states have banned or severely restricted abortion during that time, there were nearly twice as many abortions in 2025 as in 2021, the last full year before Roe was overturned. Rachana, how did this happen and how much does it have to do with mail order abortion drugs? 

Pradhan: Quite a lot. Yes, I don’t think this is something that anti-abortion groups at all expected or wanted to see. Certainly not what they wanted to see. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, pills being sent via telemedicine or telehealth is a big part of this. Even women in states that have enacted almost total bans on abortion are still able to get pills in the mail, and that is responsible for this, in large part. 

Rovner: And of course, anti-abortion groups are furious that the Trump administration’s FDA [Food and Drug Administration] has not rolled back the policy yet that the Biden administration put in during covid allowing the mailing of these pills. Now they’re agitating for acting attorney general Todd Blanche to drop the government’s defense of a case that was filed by Louisiana challenging that mail delivery of mifepristone. But even if that were to happen, medication abortions can continue just by using the second pill in the two-pill combination that’s used for abortion, which is misoprostol. And states can’t really ban misoprostol, because it’s used for so many other things, right? 

Pradhan: Right, they would be â€” I don’t know. Never say “never,” I guess. But it would be, it’s hard to see a path for that. Yeah, so our colleague Kate Wells, who’s based in Michigan, wrote this great story this week stating this exact thing, right? Because even though the research shows that the combination of two drugs for medication abortion, so mifepristone and misoprostol, taken together is the most effective, but that doesn’t mean the misoprostol alone does not work. And so it does work â€” it’s just not as effective. And there might be some greater potential for side effects â€” right? â€” if you only take the latter medication. So yeah, it’s not, so it’s not so easy â€” right? â€” to cut off access. 

Rovner: Meanwhile, let’s talk about the politics of this. Democrats who had been hoping to ride support for abortion rights to electoral ascendance may either be over- or underconfident. That’s according to  by our podcast panelist Alice Ollstein of Politico. Since Dobbs was overturned, voters, even in some pretty red states â€” I’m looking at you, Missouri â€” have approved ballot initiatives to ensure abortion rights in those states. But that hasn’t translated into votes for Democrats in many of those states. Voters approved the abortion rights referendums and voted back in Republicans who are anti-abortion. What’s up with this? 

Goldman: I think one interesting point that Alice made in that article is that a lot of voters think, OK, I voted for abortion rights, so now I can vote for other candidates based on other issues. Which is a super interesting trend to watch, especially to see if that trickles into other policy areas, too. 

Rovner: Yeah, I had not thought about that until I read Alice’s piece, and it’s like, yeah, that makes good sense. In the past, I think anti-abortion voters have very much been single-issue voters, but abortion rights voters have not. They want abortion rights, but they also want other things, and I think a lot of them in some of these states think, Well, we’re protecting abortion rights here in our state, so it’s OK to vote for this anti-abortion politician, even though they didn’t think all the way through that that anti-abortion politician in a federal office might vote for a federal ban that would override what you just voted for in your state. Joanne, you wanted to say something. 

Kenen: I think a lot of people don’t connect dots or don’t think things through. We know that in these very, very, very red, some of the most conservative states in the country, have voted big for Medicaid expansion when it became a ballot initiative, and then they went ahead and voted the same people who had fought it for years back into the governor’s mansion and back into the legislature. So I think, whether people don’t connect dots or that all of us can hold contradictory, more than â€” all human beings have some contradictory thoughts and impulses. I can’t explain exactly why this is happening . But it’s not only abortion. It’s particularly acute. Americans are for more gun control than our lawmakers, or gun regulation, than our lawmakers enact, and yet they keep voting in people who limit gun ownership or gun rights more stringently than the public in polls says they want. So this is one of several hot-button political issues â€” abortion and gun control, arguably the most domestically hot-button there are â€” that there is this inconsistency, and I don’t know that anyone’s really successfully explained it. It’s not just low information. It’s more than that. It’s, Yes, I want this, but I also want that. 

Rovner: Right. It’s holding two thoughts at the same time. You’re right. It’s a human thing. 

Pradhan: Well, and Julie, you mentioned this, right? Which is that a single-issue voting on abortion on the left is not â€” yeah. And Alice says this in the lead of her story â€” right? â€” which is the main issues of the day right now are affordability concerns across gas, food, housing. That does seem to still be the driving concern, and understandably so, right? Everything is more expensive, much more expensive than it was two years ago. So people are hurting, and so I don’t know that abortion rights would surpass, or people who are more likely to support an abortion rights ballot initiative are ones that are also not going to be inclined to vote for Republicans on the ballot during the midterm elections, because they’re not happy with some of those other, broader affordability issues. 

Rovner: Yeah, I think affordability is clearly going to be the issue of the moment, probably still when we get to the midterms. But who knows. We’ve got a whole summer to get through. All right, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. 

Moving on to vaccine policy, you might remember back in April when we talked about a study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found last year’s covid vaccine reduced hospital visits and hospitalizations by more than half. It was supposed to appear in the CDC’s journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, but it was spiked by NIH director and acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya, who said the study had methodological issues. Well, apparently that wasn’t a problem for the peer reviewers at the Journal of the American Medical Association, because the study is in this week’s . But even though it’s out there now, how is the public to have any idea who to trust when it comes to science policy? We’re now here, we have peer-reviewed journals that are publishing one thing and the government saying, No, this is not good enough. Did the doubters win simply by sowing doubt? 

Goldman: It’s a great question, and I think that’s a very interesting dynamic with this administration, is that the health officials in this administration have rose to prominence on a platform of bringing trust back into federal health policy. And I think for many people you could argue that there is less trust than there was at the beginning of the administration. And certainly not for everybody, but it’s just there are a lot of wires being crossed in different directions, and it’s hard to know where to go. 

Pradhan: I think one of the things I think about when it comes to trust in the government, like Maya said, right? We have, OK, so there are definitely certain voters that now do not trust the CDC and the government nearly as much, if it all, because of who is in charge. So distrust has arisen among those people. But when I talk to people who are supporters of the “medical freedom” movement and who are very skeptical of vaccines for themselves, for their children, I’ve asked them sometimes, Look, you’re seeing these changes, even going back to last year. This year, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, they made a bunch of changes to the U.S.’ vaccine schedule. And I asked, I remember one time I did an interview and I said, “Well, do you trust the CDC now?” And it’s not a slam dunk. People who are so distrustful of institutions and government agencies and even the medical system or our healthcare system, it’s not like they’re like, “Oh, yes, please, like everything the government says now, you know, I’m just going to take it at face value and just believe it.” It’s almost like it’s like a misunderstanding. I kind of wonder this for the people who are in charge, like leaving government now. It’s like: Do you understand this? Because they’re not just automatically going to take what you say. It’s sort of antithetical to years of thinking, potentially, that they’ve had, right? So— 

Goldman: That’s such a good point. 

Pradhan: I don’t know that now, all of a sudden, are they going to become just a mouthpiece for what RFK Jr. [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and his political appointees are saying. I don’t think so. 

Rovner: I think they’re just making everybody mistrust everything. Joanne, you wanted to add something. 

Kenen: I think, I do a lot of work on trust in healthcare, and I’ve been all over the country the last couple of months since our book came out, talking about it and being on panels. And it’s really, I mean, it’s a cliche to say distrust in healthcare or the health system or public health is an existential crisis. It’s a cliche we’ve heard all the time. But just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it’s not a crisis. The divisions in our country spill over from the politics into things that determine whether or not we and our families and our friends and our kids are healthy or not healthy, and I think this sort of whiplash of deep distrust of the other side is probably going to continue for some years as political officeholders and appointees change. But this, the CDC, I’m not â€” the last poll I saw, I’m not sure if it’s a record low of trust, but it’s definitely plummeted. But it’s the Democrats who used to trust the CDC, now don’t. Now, maybe that’ll rise again when the new CDC director, she’s confirmed, which is likely. Maybe she’ll be able to rebuild, and maybe things will get a little bit better. But right now, there’s so â€” a combination of deep distrust and a whole lot of mixed messaging. It can be very confusing to understand medical advice, and it can be very hard to access our medical system. So it’s just this really toxic brew of risk factors mixed in with the distrust. 

Rovner: Meanwhile, we had a real-world example of distrust and re-trust in public health this week. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has quietly reinstated requirements for new military recruits to be vaccinated against the flu after a flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base sickened more than 200 recruits, with four people hospitalized. Hegseth had removed the mandate, which had been in effect since the end of World War II, with much fanfare back in April. Didn’t take long to kind of see why that mandate made sense, right? 

Kenen: Yes, because this is actually a force readiness issue. It’s not just, Oh, people got sick. Most young, healthy people, and most people in military service â€” most, not all â€” are young and healthy. These were recruits. These were young. Most of them are going to be OK. But first of all, not all of them are going to necessarily be OK. There’s one possible death. The last I heard that somebody had died, but it wasn’t necessarily from flu, and that was under investigation. And one of you may have more recent information than what I read a few days ago. So, we have four people hospitalized. We do not have a confirmed death. But it was 160 people, which is a whole lot of people. And if it happened here, it’s a big red flag, because your soldiers are supposed to be ready to fight, not in the bed with the flu. So, it happened in one particular location, but it really should have showed this national security interest. You really don’t want your fighting force with a 104 fever and feeling crappy. 

Rovner: I would say it’s also completely predictable that when you bring— 

Kenen: Yes. 

Rovner: â€”a whole bunch of people in and have them sleep together in close quarters and stress them physically and mentally, which is what basic training does, and then somebody gets sick, it’s going to spread. 

Kenen: It’s also one, that’s really one of the big causes of the spread of the 2018-2019 â€” I mean, excuse me, the 1918-1919 so-called Spanish flu, which it wasn’t. It was actually, a lot of it was spread â€” it was just as we were getting into World War I. There was a lot of young recruits. A lot of it’s â€” there’s argument about exactly what happened where, but certainly a base in Kansas was one of the big spreaders of that, of what became a global pandemic. 

Rovner: In other words, we’ve seen this TV program before. 

Kenen: We didn’t have —right. We didn’t have vaccines yet. It wasn’t— 

Rovner: We didn’t have TV either, but, yeah. 

Kenen: We had imagination, right? 

Rovner: Point taken. 

Kenen: We had carrier pigeons. 

Rovner: All right. 

Pradhan: I feel like anyone with school-age children or kids who are in college could’ve. It’s like, Oh, who could have predicted?&²Ô²ú²õ±è;³Û´Ç³Ü&²Ô²ú²õ±è;³ó²¹±¹±ð&²Ô²ú²õ±è;—&²Ô²ú²õ±è;

Rovner: Yeah, yeah. 

Pradhan: â€”massive numbers— 

Rovner: Any parent. 

Pradhan: â€”of people in a small place, and Oh, look, a flu outbreak. It’s as inevitable as things can be these days, right? I think that this probably is pretty high up there, right? 

Rovner: Yeah. All right. Well, so, moving on. In things I definitely did not have on my bingo card for 2026, Indiana is imposing price controls on hospitals. Under the new law, as reported by my Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News colleagues Phil Galewitz and Samantha Liss, hospitals in the state will have to charge employer health insurance plans no more than a multiple of what they pay Medicare, or else run the risk of losing their tax-exempt status. Now, Vermont also does this, but Indiana is politically very much not like Vermont. Is this the leading edge of a Republican backlash to high healthcare prices? 

Kenen: Maybe. We just don’t know. You know — Indiana’s Indiana. But we have, and we’ve talked about it— 

Rovner: Indiana’s really red, though, and they have a really red governor who used to be a really red senator. 

Kenen: Yes, but we don’t know what’s going to spread, right? But what we’ve talked in the podcast frequently over the last couple of months, hospitals are in the spotlight about pricing in a way that they haven’t. We’ve been really focused on drug prices. And we’ve sort of, we have a different relationship with hospitals. And we also all don’t get hit by hospitals every year, where most of us do buy drugs, so â€” but hospitals are really getting a lot of attention, bipartisan, I mean, in red and blue states, in Congress. There have been hearings. It’s not like the tobacco executive hearings, but it is sort of a lot more skeptical of why do hospitals, are they â€” to use the buzzword of the day â€” why are they so unaffordable? Why are your bills so inexplicable? Why can’t you understand? So, the whole system is based on cost shift, and one reason hospitals have been pressed to charge a lot more than Medicare is they say that Medicare payments don’t cover their costs, and they â€” it’s the great big, the shell game of American healthcare. But I don’t know that we know what the next step is state-wise. But you know what? It may be a domino. We don’t know yet. 

Rovner: I know I’m interested watching the backlash of Republicans against high healthcare spending. They’re coming out against managed care. They’re coming out against hospital prices. I will point out that for my entire career, the person who’s been loudest about nonprofit hospitals overcharging has been [Sen.] Chuck Grassley. 

Kenen: Right. 

Rovner: Very Republican senator from Iowa. 

Kenen: It’s not just that they — right. He’s been consistent on this for decades, and he’s said that it’s not just that they charge a lot. It’s that: What are they really doing to deserve that? They’re supposed to get a tax break in exchange for community benefits. But show me the benefit. How are you defining and measuring? And is it truly a benefit to the community, as a layperson would think of, Oh, benefiting the community? Or is it some little niche thing that they say is their public service. 

Pradhan: And one thing about Indiana in particular, I think Samantha Liss, who’s one of the reporters on the story you mentioned. Right, Julie? Actually two years ago, what’s really interesting is she had written also about, I think, and this is sort of a case study, I think, somewhat â€” right? â€” in how consolidated your healthcare markets are. Right? I think that that’s a big driver as to whether a state or a governor or anyone wants to take action on these things. I remember she wrote about these two rival hospitals that were in Terre Haute, Indiana. They were seeking to merge, and then they pulled back their merger application because there were so much opposition, because it would have left â€” Terre Haute is like a city of maybe close to 60,000 people, and for that city and the surrounding area, they would have had only one hospital operator. So, and that was a big deal at the time. So I think Terre Haute, Indiana, is far from the only place where that is sort of a living reality, right? And that’ll be a big motivator, I think, sometimes, too. 

Rovner: But, yes, I will say that both Indiana and Vermont have a lot of these small, sort of midsize consolidated areas where hospitals can basically charge at will. Maya, did you want to say something? 

Goldman: Yeah, I was going to add, I think Indiana has been on the cutting edge of a lot of health policy, especially among red states. They’ve done a lot with price transparency and employer advocacy, and so it’s not surprising to see Indiana do this as much as it would be a different red state. I think it does really indicate to me that people in the state, state governments, and citizens are really frustrated that Congress isn’t acting fast enough for them. They’re, like Joanne said, there’s a lot of discussion happening in Congress around hospitals and needing to lower prices, but there’s not a lot of action happening. And people have power to do that at the state level, and they’re exercising it. So I think we will see more happen there. 

Rovner: Here’s another issue where states sort of have power. While we were talking about strange bedfellows, Colorado has become the second state, after Florida, to get FDA approval for a plan to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. Except Florida hasn’t been able to get its program up and running, because it can’t find a Canadian wholesaler that’s willing to sell the drugs to them. What makes Colorado think that they’re going to have any better luck? And mightn’t both of these states just take a page from Indiana and think about their own price controls, if that’s what they want, rather than importing Canada’s price controls? 

Kenen: I can’t imagine if Colorado decided to do price controls that it wouldn’t be stuck in court. We’ve joked over the years that if you want your child to have full employment for life, become a healthcare lawyer? I think that if Colorado were to do that, which it really just suggested, it would not be immediately reality for consumers. There’s so much cost shifting in healthcare, because our system is just insane, that everybody can say, honestly, I’m not the only culprit. The whole system is too expensive with all this indirect shifts of costs and confusing charges, and it’s hard for experts to understand. 

Rovner: I feel like a lot of federal members of Congress have also sort of looked at these. Let’s import cheaper drugs from somewhere else.  

Kenen: Because it sounds good. 

Rovner: This has been going on since the ’90s. 

Kenen: Yeah. 

Rovner: And nobody’s been able to make it work. And Canada has said very clearly, it’s like: We can’t sell you all of our drugs or we won’t have enough drugs for the people here, which is who we buy drugs for. 

Kenen: But it sounds good. 

Rovner: It does sound good. 

Kenen: And that’s why it’s gone on for 30 years now, closer to 40. 

Rovner: Yeah it is 30 years now. 

Kenen: Yeah, and if you live in New England, you can go to Canada and get them, but there’s been sort of on-paper authorizations to do it for quite a â€” I don’t remember when the first one was, Julie. It was a long time ago. 

Rovner: Yeah. Well, they’re â€” yes, they allowed the FDA to allow states. The first one that actually sort of in theory became legal was the Florida one. And again, that was a couple of years ago, and it’s not off the ground. All right. Well, finally this week, in a drug price adjacent story, props to our podcast pal Lizzy Lawrence at Stat for the  of the week. Lizzy revealed that drugmaker Eli Lilly granted compassionate use to an unnamed 79-year-old individual to use its still-investigational obesity drug retatrutide, which trials have so far shown to be even more potent than Lilly’s other blockbuster obesity drug, tirzepatide. Now, compassionate use is supposed to allow people with terminal conditions to get early access to promising drugs that are not yet approved. Apparently, this patient is not only obese but has obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension. Yet both of those conditions, while very serious, are not considered terminal. So the obvious question here is: Who is this 79-year-old patient, and is he named Donald Trump? So far, nobody’s been able to find out, though the White House has been very adamant, at least after Lizzy’s story came out, that it is not the president. So, why is everybody so excited about this story? 

Kenen: Because it’s weird. 

Rovner: Fair. 

Kenen: Lizzie’s story is great, but it’s just a strange saga, right? And in her first story, she said someone who was 79 at the time, which was a couple of months ago, because President Trump just turned— 

Rovner: Turned 80. 

Kenen: Right. The idea that one person and only one person would get this drug. And we all remember he did get â€” and that was life-threatening. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have gotten it, but he did get it, a monoclonal antibody, when he was hospitalized with covid in his first term. And it may have saved his life. But that was a life-threatening situation. 

Rovner: Yes, that’s what compassionate use is supposed to be used for. 

Goldman: Right. And I think it obviously does matter who, if this person is President Trump. But I think Lizzy does a really good job in the story of explaining that, regardless of who this person is, this is not typically how this program is used, and so it should raise eyebrows that the administration and Eli Lilly are allowing this to happen, regardless of who the person that’s getting this is. 

Kenen: And it could be somebody who has a connection to Lilly. It could be anything, right? It’s a tantalizing question, but we don’t know. 

Pradhan: Yeah, and I do think it sort of begs the question. The White House, after the story published, only firmly said it was not the president. Probably would have been very helpful for them to have said that prior to the story publishing. Why they— 

Rovner: And they were asked. 

Pradhan: Of course, they were asked, right? They were asked, and they did not directly answer. I don’t pretend to know why that decision was made, but I think it probably would have been a good public service to definitively say whether it was the president or not before the story first ran, before it sort of caused this big hullabaloo on social media and elsewhere, right? 

Rovner: And perhaps predictably, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire has now written a stern letter to the administration, demanding — and I believe also to Lily â€” demanding to know if not who this is, at least how this happened, because it is an unusual use of the compassionate use exception. 

Pradhan: Can I ask a question also? This is one thing that I was wondering when reading Lizzy’s story is, so clearly certain people in the NIH and the FDA are HIPAA-protected individuals. So if they were to release or leak identifying information about this patient, that’s not allowed. But not everyone is, surely. Do we really think â€” someone must have seen the details of who this person is. And they would not be subject to HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] if they were to cough up the name, right? 

Rovner: Well, I’m sure that people will continue to see, including those of us here at Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. All right, that is this week’s news. Now it’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s where we each recognized a story we read this week we think you should read, too. Don’t worry if you miss it, we will post the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Joanne, your extra credit involves the second-buzziest story of the week, the saga of the green Reflecting Pool. Please tell us about it. 

Kenen: OK, one story that’s my extra credit, and one story I’m also going to, related story, that I’m going to just give a shout out to. Sarah Kaplan at The [Washington] Post wrote “.” And basically she talks about climate change and health, and that the reason that there’s this algae â€” and actually there’s many kinds of algae. I’m not an expert on all the kinds of algae. But there is one called cyanobacteria, which is highly toxic. It is present â€” my understanding is it’s among several kinds of algae in the Reflecting Pool. But it is becoming more dominant because of climate change. And that’s toxic. That’s not a good thing to have. What I didn’t know â€” I don’t want to go on too long â€” but it’s sort of fascinating that they fill the Reflecting Pool with water from the Tidal Basin, which is the surrounding, the water that, for the people who aren’t in Washington, is the water around the Jefferson Monument and the cherry trees and all that, which in turn comes from the Potomac River, which is polluted. And painting a reflecting pool and then pouring in polluted water might not have been the smartest thing to do. And also apparently the American flag blue is darker than the old gray and it retains more heat and makes the problem worse. So sort of the big public health message is that â€” here the big joke is Making Algae Great Again â€” but that there is saying something about the state of our planet and the state of our water, and that even things that we think of as harmless are not necessarily harmless. And then, just relatedly, for anyone who’s really interested in good reporting on this and great writing on this is the cultural critic of The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott, has been writing a lot about the changes to Washington, and  the Reflecting Pool and called, he said it looked like a kale smoothie. 

Pradhan: Oh. 

Rovner: Vivid. OK, Maya. 

Goldman: My extra credit this week is from Stat. It is an article by O. Rose Broderick called “.” And I think this is a potentially very consequential move from the Trump administration that isn’t getting enough coverage. The SparkNotes version is that the Supreme Court held in 1999 a decision known as Olmstead that said you can’t have unjustified institutional isolation of people with disabilities â€” that’s a form of discrimination. The Trump administration put out a memo sort of reinterpreting what unjustified institutional isolation means. This notably doesn’t change existing laws around integration requirements for people with disabilities, but it signals where the Trump administration’s head is at with regards to disability rights. And the article also notes that the motivation for this change isn’t really clear, especially since community care is usually cheaper than institutional care. But it does mention that one possible factor could be to give the government more flexibility to tackle homelessness, perhaps by forced institutionalization. So, certainly one to watch. 

Rovner: Yeah, definitely. Rachana. 

Pradhan: So my extra credit is a story [“Arrests of Immigrant Parents Create Mental Health Crisis for Children”] written by our [Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News] colleague Claudia Boyd-Barrett. It is just devastating. If I, so â€” grab a tissue box if you’re going to read it. She wrote about how, the consequences for children who have parents that are either detained by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or deported out of the United States, and she has these incredible, really just heartbreaking stories of these children who have been separated from their parents and sort of the emotional toll that it is taking on them. So it’s, the way I think about it is it’s, during the first Trump administration there was a big thing about families being separated at the border, and it was the family separation crisis. But now it’s happening again, just not at the border necessarily. 

Rovner: Yeah. It is quite a story. Well, my story affects both immigration and disability. It’s from The Washington Post. It’s by Sylvia Foster-Frau, and it’s called “.” Now, this is a state program that’s separate from Medicaid, called Children’s Special Services, that helps low-income families with children with disabilities pay for critical things like wheelchairs and feeding tubes and ventilators. Until now, it has served families with no other way to get care, including those who are undocumented and therefore ineligible for Medicaid. But now, the 400 families on the program have been notified by the state that if they want to keep their benefits, their immigration status will be reported to federal authorities. The story profiles one family, asylum seekers from Honduras who have a 10-year-old with spina bifida and autism and whose care, including wheelchairs and catheters, has so far been paid for by the program. Now the mom says she’s going to have to drop out of the program rather than risk being deported, but she has no idea how she will pay for the care that her son needs. It is also pretty wrenching. 

OK, that is this week’s show. Thanks to our editor, Emmarie Huetteman, and our producer-engineer, Francis Yang. A reminder, What the Health? is now available on WAMU platforms, the NPR app, and wherever you get your podcasts, as well as, of course, kffhealthnews.org. Also, as always, you can email us your comments or questions. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can find me still on X, , or on Bluesky, . Where are you guys these days? Joanne. 

Kenen: I am mostly on  and Bluesky, . 

Rovner: Maya. 

Goldman: I am also on  and still on X, . 

Rovner: Rachana. 

Pradhan: You can find me , , and , @rachanadpradhan. 

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

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2253740
Democrats To Propose Bill Capping Out-of-Pocket Medicare Costs for Enrollees /medicare/medicare-costs-out-of-pocket-cap-democrats-senate-wyden-midterms/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2253723 Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 Democratic co-sponsors plan to introduce legislation Thursday to cap consumers’ potential out-of-pocket costs in traditional Medicare, resurfacing a long-running debate over why the program doesn’t limit beneficiary spending.

Even the bill’s backers say securing passage this year is a long shot. But the effort is one more opportunity for Democrats to highlight voters’ frustration about healthcare costs leading into the November election.

Polls show Americans are very concerned about affordability, with finding fewer than half of Americans say they can consistently afford healthcare.

Wyden’s bill would focus on what many consider a critical pocketbook issue in traditional Medicare: There’s no limit on what a beneficiary could pay in cost sharing.

“Everyone else in the health insurance neighborhood has one — employer coverage, the Affordable Care Act, all of them have a cap,” the Oregon Democrat told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. “There’s no good, common-sense reason why the flagship health program doesn’t have the same protection.”

Critics of a cap, meanwhile, are likely to pounce on the cost to the federal budget, which could be significant.

Wyden, already making the battle lines clear, added, “I suspect it will come up on the floor of the Senate that Democrats want to give a fair shake to people on traditional Medicare and Republicans want to help billionaires.”

Policy, Political Dynamics at Work

The underlying issue is the 20% share of have to pay for medical services after they’ve met any deductibles. Without a ceiling or upper limit, an expensive condition such as cancer or a long hospital stay could result in beneficiaries paying thousands of dollars in costs.

That concern leads enrolled in traditional Medicare to purchase separate insurance, often called Medigap. (Others get such coverage through job-based retiree plans.)

Medigap insurance plans have seen rapid premium increases and can cost thousands of dollars a year, especially for couples. That price tag can be unaffordable for some beneficiaries, who may instead turn to private-sector Medicare Advantage plans offered by commercial insurers, or go without.

The Wyden proposal would set a $5,000 cap in traditional Medicare. Any amounts paid by a Medigap plan or a retiree health plan toward beneficiaries’ care would count toward that cap. It also includes other provisions to help older people with lower incomes, including eliminating an asset test to qualify for special programs that help reduce costs.

Medicare would pick up any amounts over that $5,000 limit, which is lower than the one Congress set for the rival Advantage plans — , although insurers can set smaller amounts.

Setting a cap in the traditional program, proponents argue, would help level the playing field between traditional Medicare and Advantage plans, which often cost consumers far less than traditional Medicare with a Medigap supplement. Premiums for these policies would probably be lower, they say, because the insurers’ financial exposure would be limited.

The Medicare Advantage program has historically had strong support from Republicans, who like its private-sector aspect and note that it can potentially do more to control costs, such as by using specific networks of doctors and hospitals, or requiring preapproval for some services, which the traditional program cannot do.

The plans also offer enrollees additional benefits, such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, and prescription drug coverage, and have now attracted more than .

Along with that growth, however, has also come increased scrutiny over concerns about denials of patient services and the to the traditional program. Recently, some health systems have , citing concerns about tardy payments or prior authorization requirements, while insurers where they offer Advantage coverage.

The bill has not yet been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, so there is no official estimate of increased costs to taxpayers for Medicare. Still, it would raise those costs — at a time when other health programs are being cut, the Medicare trust fund is scheduled to of funding in 2033, and the .

That is likely to draw sharp rebukes from fiscal hawks and other conservatives who question whether billions in tax dollars should be used to pick up costs that would otherwise be paid by enrollees or by the supplemental insurance plans many purchase to do so. They are likely to note that beneficiaries could also choose to join private sector Advantage plans, which eliminate the need for supplementary insurance coverage such as Medigap.

Key Questions: Who Benefits? Who Pays?

A cap’s cost to taxpayers, while not officially scored yet, is likely to be significant, although adding one could also save individual consumers money. A recent study from Brown University gives some clues.

A $5,000 cap could save enrollees , the study says, both in direct savings and reductions in their Medigap supplemental premiums. Just over 11% of traditional Medicare beneficiaries, about 3.2 million, would directly benefit from such a cap if it was implemented in 2028, said the study, which did not receive outside funding.

Over the next 10 years, it estimates, just over 52% of all traditional beneficiaries would exceed the $5,000 cap at least once.

Still, lead author Andrew Ryan, a professor at Brown’s School of Public Health, said analysts estimated such a cap “could cost over $50 billion annually, which is a lot of money” to add to the federal balance sheet.

Critics are likely to focus on the cap’s expense and the number of people who might benefit.

“How many people are hitting a level of cost they can’t afford on Medicare? “asked Jackson Hammond, a senior policy analyst with the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank influential with the GOP.

Any cap “is generally going to increase expenses for the program without adding a lot of benefits to enrollees,” said Hammond, who spoke with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News before the legislation was introduced.

Supporters, though, have a different view.

Certainly, with “any policy that’s going to cost money, there will be an argument over where the money is coming from,” said Brian Keyser, a research associate at the liberal Center for American Progress who also spoke with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News before the Wyden measure was introduced.

Keyser co-authored that suggested lawmakers could pay for changes in traditional Medicare, such as an out-of-pocket cap, if they reduced the amount the government pays Medicare Advantage insurers, pointing to government estimates that Advantage would cost the government $76 billion more this year than if the same number of people were in the traditional program.

Finding a way to add a cap “is right and fair because without it, people who become seriously ill can spend their life savings on cost-sharing Medicare,” Keyser said.

Such an idea, however, on and off for years. Knowing that, the bill’s backers acknowledge that passage is unlikely — but they say they’re playing the long game for now.

“We’re going to push for it in the next Congress, when we believe we will be in the majority,” Wyden said.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/medicare/medicare-costs-out-of-pocket-cap-democrats-senate-wyden-midterms/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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Worried About Your Aging Parents? Welcome to the Caregiving Club /health-care-costs/healthq-sandwich-generation-caregiver-title-stages-expectant-aging-parents-tips/ Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2249666
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Cara Anthony tries to convince her HealthQ co-host Blake Farmer that there are benefits to embracing the caregiver identity when helping an aging parent.

An illustration of a person pushing a senior man in a wheelchair, apparently running from a giant "hello my name is caregiver" name-tag.
(Candice Evers for WPLN and Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

When his father was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer in 2025, William Morrison immediately went into caregiving mode.

“We were in the hospital every day,” he said. “I was really playing the intermediary between the medical staff and our family and kind of helping have those conversations and push for those answers.”

One in 10 Americans say they are a caregiver for a parent 65 or older, . And many people in the sandwich generation — those who have both children and aging parents — start their caregiving journeys like Morrison: stepping up during a medical crisis and becoming a family caregiver essentially overnight.

For other people, taking on the role and identity of a caregiver happens more slowly.

Researchers and experts say the spectrum of caregiving is broader than many people realize and that embracing the caregiver title before there’s a crisis can make a significant difference in this phase of life.

Worry Comes First

Being a caregiver can start long before you go to a doctor appointment with a loved one or move your parents into your house. “Oftentimes what we see out in the world is a very limited definition of who a family caregiver is,” said Denise Brown, a caregiving coach and the founder of Caregiving Years Training Academy in Illinois. Being a caregiver is “not necessarily around defining caregiving by tasks and chores, but about that emotional impact.”

Brown created a framework that defines caregiving as a . She said the first stage — the “expectant caregiver” — begins the moment you start to feel concerned about a loved one.

“ You look into the future and you think, ‘Oh, I think someone’s going to need help in the family,’” Brown said.

When you start to get actively involved in a loved one’s care, that triggers the second stage, what Brown calls the “freshman caregiver”: “You’re learning the lay of the land. You’re learning the language of all the systems that you now manage. The best thing to do in this stage is to get comfortable experimenting.”

Caring for Parents Brings Different Stressors

The kind of care that Morrison provided — responding to an immediate medical crisis — catapulted him into the third stage of caregiving, the “entrenched caregiver.” By the time you hit this point, Brown said, “you can feel completely overwhelmed and swallowed up by the experience.”

that the stress is especially acute for people taking care of parents. The role reversal stresses the relationship: Caregivers who focus solely on children don’t deal with the tension linked to shifting power dynamics and other changes that happen when an adult child starts to care for a parent.

Burnout, defined by physical and psychological fatigue, was higher among caregivers of aging parents than among caregivers caring only for children. And for caregivers in the “sandwich generation,” who were taking care of both children and aging parents, personal burnout scores were even higher.

The Title Makes a Difference

Many people who perform care tasks don’t consider themselves caregivers, , but those who do are more likely to access support services and feel a sense of community with other caregivers.

“Anyone in a caregiving situation deserves support and help,” Brown said.

Embracing the role of caregiver early also allows you to have “really good conversations with people in your life” about their desires — and yours — as you enter this phase, Brown said.

Morrison, whose father died earlier this year, is about to enter his own sandwich generation era: He and his wife are expecting a baby boy in August, and he’s been stepping in to help his mom with housework and administrative tasks.

Morrison and his wife have already had conversations about making time for themselves and each other after their son is born. Morrison also wants to be more intentional with his own health, even if that means just going for walks.

People and Policy

Beyond the emotional strain, caregiving comes with substantial costs. On average, caregivers spend more than $7,000 a year on medical and other expenses to support a loved one, according to in 2021.

Some efforts aim to mitigate the financial burden. In most states, family members can get paid to take care of relatives who qualify for Medicaid. But state Medicaid programs face new pressure from federal cuts, and some states have pulled back funding for home-care programs designed to help residents with disabilities.

Meanwhile, a handful of states for unpaid caregivers. For example, starting in 2027, Connecticut will allow family caregivers who make less than $50,000, or couples who make under $100,000, to apply for a tax credit up to $2,000.

This installment is part of HealthQ’s reporting on caregiving among the sandwich generation. For more, check out the series archive.


Katherine Ruppelt at Nashville Public Radio contributed to this report.


HealthQ is a health series from reporters Cara Anthony and Blake Farmer, approachable guides to an unapproachable healthcare system. It’s a collaboration between Nashville Public Radio and Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-care-costs/healthq-sandwich-generation-caregiver-title-stages-expectant-aging-parents-tips/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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Try These Tips When You Can’t Afford Your Rx /podcast/arm-and-a-leg-podcast-listener-tips-hacks-afford-prescription-rx-drugs/ Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2251049&post_type=podcast&preview_id=2251049 Last year, An Arm and a Leg set out on a mission: Collect the best advice about what to do when you can’t afford your prescription drugs. Dozens of listeners wrote in. The result was “.”

Hear stories from: a dad who developed a cost-comparison tool to pay for his daughter’s epilepsy medication; a Medicare coach with tips on how she helped seniors save thousands of dollars on prescriptions; and a pharmaceutical sales representative with an unorthodox short-term solution.     

This episode is a condensed version of two episodes that originally aired in 2025.

Dan Weissmann Host and producer of <em>An Arm and a Leg</em>. Previously, Dan was a staff reporter for Marketplace and Chicago's WBEZ. His work also appears on <em>All Things Considered</em>, Marketplace, the BBC, <em>99% Invisible</em>, and <em>Reveal</em>, from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Credits

Emily Pisacreta Producer
Claire Davenport Producer
Adam Raymonda Audio wizard
Ellen Weiss Editor
Click to open the Transcript Transcript: Try These Tips When You Can’t Afford Your Rx

Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.

DAN: Hey there,

We are working on some big projects this summer. So this week we’re bringing back a story from last year — actually a series, condensed into one special episode. Here we go.

A while ago, I heard a story that I just couldn’t shake. It was about a guy named Cole Schmidtknecht.

In 2024, Cole went to a Walgreens in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he lived, to refill the medication he used to control his asthma. He’d been taking it for years, and he expected to pay about seventy bucks.

But — according to a lawsuit filed by Cole’s family — the pharmacy told him his insurance no longer covered the medicine. The price for him was going to be more than $500.

He didn’t have it. So he left without his medicine.

A few days later, he had a severe asthma attack. After days on life support, he died. He was 22 years old.

And of course, Cole is far from the only person to go without medicine because of the price tag. 

In a recent survey, four in ten people said that at some point in the last year, they hadn’t taken their medicine as prescribed because of the cost. 

Most people survive, but deciding between the medicine you need to be healthy and — other necessities– it’s not OK and way too common. We need systemic change. 

And in the meantime, we can definitely benefit from help navigating this chaotic, unfair landscape. 

Because Cole Schmidtknecht did not have to leave that pharmacy empty handed. He didn’t have to die.

In their lawsuit, Cole’s family says the pharmacist at Walgreens could have told him right then and there about comparable drugs his insurance would have covered.

That’s the kind of information we all need: when the price of our medicine is more than we can really pay, what alternatives do we have?

It turns out: we have a lot of them. They’re patches, workarounds, hacks. There’s no telling which one — if any — is going to work in any particular situation. 

But as Cole’s story makes painfully clear: we can’t count on anybody to give us the information we need right when we need it. 

Everybody needs a playbook. 

So last year, with your help, we produced one. A series of podcast episodes and newsletters. 

We started by asking you:  How have you managed when your prescriptions get really expensive? And of course we heard from a lot of you who have faced this problem: 

Rachel: We went to go pick up the prescription and we were like, holy moly, that is so expensive.

Sandra Maher: We’ve been given estimates of $30,000 a dose.

Marna Miller: The pharmacist would burst out laughing every time I showed up to pick up the prescription.

Dan: And then you told us what you did next — the strategies you tried, the workarounds you found, and the moments when sometimes, you actually won.

A lot of those moves, we already knew about. Some of them were new to us.

And the truth is, a playbook — a collection of possible workarounds — isn’t a solution. There may not be a great play for you in a given situation. 

And the best available play: It could still require more work, and persistence, and patience than is fair, or right.

But all of these strategies are worth knowing about. And reviewing sometimes. So we are bringing back everything we learned in that series– the whole Prescription Drug Playbook–  in one episode, today. 

You’ll hear from folks who come at this from lots of different – and honestly really surprising– angles. 

First up, our story about a listener named Bob.

Bob’s journey is going to help us show you — well, the journey. How the trial and error works. The obstacles.

And we’ll show you the strategies Bob worked to get through those obstacles. Including a tool he developed, that we’re gonna share with you.

And I’ve got some help telling Bob’s story. Our producer Claire Davenport did most of the reporting here. Hey, Claire!

Claire: Hi, Dan!

Dan: You’re gonna tell us Bob’s story, and then at some points, we’ll zoom out — like tour guides, pointing out the big lessons

Claire: Yes! I’m super excited to get into it.

Dan: Let’s go. 

This is An Arm and a Leg, a show about why health care costs so freaking much, and what we can maybe do about it. I’m Dan Weissmann — I’m a reporter, and I like a challenge. So the job we’ve chosen on this show is to take one of the most enraging, terrifying, depressing parts of American life, and bring you something entertaining, empowering, and useful.

Alright Claire, where should we start with Bob’s story?

Claire: First, let’s meet Bob. He’s got a very full house. 

Bob: Between me and my wife, we have five kids and uh, three dogs, and two cats and two lizards.

Claire: Did you ever anticipate you’d be a dad to so many?

Bob: Nobody plans to have many kids, Claire.

Dan: I like this guy.

Claire: By the way, Bob asked us just to use his first name for privacy reasons. But we’ve checked out his story — he sent us lots of documentation. Bob’s journey here begins in 2019 — the first day of high school for his daughter, Mary. After she got home, he wanted to hear how it went, so he called her.

Bob: We were talking and, I would say she’s being a little spacey, but, uh, talking to a 14-year-old on a cell phone, right? And, and I’ll never forget this, she, we were talking and all of a sudden she said, the ceiling looks so funny. And then, um, and then she was sort of gone.

Claire: At first, he assumed Mary had just set the phone down — maybe to talk with one of her sisters.

Bob: I text her mom and say, “Hey, I was talking to our oldest daughter, and, uh, she just sort of disappeared now she’s not answering the phone. Can you go check on her?”

And I still get even choked up talking about this. But, I get a text back in about two minutes saying “she’s unconscious.”

Claire: They end up calling an ambulance. Bob is scared.

Bob: All kinds of thoughts were running through my mind in terms of what could possibly have happened here. Epilepsy was not one of them.

Claire: Epilepsy. It’s a condition that causes seizures. And Mary was having one while her dad was on the phone with her.

Mary and her folks worked with a pediatric neurologist. They started trying out different medications and dosages.

Bob: We were told, we’re going to figure out what the right medications are for her. This is gonna be a process.

Claire: And it was. It took years of trial and error: they had to experiment with different drug combinations.

Finally they landed on the right mix. That mix included a drug called Clobazam.

Bob: And that seemed to be the magic bullet.

Claire: A magic bullet with a reasonable price tag.

Bob: The three drugs she was on were well under a hundred dollars for all three of them together and she went over a year without a seizure. And then I changed jobs.

Claire: Which had an unexpected consequence. As Bob learned when it was time to refill Mary’s prescription for Clobazam.

Bob was used to paying around 15 dollars.

Bob: This time the pharmacist comes out and says, “Hey, your, your Clobazam is gonna be $500.”

Claire: Ok, so…Dan, let’s take a step back. Bob changed jobs, and suddenly Mary’s Clobazam is $500. Because…

Dan: Bob’s new job meant… a new insurance plan for the family. And…

Claire: Every insurance plan has its own list of how much you pay for which drugs. And which drugs they don’t cover at all. That list is called “the formulary.”

Dan: That list, that formulary, is based in part on business deals that plans and drug-makers hash out behind closed doors.

Claire: So when you change jobs, change insurance: the difference between what’s on one formulary and what’s on the next: It can be…

Dan: unpredictable at best.

And even if you don’t change jobs, your job may change your insurance plan. That happens a lot.

Claire: And even if your insurance plan doesn’t change, that plan’s formulary can change from year to year.

Dan: So, Claire, this seems like the first big lesson from Bob’s story — the first big obstacle: The deal can change on you. 

And, you know, MAYBE, in this new deal, your insurance offers another drug they say is just as good.

But it may not be just as good for YOU. That’s a thing.

Claire: And it was definitely a thing for Bob and his daughter Mary. Remember, they had spent YEARS of trial and error, finding the perfect regimen.

Just switching to whatever random thing the insurance company approves? That’s not on the table.

So first, Bob thinks, hey maybe there was just some kind of mistake here. New insurance company, right? Maybe the pharmacy got confused. 

So Bob calls his insurance just to ask, and they’re like:

Bob: Oh, well that medication is only covered for a certain type of, of epilepsy

Claire: Which isn’t the type they think Mary has. They’re not gonna cover it. So, now we have arrived at the point where Bob busts out his first big strategy: Haggling with his insurance. They’ve said “no,” but that doesn’t mean he has to accept this as their final answer.

Dan: Yep, we heard from so many people — have heard over the years: This is a whole  dance, a whole fight.

Claire: Yep, and Bob’s gonna take us through it. In fact, in this very same phone call where his insurance company said they wouldn’t cover Mary’s Clobazam, they basically invited him to this dance. They said:

Bob: Well, there’s a prior authorization that can be filled out. We’ll send that to your doctor.

Dan: “There’s a prior authorization that can be filled out! We’ll send that to your doctor!” The way Bob says that, it sounds like the insurance person was so cheerful. Making things sound so easy.

But prior authorization…

Claire: That’s a hurdle, a hoop for Bob and Mary’s doctor to jump through.

Dan: This will be familiar to a lot of folks already, but: Prior authorization… PRIOR:

Claire: Before the insurance company will pay for Mary’s Clobazam,

Dan: They have to AUTHORIZE it.

Claire: her doctor has to make a case that she needs this particular treatment — and the insurance company has to decide the argument is good enough.

Dan: We see it all the time.

Claire: Yeah, and Bob isn’t thrilled by this requirement.

Bob: Seems unnecessary. This is a, you know, board certified pediatric neurologist who’s been seeing this patient for years.

Claire: And who took her through a whole long trial-and-error process to find the right meds.

Dan: Because of Bob’s confidentiality, his insurance company said they couldn’t respond directly to his story — fair enough. 

But a lot of the time, Insurance companies say: “Hey, we’re just discouraging waste with these prior authorizations! Sometimes doctors do just prescribe an expensive thing, when something cheaper would be just as good.” Okay.

But a lot of patients say, like Bob would: “In this case, my doctors and I had already DONE all this checking.”

Claire: Bob gets form sent in, but now he’s got another problem. The insurance company needs time to evaluate the prior authorization. And Mary needs her drugs right now.

Bob: She starts to panic a little bit of like, “Hey, I, I need my medication. If I miss a couple doses, I could have a seizure.”

Dan: That’s a bad problem.

Claire: Luckily: Bob found a way to get Mary’s Clobazam for less than five hundred dollars a week. We’ll get into that a little later.

But for now, just to note: It’s lucky he found that workaround.

Because when Bob calls to check on the prior authorization– PA for short– Well, here’s how he says the conversation went…

Bob: ‘Yes, we got the PA information. It was denied.’

‘It was denied? What, uh, why was it denied?’

‘Oh, well, again, it looks like it’s only approved for this one particular type of epilepsy.’

Claire: Which was just what they’d said before. Bob gets ready to appeal.

And he says this is getting to him. When we talked, he mentioned a lesson from this show:

Bob: I think you guys recommend this of like not losing your cool with the customer service people, in the insurance companies.

Dan: I mean, we do. Everybody says: It really helps.

Claire: And everybody knows. It’s not actually always possible. Here’s what happened the next time Bob calls his insurance.

Bob: They asked me, “oh, how’s your daughter doing?” And I just remember saying like, “She’s terrified. She’s gonna be walking to class and have a seizure because she doesn’t have the medication. So don’t give me this BS about how’s my daughter doing.”

Dan: You know, Bob seems like a pretty level-headed guy. Also — we’ve kind of withheld this until now– but Claire, you told me Bob works in health care, so he knows a little more about this world than most of us do. Insurance, appeals. He’s got the advantage, in terms of keeping his cool, of not being in totally foreign terrain.

Claire: Yep, and he says he recovered his cool pretty quickly.

Bob: I pulled back at when I realized what I was doing. Like this isn’t this person’s fault. They’re just probably reading a script.

Dan: But this is kind of the lesson here: No matter what kind of advantages you have, this stuff is so frustrating. Anybody can lose their cool. 

The key — and maybe we should do a whole show on this — is recovering. Because you’re gonna have to get up and go again.

Claire: Yeah, and we’re just getting to the most frustrating part.

Dan: Right.

Claire: After more than a month– and two rounds of appeals– Bob says Mary’s Clobazam finally gets approved.

Dan: And this is the frustrating part because…

Claire: Insurance will cover it now. But they tell him his share is going to be $150.  Remember, Bob said under his old insurance, it used to only cost $15.

Bob: So 10 times the price now, plus the price you know, of the other medications she’s on.

Dan: Yep. All this waiting, all this fighting, everything. And it’s still ten times more than he used to pay under his old insurance.

Claire: It’s less bad– this insurance was originally gonna make him pay more than 500 bucks. But yeah. Not great.

Dan: But Claire: this is not the end of Bob’s story, right?

Claire: Not even close.

Bob: What this sparked us to do is to look at, okay, well, if it’s not going to get approved, what are the other options?

Claire: now he’s going to work a whole different strategy: Ignoring his insurance. Because there can be better deals elsewhere. Bob starts with GoodRx.

Dan: Lots of people know GoodRx — it’s a website where you tell them what drug you need, and they’ll show you deals — discounts — at local pharmacies. Which does not always work. Saving 50 percent on drug that costs a thousand dollars does not make it affordable. I know people who get mad when you mention GoodRx.

Claire: Bob had heard of it – but didn’t think it was for  people like him, who had insurance.

Bob: like I almost, and this is gonna sound crazy, but I almost thought of GoodRx as like Medicaid. Like, I think I thought of it as like, oh, well that’s what you use if you don’t have insurance.

Dan: Interesting! And in one sense, he wasn’t wrong: When you use a GoodRx discount, you can’t use your insurance too. But it turns out, even when you have insurance, GoodRx can be worth looking at.

Claire: Yes, and here’s what makes Bob’s story stand out — the reason we wanted to really dig in. It’s what he did next. Because he didn’t just look at GoodRx. He started exploring a whole world of options. Actually, worlds. One is the world of sites LIKE GoodRx.

Dan: Ooh, I’m googling “sites like GoodRx” — here’s SingleCare, RxSaver, BuzzRx…

Claire: Yep, and for any given drug, each of these sites may show you different prices. So now that he was looking at this world, he started mapping it out.

Bob: I created this spreadsheet that had each of those options, the different medications and then the different pharmacies and where we could kind of get the best price for things.

Claire: And: Once Bob started looking at THIS outside-insurance world, he started exploring others. Like Cost Plus Drugs.

Bob: And –What was really sort of eye-opening to me is they did so much better than our insurance company did.

Claire: So the company’s full name is Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs — named after its founder, the celebrity billionaire.  But what makes the company different isn’t the glam factor, it’s the business model. The company buys meds direct from manufacturers, and adds 15 percent to their wholesale cost.

Dan: Plus shipping fees, and five bucks for “pharmacy labor”.

Claire: Bob added CostPlus to his spreadsheet. And he liked what he saw.

Bob: It’s very transparent and super low cost.

Claire: He asked Mary’s doctor to transfer two of her prescriptions.

Dan: But not all of them. Cost Plus doesn’t carry everything. For one thing, they mostly only carry generic drugs.

Claire: And — what matters in Bob’s case: they don’t carry controlled substances. Nobody sells them online because it’s illegal to ship them. And Mary’s Clobazam? It’s a type of controlled substance: They’re called Benzos.

Dan: Like Valium and Xanax.

Claire: Yeah. So for Clobazam, the best price he can find is 85 bucks, using GoodRx at Walmart.

Dan: Which is a LOT less than his insurance was gonna have him pay. Go spreadsheet! Head to WalMart, use GoodRx there.

Claire: Just one thing: as Mary headed off to college a few years later — she discovered there was no Walmart right nearby. And Mary doesn’t drive.

Bob: Well, she has epilepsy. She can’t have a driver’s license, so it’s uh, she can’t drive anywhere. Right? We had a Walmart near our house at home. I’m two and a half hours away from her.

Claire: And he says he made the drive.

Dan: Dad of the decade. For ALL of this. Bob fought down the insurance companies. He shopped around. He made the spreadsheets. And he made a bunch of round trips to his daughter’s college.

Claire: Yeah, Bob rules. But he’s not exactly happy about all of it.

Bob: I pay an insurance company every month outta my paycheck for prescription drug benefit that I don’t feel like I get, right? Like I’m having to go outside of that in order to get them the medications that are nothing special. Like, Clobazam has been on the market since like the seventies.

Dan: Yeah, fair.

Claire: But he may be game to take the win on that Dad of the Decade award.

Bob: I would say I did a magnificent job of, you know, staying, staying calm, and hiding that stress from Mary.

Mary: I assumed he was gonna figure it out. Um.. [laughs]

Bob: Total confidence in me, right? [laughs]

Mary: I did! I mean, I did, right? 

Dan: That’s Mary?

Claire: That’s her.

Dan: OK, so let’s review these lessons: Yes, you can fight your insurance, but you may get a better deal going outside of it. All of which sucks — this was a LOT of work, and not a total victory — but it’s better than NOT knowing any of this.

Claire: Yes. And this story ends up going full circle. Back to the first lesson. The deal can change on you. For worse. Or for better. Bob changed jobs again recently — so, new insurance. And actually, it’s good this time! Under Bob’s new insurance, Mary’s Clobazam is back to 15 dollars. Which she learned recently when she went to go pick it up.

Mary: I was like, this is amazing. Definitely a weight lifted off my chest when I saw a two digit number.  It was not like that a couple years ago and it is reassuring to know, like, if I show up and it’s $150, there are places that would have a price I could actually afford. 

Dan: Now let’s take that glass half full and add a little bit to it. Because in addition to their story, Bob gave us one more thing: His spreadsheet. And we’ve been adding to it.

Claire: Yep. We’ve got a template you can download — it’s in the show notes for this episode, and it’s in our First Aid Kit newsletter. And in addition to GoodRx, and some similar sites, and CostPlus, we’re adding lines where you can log prices from a world Bob didn’t explore.

Dan: I mean, he’s just one guy.

Claire: So, one thing we’re adding: ordering from pharmacies outside the U.S.

Drug prices are lower basically everywhere else, and some pharmacies in Canada will ship to the U.S. To avoid shady internet stuff, a tool called Pharmacy Checker will steer you to ones that are above board.

Dan: Another addition: Manufacturer coupons. SOMETIMES, especially with brand-name drugs, pharma companies offer coupons that can make drugs more affordable.

Claire: Yeah, and there’s a lot of caveats with those too. 

DAN: Claire, thank you so much! 

Claire:  My pleasure.

Dan: Just ahead – we’ll dive into some tips that really surprised us, from folks who do this kind of thing for a living.

.

<<<<<BREAK>>>>

 

Dan: This episode of An Arm and A Leg is produced in partnership with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News — that’s a nonprofit newsroom covering health issues in America. Their journalists do amazing work. We are honored to be their colleagues. 

DAN: OK, now on to tips from professionals.  

Let’s start with Jeanne Chamberlain… Jeanne’s from North Carolina. And she regularly talks with folks who take like 15 different meds every day.

Jeanne Chamberlin: You are like, oh my gosh. And literally the retail costs are $20,000 a month.

Dan: Jeanne’s an expert, twice over. Since retiring from a career managing hospitals and medical groups, she’s been helping her fellow seniors figure out how to manage what they pay for health care — as a county-level volunteer coordinator for a program called SHIP.

Jeanne: And SHIP stands for Seniors Health Insurance Information Program.

Dan: Actually in some cases it stands for State Health Insurance Assistance Program. Whatever you wanna call it — It’s a federally funded program that helps seniors with all things Medicare. Every state has its own version of SHIP. During the busy season — that’s in the fall, when people can pick new insurance for the coming year– Jeanne says she and her team speak to more than a hundred people a week.

And one thing that comes up in basically ALL of those conversations is this question: Can I change things to get my meds for less next year?

Jeanne says one year, her team added up the impact of those conversations, and half of the people ended up changing plans, and on average, they saved 300 dollars a person. Not bad…

Jeanne: But there were many, many people who saved a thousand, 2,000, even $10,000 by changing from one Medicare plan to another based entirely on the cost of their drugs.

Dan: Jeanne wrote to tell us about what she knows from helping people enroll in Medicare. But she also had an instructive personal story to share. Because even experts have to scramble sometimes.

A while ago, when Jeanne’s husband had a gut infection, he got prescribed two antibiotics. His insurance coverage meant one was gonna cost him thirty bucks. But the other one? His plan didn’t cover it. And… 

Jeanne: It was $1,200. For a 14 day supply. It was just obscenely expensive.

Dan: So immediately, Jeanne says she went into problem solving mode. And her order of operations provides a great template for any of us.

Step one: Google for discounts. Just taking a quick first pass at the kind of thing we talked about with Bob’s story. Maybe that’s GoodRx. Maybe that’s a coupon from the drug maker. 

Results for Jeanne: Not great.

Jeanne: I could get it down to $800. It’s like, still, you’re like $800. Really?

Dan: So, on to step two: Tell your provider there’s a problem and ask for advice.

Jeanne: We went back to the doctor and said, “Is there something else that, you know, you can do?”

Dan: Jeanne was thinking: Maybe the doc could recommend another antibiotic — one that insurance would cover. Or maybe the doc could help them fight her husband’s insurance company to get this drug covered. But actually, this doctor’s proposal was much simpler.

Jeanne: She said, “Well,  just take the other one.”

Dan: Just take the one Jeanne’s husband could get for thirty bucks. Skip the second drug.

Jeanne: So he did, and he was fine!

Dan: END OF STORY. In this case. It’s not always that easy. But the moral is: ASK. If your insurance covers a different drug, your doc can tell you if it’s a good bet for you. If not… well… we’ll come back to other ways your doc could help.

But right now let’s move on to the biggest, most valuable advice Jeanne gives to seniors– and that applies to everybody.

Especially anybody with meds they’re taking long term, like blood pressure or cholesterol meds, or whatever.

And the advice is this: Look ahead, every year.

In the fall, when it’s time to sign up for next year’s insurance plan: Get a look at the formulary. That’s the list Bob had to learn about the hard way: which drugs your insurance will cover, and how much they expect you to pay for them.

So, Bob changed jobs — new insurance, new formulary. But even if you don’t change anything about your insurance, your insurance could change their formulary. 

Jeanne sees it all the time with seniors, like when their plans reboot at New Year’s.

Jeanne: When people come in in January and this happens every year, and say, “I just went to the pharmacy and they want $300 for my medicine. And last year, or last month in December, it was $30.” 

Dan: These folks didn’t plan to change anything about their insurance — but their insurance plan changed things on them– and stopped covering a drug they’ve been taking. Now they’re getting charged sticker price. And Jeanne’s like, “Man, I wish you’d have come to see us during the fall sign-up– open enrollment.”

Jeanne: We could have probably found a plan that covered that drug still.

Dan: And look, it’s true that folks on Medicare tend to have more choices than the rest of us here. In Medicare, drug coverage is its own separate plan — it’s called Part D — and seniors in Jeanne’s county for instance have more than a dozen plans to pick from.

If you get insurance from work — and maybe there’s just one plan — this thing of looking ahead is maybe even more important.

At some point, maybe a couple months before the new year, you should get a chance to see that next year’s formulary. Like when they’re telling you you’re covered for next year.

And it could say, “Hey, your drug is gonna be more expensive for you next year.” That’s your cue to start problem-solving right away. Get a plan in place before that new price kicks in.

This is exactly the advice I wish somebody had given Cole Schmidtnect — he showed up at Walgreens expecting to pay 70 bucks for his asthma meds in JANUARY. But the formulary on his insurance had changed when the new year started. 

He had no warning those same meds would be 500 bucks — and didn’t know he had any alternatives.  

So Jeanne and other experts say: get the news early, so you can get a plan going.

Step one: Check: Can you find discounts online that make this drug affordable? Okay, cool. No? Time to get in touch with your provider’s office: start tapping their expertise.

Jeanne: The provider normally has a lot of people with your condition and probably prescribes this medication a lot.

Dan: And so, if your insurance company says they’ve got some other drug you could take, one they’ll pay for– your provider will know: could that drug work for you? And if you’ve got a choice of insurance plans — but they all require prior authorization — that process Bob spent so long fighting through — Jeanne says to ask your provider: Is one of those insurance companies more likely to actually issue that approval?

Jeanne: Ask them about a plan where they have an easy time getting it approved for somebody with your condition where it always goes through.

Dan: And that’s the plan you want to pick. And, speaking of getting your insurance company’s approval:

We’re about to move from Jeanne’s advice – plan ahead, get your provider to help — to the next step. Because you can’t plan everything. Sometimes you get sick, with something new. No planning for that.

And sometimes, your insurance is definitely not gonna say yes right away to the drug your doctor thinks you need. And your doctor thinks you need this particular drug. So, how ELSE can your provider help? 

Well, it’s time to meet our next expert. Unlike Jeanne, who spends her days just trying to help folks in her community, John is, well..

John: I work for an industry with an approval rating below Congress.

Dan: He’s a pharmaceutical sales rep! He asked us to keep his full name and employer confidential. He’s also an Arm and a Leg fan.

John: I love it when, uh, I hear stories of average people just sticking it to the insurance company. It’s nice when the patient wins, cause they don’t get a lot of wins.

Dan: We reached John in his primary office — also known as his car. When we asked listeners a few months ago to share lessons about getting prescription meds without paying an arm and a leg, he wrote right in with tips. And one, I love just for the attitude. Here’s John reading from the email he sent us:

John: Step therapies. Uh, denials and price at pharmacy should be viewed as suggestions.

Dan: Suggestions. Perfect. The other is much more specific. As a salesman, a big part of John’s job is prepping doctors for the fights they’re gonna have with insurance companies, to get approvals for drugs. He does that because approvals for them mean sales for John.

Of course, approvals take time.

John: But one thing that you know doesn’t care about time is diseases. The disease of Crohn’s or Bipolar disorder, whatever, isn’t like, look, I’ll hold off on affecting you until this prior authorization is done.

Dan: So here’s John’s advice: while you’re fighting for that approval– pushing back on the insurance company’s “suggestion” that you try something else– Ask your provider if they can get free samples from the pharma company — from a rep like him.

John: And the provider hopefully will say, yeah, let me call the rep and we’ll leave some at front for you.

Dan: Actually, your provider may already have some on hand. A study from a few years ago found that TWO THIRDS of primary-care practices had CLOSETS of pharmaceutical samples. Which, wow.

So, let’s address something big: Like John joked about as we introduced him, pharma sales reps are NOT generally looked upon as model citizens.

The rap is: Some of them use less-than-scrupulous tactics to encourage doctors to prescribe expensive drugs… even to patients who might not get extra benefit from a specific drug. Or, in the case of opioids — which got pushed really hard — might cause harm. And free samples are part of that process.

So, some providers won’t meet with sales reps at all. Some health systems don’t allow any of their staff to meet with them.

But you don’t have to approve of how pharmaceutical companies do their business to take advantage of John’s suggestion. And neither does your doctor.

John says, to get free samples, your doctor might not even need to talk to anyone.

They can just make a request online, at the manufacturer’s website. John says it definitely happens.

John: So even with providers or doctors that I’ve never seen in my nine years, I know that they’ve gotten samples before.

Dan: But here too, there will be limits.

John: Some manufacturers don’t even do samples. So it really varies a lot.

Dan: But a lot of these samples do exist — And the idea of using them as a stopgap while you fight to get your insurance to pay for the meds you need — I had never thought of it until we asked you, our listeners, for your tips.

Dan: OK, here’s another tip I hadn’t really considered, from another expert.  Like Jeanne, who we heard from earlier. Cristy Gupton also lives in North Carolina. She works as an independent employee benefits designer. You’re probably like, what the hell is that? Here’s how she describes her work.

Cristy Gupton: Imagine you’re a kid in high school, in shop class, and your teacher puts an old engine on the table, and says, take it apart and put it back together again and make sure it works.

Dan: Except, the machine is a health benefit program for workers. And– back to the shop-class metaphor — Cristy says she’s the real gear-head in the room .

Cristy Gupton: By the time I put the engine back together, it works twice as good, but at half the cost.

Dan: Cristy says she does it by ditching expensive, off-the-shelf parts — standard insurance policies from big companies — for custom solutions. It’s a WHOLE THING, and super-interesting, and worth going into.

For now, she’s got one big tip that *some* of us could use to get access to meds at super-low prices. Basically it’s this: Look for a community health center that offers a sliding scale. They can get drugs at extremely low prices, through a federal program called 340B. How low?

Cristy Gupton: The drug Humira is one of the most prescribed drugs in America. And the list price is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 a month. But a 340B covered entity could purchase it for a penny.

Dan: So we checked, and actually: Humira’s list price isn’t 5,000 dollars. It’s 7,000 dollars. But YES, a 340B clinic can get it for a penny. Now, they don’t get every drug that cheap, but the Humira example suggests this 340b thing is worth knowing about.  And before I get you too excited: it’s also definitely not guaranteed to work for you. Partly because 340B is complicated in all kinds of ways. Here’s my colleague Emily Pisacreta asking Cristy about it.

Emily: Help me understand what 340B is.

Cristy Gupton: I’ll give you my best, um, like only know enough to be dangerous answer.

Dan: After checking some actual experts, here’s what we think you need to know: A federal law from the 1990s — section 340B of that law — basically requires drug-makers to give some hospitals and health centers that serve low-income folks super-duper discounts on meds. Those discounts don’t always get passed along to patients. The feds say hospitals and clinics can take a profit, to subsidize their other work .

But the rules say: community health centers DO need to make drugs affordable to people with lower incomes. Specifically, to people who make less than two times the federal poverty level.

For 2025, that’s just over 64 thousand dollars for a family of four. Not a lot.

But it’s a lot of people: More than 28 percent of Americans qualify. And some clinics may have sliding scales for people with higher incomes than that.

So: There’s a search tool. We’ve got a link wherever you’re listening to this. Find a clinic in your area, call them, and see what the deal is.

One last thing to know: You’ve gotta actually be a patient at the clinic in order to use this program. And actually, if you meet the income requirements, all the clinic’s services are gonna be super-subidized.

But if you don’t want to engage too deeply with the clinic– don’t want to switch over all your care to a new team — Cristy says, in her experience, you may not have to.

Cristy Gupton: It can be as loose as they just have a virtual visit. I mean, that’s pretty simple.

Dan: Again, we’ve got a link to the search tool for finding a health center near you. Which of course…near you… not everybody is gonna have. Your mileage may vary, literally. But is it worth checking? Yeah, I think so.

OK we’ve thrown a LOT at you. I know, I know. And we do have one more set of expert tips. From someone we are really glad to have met. So here’s Erika — she didn’t get her employer’s OK to talk to us so we’re just using her first name – and her expertise is part of a lifelong project.

Erika: You know, as a child with Type one diabetes, I had a very dysfunctional household and I had to take care of myself from a very young age. I have learned that the skills that I developed as a child with a chronic illness are transferable into a career to help people be taken care of.

Dan: So now, she works as a patient navigator– a kind of case worker, at a hospital in rural Oregon. When my colleague Emily talked with Erika, they bonded a little.

Emily: I live with type one diabetes and I really wish that I had had a patient navigator, um, when I was diagnosed.

Erika: Yeah, I wish I had me as a patient navigator too.

Dan: Most of the patients Erika does work with are managing chronic conditions and other serious health problems, under tough circumstances.

Erika: For example, let’s say a patient has an amputation and they’re told on discharge to keep it elevated and keep it clean. Well if they’re living in their car, that can be a challenge. So in that case, case management would try to find them a hotel for a couple weeks.

Dan: And of course, one of the most common problems she tackles: helping people get their meds at prices they can afford.

Erika: There are weeks where that’s all I’ll do.

Dan: For insured patients, Erika he starts with drugs-and-insurance 101: Helping them figure out which drugs their insurance covers, at what price to them, and coaching them before they call their insurance company.

Erika: I offer to be on the call with them if they want. And I will tell you right now that we’re gonna be on hold with that insurance company for 30 minutes.

Dan: Yeah, that sounds familiar. Also, for some patients on Medicaid, Erika runs interference with bureaucracies.

And, when there’s no way that insurance will make the right drugs affordable for her patients– including folks with no insurance at all– Erika helps them explore one of the options she wrote in to us about.

“Patient Assistance Programs” based on income. Some are from manufacturers, others come from private foundations.

Erika: It’s such a matter of somebody knowing who to ask and where to get the stuff.

Dan: And there are websites to find this kind of thing — we’ve got links and guides for you — and she says the applications aren’t complicated. But the people she works with, they need extra help.

Erika: A lot of my patients don’t even know how to use a computer or to get onto the internet, or they don’t have smart phones, they just have cell phones. So a lot of them, I meet with them. I take my laptop, and we do an online application. I help them fill it out.

Dan: And then hope it works. Some programs only give out so much assistance per year, so not everybody gets help.

Erika: It’s a frustrating fight. I feel bad that people have to wage this, you know, to get what they need to be healthy. It’s, it’s not like people are asking for a BMW or new clothing. People are asking for, oftentimes medications they need to keep themselves alive. It’s, it’s like asking for oxygen. Like what if you were told you you couldn’t afford oxygen? That’s the way people feel sometimes.

Dan: And that’s why, even though Erika wrote to us about practical specifics, it’s her approach, her presence that we especially wanted to share with you.

Erika: I advised all my patients to get a tattoo that says, be persistent. I mean, seriously, I don’t expect them to get tattoos. But as a patient who manages a chronic condition, you just have to be.

Dan: Oh yeah. The ongoing burden of dealing with all this, it’s a bear. And it came up again and again when you wrote in to us.

Erika: Yeah. Stress management, whew.

Dan: For Erika’s patients, and for herself too.

Erika: I have to remember to like, stop, step away, do some breathing. And these are things I teach to my patients a little bit too. Like, okay, let’s stop and do some breathing together on the phone. Okay.

Dan: She calls her strategy “self compassion.” It’s about helping people see how much they’re already doing.

Erika: I encourage people to take a moment and appreciate that about yourself. Okay? you’ve been on the phone with your insurance company for 30 minutes.

You’re trying to get this done. You really need to appreciate that you’re doing that for your health. For your health. Feel good about that, at least.

Dan: You are taking time to listen to this podcast. We are here, right now, together, doing our best.

For the practical lessons — all the things to try, that may or may not work — we’ve done our best to write them down for you, and organize them so they’re useful, in our First Aid Kit newsletter. Four installments.

You can find those newsletters at Arm and a Leg show, dot com, slash, drugs.

Arm and a Leg show dot com, slash drugs. There’ll be a link wherever you’re listening to this.

We’ll be back with a new episode in a few weeks.

Till next time, take care of yourself.

This episode of An Arm and a Leg was produced by Emily Pisacreta and Claire Davenport with help from me, Dan Weissmann, and Lauren Gould, and edited by Ellen Weiss.

Adam Raymonda is our audio wizard.

Our music is by Dave Weiner and Blue Dot Sessions.

Sarah Ballema is our operations manager.

Bea Bosco is our consulting director of operations.

An Arm and a Leg is produced in partnership with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. That’s a national newsroom producing in-depth journalism about health issues in America — and a core program at KFF: an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Zach Dyer is senior audio producer at Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. He’s the editorial liaison to this show.

An Arm and a Leg is Distributed by KUOW — Seattle’s NPR station.

And thanks to the Institute for Nonprofit News for serving as our fiscal sponsor.

They allow us to accept tax-exempt donations. You can learn more about INN at .

Finally, thank you to everybody who supports this show financially. You can join in any time at Arm and a Leg show, dot com, slash: support.


An Arm and a Leg is a co-production of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and Public Road Productions.

For more from the team at An Arm and a Leg, subscribe to its weekly newsletter,Ìý. You can also follow the show on ,Ìý,Ìý, and . And if you’ve got stories to tell about the healthcare system, the producers would love to .

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2251049
Democrats Keep Healthcare at the Fore /podcast/what-the-health-451-democrats-obamacare-midterms-rfk-vaccines-june-18-2026/ Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:13:26 +0000 /?p=2249718&post_type=podcast&preview_id=2249718 The Host
Julie Rovner photo
Julie Rovner Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl 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.

Senate Democrats hope a little-used law from the 1990s will help draw attention to the healthcare cost issue by forcing a vote on the Trump administration’s recent changes to the Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is demanding information from a medical journal that retracted a study that backed Kennedy’s claims of vaccine harm.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, Anna Edney of Bloomberg News, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Anna Edney photo
Anna Edney Bloomberg News
Sheryl Gay Stolberg photo
Sheryl Gay Stolberg The New York Times
Lauren Weber photo
Lauren Weber The Washington Post

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • As the midterm elections approach, congressional Democrats are pushing back on newly finalized guidelines from the Trump administration for ACA plans. The guidelines allow the sale of plans with fewer benefits and bigger deductibles next year, further eroding protections designed to keep healthcare affordable. With many voters concerned about the cost of care, Democrats’ push could prove a potent campaign message come November.
  • State officials in Texas and Alabama are continuing to crack down on abortion access. And new reporting reveals a trend of women going to great lengths to seek abortion care only to learn that their home pregnancy test results were false positives and they’re not pregnant.
  • Two medical journals recently retracted separate studies that linked vaccines to harmful health problems, with Kennedy pushing back. And legal action over Kennedy’s reconstituted vaccine panel and its decisions is leaving the nation without traditional outside expert input into seasonal vaccines as the flu season approaches — though the American Academy of Pediatrics has pointed out that Kennedy could resolve the legal issues by simply appointing experts to the panel with vaccine backgrounds, as statute dictates.

Also this week, Rovner interviews Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute and Liz Fowler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about their joint effort pushing for the elimination of the employer health insurance tax exclusion. You can read their .

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

Julie Rovner: Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Trump Bought Tobacco Stocks and Raked In Industry Donations as FDA Eased Standards,” by Darius Tahir.  

Sheryl Gay Stolberg: Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Tennessee Pharmacies Sell Potent Ivermectin, Led by Anti-Vaccine Doctor Who’s Taken ‘Bucketloads,’” by Brett Kelman and Rachana Pradhan. 

Anna Edney: Politico Magazine’s “,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly. 

Lauren Weber: The Atlantic’s “,” by Benjamin Mazer.

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

  • Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Democrats Seek To Spotlight Rising Health Costs by Forcing Vote on Trump Regulation,” by Julie Appleby.
  • The New York Times’ “,” by Reed Abelson.
  • MedPage Today’s “,” by Jennifer Henderson.
  • The Alabama Reflector’s “,” by Anna Barrett.
  • HuffPost’s “,” by Alanna Vagianos.
  • The Daily Signal’s “,” by Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell.
  • The New York Times’ “,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
  • The New York Times’ “,” by Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett.
Click to open the transcript Transcript: Democrats Keep Healthcare at the Fore

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

Julie Rovner: Julie, hello from Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and WAMU Public Radio in Washington, D.C. Welcome to What the Health? I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. And, as always, I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters covering Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, June 18, 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 Lauren Weber of The Washington Post. 

Lauren Weber: Hello, hello. 

Rovner: Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times. 

Sheryl Gay Stolberg: Hi, Julie. 

Rovner: And Anna Edney of Bloomberg News. 

Anna Edney: Hello. 

Rovner: Later in this episode, we’ll have my interview with Michael Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute and Liz Fowler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Michael and Liz, who are on opposite sides of most things in the health debate, are jointly promoting the idea of eliminating, or at least scaling back, the employer health insurance tax exclusion that underpins much of the U.S. healthcare system but also drives up health spending. But first, this week’s news. 

Let’s start this week on Capitol Hill, where Democrats in the Senate say they plan to use the Congressional Review Act to force a vote to disapprove the Trump administration’s Affordable Care Act payment rule that was finalized in May. For those who haven’t been paying close attention, this is the rule for next year’s plans. It includes things like allowing non-network plans that could open policyholders to unlimited out-of-pocket spending, or else possibly no available providers of care in their area, as well as new catastrophic policies with lower premiums but deductibles well into the five figures. 

The CRA is a handy tool for Congress. It allows the minority to force a vote on the floor and only requires a simple majority of both houses to pass. Few rules are actually canceled using this procedure, but it does allow members of Congress to highlight an issue, in this case playing into Democrats’ desire to keep one of their best midterm electoral issues, healthcare, front and center. So, will this succeed at getting attention, even if it ultimately doesn’t cancel the rule? Or is there just too much else going on right now? I have to say, I haven’t seen a lot of coverage of this other than from my colleague Julie Appleby. Bless her heart for bringing this story to everybody’s attention. 

Stolberg: I think that by November this will resonate. We’re in a situation now where costs are rising, gas costs are going up, and they may go down if this Iran deal goes through, but healthcare and the cost of care is always an issue for Americans. It’s long been an issue that Democrats have led on. I actually find it interesting. What [President Donald] Trump is trying to do really kind of undercuts the very premise of Obamacare, which was to offer kind of a baseline level of care, to require that plans gave people a baseline level of care. You know, come November, it’s going to be just after the enrollment period of October, and I think Democrats are going to be talking about this. And then, it might not resonate or break through now, but they will point back to this vote in this moment. 

Edney: Yeah. I was going to say that I do think it’s possible by then. I think you were right to say that right now it’s hard for things to break through, but by the midterms we may see, as a direct result of this, people losing coverage. And I think that coverage losses â€” or deciding not to have coverage any longer, because it’s too expensive. So, I do think that coverage losses, whether it’s in the ACA marketplace or Medicaid, are going to be a big campaign issue. And if Democrats can point to this vote as a direct line to We support you having your coverage and Republicans don’t, that could be something that breaks through to those potentially millions of people who no longer have care. 

Rovner: Yeah, last week I described this as the drip, drip, drip of declining coverage, which is that we sort of keep seeing these things bit by bit. Rather than sort of one dramatic, Oh my goodness, I can’t afford my coverage and I’m going to drop it, we’re seeing people scrambling to try and keep coverage, or to buy down to have less expensive plans with bigger deductibles. And then, once they start to seek care, they’ll realize they can’t handle those deductibles. So it’s happening in pieces rather than all at once. 

Well, speaking of that Affordable Care Act rule, props to the eagle-eyed Reed Abelson, your colleague at The New York Times, Sheryl, for spotting a little-noticed piece of the rule that allows insurers to offer loans to patients who can’t immediately come up with those multi-thousand-dollar deductibles should they need medical care. Now, this is not a new idea. Overall, veterinarians have long offered payment plans to pet owners, as have health practitioners, whose services are often not covered by insurance, like cosmetic surgeons. But for necessary medical care, it seems like loading patients with still more medical debt seems like a less-than-popular solution to high healthcare costs. Or is that just me? Lauren. 

Weber: I mean,  was a blockbuster, and also just horrifying. And what kind of dystopian future are we all in? Instead of paying your premiums, you’re also paying your payment plan to the same people. It’s already been said enough that there’s some concern that health insurance plans are gobbling up so many parts of the healthcare market. You wonder what happens when they also become essentially your mortgage broker. And so I think the story deserves a lot more attention, because I think a lot of Americans would be quite terrified if they realized that is potentially the future. 

Edney: And it seems like the point should be to make coverage more affordable, not to find new ways for you to pay the same really high amounts. 

Stolberg: I just was going to say I thought it was interesting that Reed pointed out that roughly a third of Americans have some kind of medical debt, and she linked to an analysis, a  in HealthAffairs, about medical debt and collections being very common and large. 

Rovner: Yeah, I’m just noting the irony of Republicans deciding to come out against Big Insurance, and yet this â€” talk about own goals, going against exactly what you’re saying. Let’s make Big Insurance less popular by having people owe money on a payment plan, have a credit card to pay their insurance company back for things that their insurance company basically isn’t covering anymore. Yes, presumably with interest, so Big Insurance will make even more money. 

Well, moving on, it’s been a busy week on the reproductive health front. In Texas, the state’s Republican platform includes a plank calling for women who have abortions to be held criminally liable for murder after another Texas anti-abortion group fought unsuccessfully to have it removed. , the attorney general’s office is sending cease-and-desist letters to out-of-state organizations that offer abortion pills via telehealth. The letters say the companies, including some well-known ones like Plan C and Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, must stop all advertising, sale, and delivery of pills to Alabama residents or face potential legal action, including fines of $2,000 per violation. On the other hand, one former abortion provider in the state pointed out that the letters themselves act as an advertisement for the various services that otherwise people might not know anybody about, or where they are. Is this just performative? Or do we think there are going to be real efforts to reach distributors outside states with abortion bans, despite shield laws in the states where those distributors are actually located. 

Weber: It’s probably a mix of both, right? I think that some of it is for press coverage. I did find the former abortion provider saying this is a giant billboard for all these products to be somewhat quite the comment to be made. But it’s true. If you live in Alabama and you went to this woman who is an abortion advocate, she could not tell you where to look these things up online, and now there’s a plethora of media coverage and attorney general’s letters that lead you right to the source. 

Rovner: With their addresses. 

Weber: With their addresses. With their web addresses. And so— 

Rovner: That’s right. 

Weber: It’s an interesting move on all counts. I think it’s just a one and another. I think I don’t think we’re going to just see this from Alabama. 

Stolberg: Yeah, I was going to say this is part of a broader assault by the anti-abortion movement on abortion medication, and in particular mifepristone. And my colleague Pam Belluck and I  about this lawsuit that was brought by the state of Louisiana, which instead of targeting the manufacturers of the pill, they want courts to bar a policy allowing abortion providers to provide or prescribe mifepristone and send it through the mail. This was the policy of the Biden administration’s FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. The Trump administration has said, We’re studying this issue. That study seems to be going on a very long time. Some people suggest it will go on past the midterms, so— 

Rovner: That seems to be the strategy. 

Stolberg: Right. But nonetheless, now that Roe [v. Wade] is gone and states regulate abortion, we are seeing this kind of clash between states about what can happen from one state to another, and I think this is part of that. 

Rovner: Yeah, and as we’ve pointed out multiple times in multiple ways, anti-abortion groups are furious that the administration has not rolled back this ability to send these pills through the mail, because that is why I think we’re seeing less backlash to some of these bans than we would have otherwise, because a lot of these bans are fairly easily evadable by going, having a telehealth appointment with a doctor in another state and getting the pills in the mail. And there’s very little that the ban states, as we’ve discovered, can do to stop it. So they’re sort of trying everything, including these cease-and-desist letters. But this is clearly a fight that’s going to go on unless and until the administration steps in or the courts step in. And we’re, I guess, at this point waiting on both. 

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has a truly  about women who get positive home pregnancy tests, arrange to travel or take time off from their jobs to get an abortion, only to discover once they get to the clinic that they weren’t actually pregnant at all. It seems most of the false positives are coming from the same brand, Clearblue. And it’s not that the tests are wrong as much as they appear to be too sensitive, likely picking up pregnancies that either end themselves before they’re fully established or picking up the hormone that the tests detect from sources other than an active pregnancy. The most chilling part of the story is at the very end, with one doctor wondering how many women are doing telehealth abortions with pills who were never actually pregnant to begin with. It seems that do-it-yourself healthcare maybe isn’t as foolproof as we’ve made it out to be? 

Weber: I think the story, just â€” first off, everyone should read it, because it’s an incredible deep dive. She managed to uncover multiple complaints that physicians who provide abortion had made to the FDA, which appear to have been undealt with, and it speaks to the tragedy of some of these people that take time out of their day, raise money, travel across state borders to potentially try to end their pregnancy, and realize they don’t have a pregnancy at all, and the emotional trauma of that. But more than anything it speaks to the fact that as abortion rules have become more restrictive, you need to know if you are pregnant earlier than ever, so that’s why a lot of these people are taking these pregnancy tests. And the fact that this is so sensitive, the article does posit that it could be picking up pregnancies that are called chemical pregnancies, which don’t end up becoming actual pregnancies. But the point is that usually if you wanted to go check that, you would go to a doctor and they would check your blood levels and see if they were rising. But a lot of women are afraid to do that in this current environment. And so I feel like it’s a big story of unintended consequences and horror that has unfolded as some of these pregnancy tests are not accurate. 

Rovner: Yeah, and in some cases there are multiple cases. Go ahead, Sheryl. 

Stolberg: Lauren’s words, “unintended consequences,” were just what I was about to say. This is part of a whole panoply of things that were not foreseen by anyone, really, when Roe was overturned. A couple years ago I went to Idaho  how OB-GYNs, especially those who dealt with complicated pregnancies, were fleeing the state because of the restrictive abortion rules. And that was leading family practice doctors, like one I featured, without help in caring for patients with complicated pregnancies. And that, too, is sort of an unintended consequence. And when we were talking before about the abortion pill being sent across state lines, yes, you can evade the bans that way, but it still leaves women without medical care, without follow-up care should something go awry. So a lot of things happened, have flowed from the Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] case that we didn’t think about at the beginning. 

Rovner: Yeah, one of the things that I’ve written about is it’s not just OB-GYNs who are leaving states or not going to states in the first place, choosing not to do residencies there. 

Stolberg: Right. 

Rovner: But it’s other doctors who are not going to some of the states with bans, because doctors who finish their medical school and residencies tend to be of reproductive age. And they are women, or if they are men and have spouses and want to start families, they’re worried about being in states that don’t have enough doctors if there’s a difficult pregnancy. We’re talking about people who want to get pregnant being a little bit concerned about going to states with abortion bans, because so many of the doctors who would deal with difficult pregnancies have left. So it’s just, it spins out and out and out and out. 

Well, finally, in something from the Trump administration that will please anti-abortion forces, a new grant announcement for a George W. Bush-era program promoting the adoption of frozen embryos left over from IVF [in vitro fertilization] refers to them as, quote, “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” Is this formal announcement the quiet beginning of this administration’s effort to establish fetal personhood in federal law? Or is it just another way to pacify pro-lifers who are still angry over the other administration policies we were just talking about that they don’t like so much? 

Stolberg: Huh. That’s interesting. 

Rovner: Sheryl, you probably remember the “snowflake babies” from the Bush administration. 

Stolberg: OK, I’m actually the person who  on the front page of The New York Times, and then suddenly snowflake babies and their parents were appearing at the White House and on Capitol Hill, it was a group called— 

Rovner: Remind younger people who these snowflake babies are. 

Stolberg: So, there was a group called â€” this was at a time when we were talking about excess embryos left over from in vitro fertilization and what should happen with them, and— 

Rovner: And whether they should be allowed to be used for stem cell research. 

Stolberg: Right. That’s exactly right. And whether they should be allowed to be used for stem cell research. And there was a group called Nightlight Christian Adoptions. They’re a Christian adoption agency, and they had come up with another way, they said, in which infertile couples were literally adopting embryos that were left over from other people’s pregnancy effort attempts. And this was a solution for deeply religious people who did believe that life begins with the embryo and did not want to destroy their embryos and also did not want to have to pay in perpetuity for them to be housed in a lab somewhere. And they called them snowflake babies. And so this is something that George Bush talked about and became enshrined in, I guess, his administration. And, I don’t know. I guess Trump is looking back 20-some-odd years or so, reviving the past. 

Rovner: Well, there has been, there â€” it’s a program that has continued. 

Stolberg: Right. 

Rovner: And there were some adopted embryos even during the Biden administration. But I guess the question that sort of comes up now is, by describing them as already children— 

Stolberg: Yeah. Are they laying the groundwork for this? 

Rovner: â€”are they setting â€” yes, are they laying the legal groundwork? Lauren, you wanted to add something. 

Stolberg: Maybe. 

Weber: I was just curious. Does this lay the legal groundwork that any leftover embryo would then qualify for this program? What if you didn’t want your leftover embryo to go through this? I’m curious. The regulation seems a little unclear. 

Stolberg: I think parents retain the right. Parents retain the right to, they are in essence the property â€” I don’t like to use that word, but â€” 

Rovner: I think legally, though, that’s what they are. 

Stolberg: And legally, embryos created by an infertile couple belong to that couple. And in fact we’ve seen, and my colleague Caroline Kitchener  a lawsuit between a husband and wife who divorced and the woman wanted to implant the embryo and the man did not. And the question was, who quote-unquote “owned” the embryo. But I think that personhood question is really interesting, Julie, and maybe it does establish, in a way, a government recognition of embryos as people that is unprecedented. 

Rovner: Yeah, that’s certainly the concern, that it’s sort of taking it one step further. All right, we’re going to take a quick break. We will be right back. 

We are back. And speaking of issues the administration is trying to tiptoe around, let’s turn to vaccine policy. Last month, the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health announced it was retracting a 2010 study that linked the hepatitis B vaccine to an increased risk of autism, because, and I’m quoting here, “due to fundamental methodological flaws the study’s conclusions are unsound.” That was one of the studies cited by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked advisory committee to change the recommendations for the birth dose of the hep B vaccine. Separately, the journal Toxicology Reports retracted a 2021 study that claimed a link between vaccines and sudden infant death syndrome, also citing methodological errors â€” which is typical, by the way, for why studies are retracted. Yet that retraction led Secretary Kennedy to write a letter to the journal demanding to know why and giving the journal’s editor a deadline of June 26 to respond. What is Secretary Kennedy trying to accomplish here? And will it work or is it just coming off as bullying? 

Edney: I think certainly it’s coming off a little bit as bullying in the sense that this was a decision that the journal made about something that â€” clearly this happens, because it happened with this other study. I think that in Secretary Kennedy â€” and Sheryl, you’ve written about this, and others â€” he does still have a vaccine agenda, whether he’s allowed, or an anti-vaccine agenda, whether he’s allowed to talk— 

Rovner: We’ll get to that in a moment. 

Edney: â€”or not. So I think when he makes these requests, he’s kind of trying to sow doubt into what these other doubts the journal is bringing out. 

Rovner: Lauren, you want to say something. 

Weber: Yeah, I just, I think in general, this is a pattern of actions by Kennedy that several experts have described to me as somewhat hypocritical. He’s attempting to bully a medical journal. He had a big thing about all information should be free during covid, no one should be silenced. And here he is using his platform to potentially change things on that front. And then he also recently issued a quarantine order for someone with hantavirus to stay in Nebraska, which flies in the face of a lot of his “medical freedom” rhetoric during covid. And so I think some of these moves are really interesting because they seem to strike at a contradiction in a lot of the rhetoric he espoused before coming into office. And even on top of the vaccine of it all, I just, I think that’s important context to consider. 

Rovner: And Sheryl, we spent some time last week talking about  about the secretary. But anything you would like to add, please do. 

Stolberg: Yes. I think this is not at all out of character for the secretary. The secretary has long believed that the established medical journals are censoring what he views as legitimate research, i.e. research into the alleged harms of vaccines. And even before he became secretary, when he was running for president, he laid out a very clear agenda in which he said he was going to use government science to lay the groundwork for research that could be used in court against pharmaceutical makers, vaccine makers, and he was also going to take on the medical journals. And in the aftermath of covid, what we saw was also this sort of alternative ecosystem of medical journals growing up, published by these covid contrarian doctors, the Independent Medical Alliance, and other groups. So it wasn’t surprising to me at all that Kennedy went on the offensive against a journal that retracted a study, because he and his allies have long complained that these journals are censoring them. When journals find fault with research that Kennedy likes or supports his views, he doesn’t want to hear about that. 

Rovner: Well, separately, or perhaps not so separately, the Justice Department, on Kennedy’s behalf, is asking for an expedited appeal of a lower-court ruling that found his changes to the childhood vaccine schedule to be, quote, “arbitrary and capricious” and his handpicked vaccine advisory committee members unqualified for their posts. The administration is arguing that because the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] is currently frozen, the administration can’t act on new vaccines for this fall, including for things like flu, RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], and covid. The , meanwhile, which brought the lawsuit that got the changes stayed, argues that Kennedy can reconstitute ACIP anytime he wants, as long as he follows the federal advisory committee rules and appoints members with vaccine expertise. How might this standoff get resolved? Or does this standoff need to be resolved? There are arguments the FDA has already approved a vaccine for this fall. Insurers have already said they’re going to cover it. So is this, speaking of things that are performative, also performative? 

Stolberg: That’s â€” I think we’re in uncharted territory, Julie. In the past, the CDC’s [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] vaccine advisory committee has met well in advance of every upcoming fall, the flu season, to discuss vaccines to protect the American public and kind of issue their recommendations, which guide what insurers cover. And as a result of this lawsuit, we’re in a place where kind of everything is going on without that central pillar that backs up these decisions. So insurance companies are saying, Yeah, we’ll cover, and the FDA is saying, Yeah, we’ll approve, but there are no experts, outside experts, really thinking through what the right policy is. So, I suppose— 

Rovner: Technically there’s not even an acting director of the CDC, right? Because it went on too long? 

Stolberg: That’s right. 

Rovner: Or is that — so Jay Bhattacharya— 

Stolberg: Well, Jay Bhattacharya is functioning as the acting director but technically he is not the acting director. He is acting in the capacity of director or something like that? 

Rovner: I believe that is the phrase. 

Weber: Who needs senior leadership? 

Rovner: Yeah. It’s all very weird, so— 

Weber: They’re all gone. 

Stolberg: I think it’s a question of, can the government function without this? Yes. Is the government doing the best work for the American people without this system in place? You know, probably not. 

Rovner: Well, meanwhile, more quietly, since the White House ordered Kennedy to back off his more public anti-vaccine efforts, it appears that things are still happening, just a bit more out of public view. Both  and now  are reporting new efforts to study possible ill effects of vaccines at the CDC, the NIH [National institutes of Health], and elsewhere in the department. Quoting from the Washington Post story, by Lena Sun and our podcast panelist Rachel Roubein: “Kennedy’s allies are embedding his agenda in institutions that decide what gets studied, who does vaccine research and how these findings are translated into policy. This could keep the Trump administration’s questioning of vaccines’ safety alive for years to come,” close quote. Could these changes have an even longer-term impact than some of RFK Jr.’s sort of splashier actions that we were just talking about, that could be more easily overturned by an incoming administration? 

Weber: I think absolutely, Julie. I think at the end of the day, too, some of what my colleagues Rachel and Lena found was that they are exploring adding new members to ACIP, that they’re also exploring adding a new Office of Science in the CDC. What does that mean? If is that an Office of Science that Kennedy agrees with? Or is that an Office of Science? These are the questions one has to ask. And then, what kind of long-term ramifications are there for that? Many public health experts say that this continued back-and-forth on vaccines just leaves a lot of people confused and will likely contribute to lower vaccination rates, which could contribute to the continuous rise of preventable, vaccine-preventable, disease. And so there’s a lot of concern that some of this groundwork that’s being laid to underpin some of Kennedy’s long-held beliefs could have a very, very long tail. 

Rovner: Yeah, and of course we’re already seeing cases, not just measles spreading but whooping cough and the kinds of diseases that are preventable with vaccines that people are now not getting for their kids. 

Well, finally this week, two amazing stories related to HHS but not of HHS. One is from The New York Times’ Christina Jewett and Kenneth Vogel, and it’s a  into how lobbying has helped keep the potentially dangerous supplement kratom, if not on pharmacy shelves everywhere, then at least in gas stations and convenience stores around the country. This story has lots of twists and turns over several presidential administrations, but it does seem that Trump 2.0 has been welcoming, shall we say, to the kratom industry, which has in turn given lots of campaign contributions to the administration and its allies. Anna, I see you nodding. 

Edney: Yeah, I loved the story. I thought it was really well done. And, like you said, lots of twists and turns. And there was a really great quote, and I’m not looking at it, but it was along the lines of this being kind of a coin-operated policymaking administration. So, like, you’re â€” if you give enough money. That’s why we’re seeing it’s not your typical, like, Big Pharma putting a lot of lobbying in, right? It’s kratom, it’s flavored vapes, things that kind of you might have considered on the fringes bubbling up to hit. Even the president’s talking about them, and at press conferences that are completely unrelated. So I think that it was a great look at how this industry really kind of got into the administration, and in their view, in the industry view, it’s like, Listen, we’re just paying to be at the table, and we’ve never really been at the table before. But pretty much anyone who can bend the presidency, or someone in his administration, seems to be able to make these inroads that we haven’t seen before, when the product is not proven safe and has been shown to harm people and cause, lead to death. 

Rovner: Yeah. Sheryl, you wanted to add something. 

Stolberg: Yeah. So I was going to say, I lived through this story by my colleagues Ken Vogel and Christina Jewett, and props to them. We’ve been talking about this for a while. I noticed a while back, when  the MAHA [Make America Health Again] movement and Trump, that this company called Botanic Tonics had kind of donated like a million dollars to the MAHA PAC: And I thought: “What is this? Why are these people donating a million dollars to this PAC? Who are they? What is kratom?” And it turned out that my colleague Ken Vogel and also Christina Jewett were kind of already onto this. And the thing that they found to me that was so amazing is that not only this company and the promoters of kratom, which is kind of like an addictive gas station drug â€” it supposedly boosts energy â€” not only were they cultivating Kennedy, but also Markwayne Mullin, who now leads the Homeland Security Department but formerly was a senator, had an investment worth as much as a million dollars in this company, the company of Botanic Tonics. The company’s founder was an energy executive in Mullin’s home state. He’s this odd guy who I think had some sort of brush with the law and changed his name, and it was just this kind of crazy story of influence, like Anna said, kind of, or maybe you said, Julie, on the fringes but coming to the fore. 

Rovner: Yeah, and the original sin here, I think, and someday we’ll go into a deep dive on this, was the 1994 fight in Congress about dietary supplements and— 

Stolberg: The DSHEA [the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act]. Yes. 

Rover: Right. 

Stolberg: And I’ve thought a lot about this. That has created kind of the, what critics call, the wellness industrial complex, which allows these companies to sell things that are supplements as food, which means they are not regulated as stringently as drugs, can only be regulated after they come to market. And a lot of shady stuff is sold as a result. 

Rovner: Yeah, as I say, it goes back a lot of administrations. All right. Well, finally this week, my other story, and this is my extra credit this week. It’s the second blockbuster in the last three weeks for my Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News colleague Darius Tahir about President Trump’s stock trading. The previous one was about the prescription drug industry. This one is about tobacco. It seems that the teetotaling commander in chief is fine with other legal vices, that he holds more than $1.6 million in stock in tobacco giant Philip Morris, as well as positions in Altria and other tobacco companies. The tobacco industry has been good to him, too, giving millions to Trump-affiliated super PACs. And what has the administration given back? Quoting from the story: “It’s FDA piloted a fast-track program to approve nicotine pouches. It unveiled a program to allow vapes on the market more rapidly, despite resistance from career civil servants and leadership, culminating this year in guidance waving through flavored electronic cigarettes. It cut public health employees focusing on anti-tobacco policy. And it broadened enforcement against illicit e-cigarette, competitors to the big industry players with a financial relationship to Trump,” close quote. This is a big difference from the first Trump administration when it comes to tobacco, isn’t it? My recollection is that they were not quite this welcoming to tobacco from 2017 to 2020. Anna, I see you nodding. 

Edney: Yeah. 

Rovner: You did some work on this. 

Edney: Yeah, well, this was when, the first Trump administration was when Scott Gottlieb was the FDA commissioner, and he was quite anti-tobacco. And we went through this whole scare about kids getting some strange lung disease from vaping. And there were a lot more restrictions that â€” and less approvals, or clearances, whatever you want to call the tobacco side of FDA. So, I think it’s been a complete turnaround, where this time around the Trump White House would prefer to run roughshod over the FDA and get what they want for the tobacco industry, because they’re getting a lot of money from them. 

Rovner: Yeah, and props to Darius for connecting all of the dots. Lauren, you want to add something? 

Weber: Yeah. Let’s go back to  about Trump meeting over cheeseburgers with the tobacco guys at the White House. I think Darius’ piece lays out the money that maybe is hanging out there. But props to Darius for having two of these quite good stories looking at these conflicts of interest. 

Stolberg: Yes, during the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, Alex Azar, his health secretary, pressed Trump to take some sort of action restricting vaping, and Trump got really mad at Azar about it, and he complained privately and yelled at Azar, saying to him, You’re costing me votes, because the MAGA crowd likes vaping. This was recounted in a book. I’m pretty sure it was Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s book, the two Washington Post reporters. So, Trump was, maybe he wasn’t this aggressive in supporting the tobacco industry, but then there’s this added component to it, which is that he thinks MAGA [the Make America Great Again movement] likes vaping. And he was yelling at Azar, saying: You’re costing me votes. You’re going to cost me this election. I’m sorry I ever did this. 

Rovner: Oh, we will see how this one plays out. All right, that’s this week’s news. Now, we’ll play my interview with Michael Cannon and Liz Fowler, and then we’ll come back and do our extra credits. 

I am pleased to welcome to the podcast two people who have taught me a lot over my years covering health policy. And full disclosure, I consider both of them friends. Liz Fowler is a distinguished scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. During the Biden administration, she ran the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, an agency created by the Affordable Care Act, which she helped write as the chief health counsel on the Senate Finance Committee and implement as a senior official in the Obama administration. Michael Cannon is the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank here in Washington, D.C., and has spent most of the past 16 years trying to get the Affordable Care Act repealed after vehemently and almost successfully blocking its passage. Yet this unlikely pair is on a new mission, pointing out why the first step in the next round of health reform should be to get rid of something called the employer health insurance tax exclusion, which we will explain in a minute. Liz and Michael, welcome. Thanks for doing this. 

Liz Fowler: Thanks for having us. 

Michael Cannon: Thanks for having me. 

Rovner: So for most people this would be a hard question, but you guys have been on the circuit, so one of you give me the 30-second explanation of what the employer tax exclusion is and why it exists in the first place. 

Cannon: So when Congress passed the income tax in 1913, there was no such thing as health insurance, really. So they gave no thought to the question of if an employer provides health insurance to its employees, should that be subject to the tax. The Treasury bureaucrats, when someone presented that idea, said: This is really hard. We don’t know. We’ll just say we’ll exclude that from the tax base, so we won’t tax compensation in the form of employee health insurance. That was in the 1920s. In the 1940s â€” so that gave employer health insurance a boost. In the 1940s there were wage and price controls that gave it a further boost, because employer health insurance was exempt from those wage controls, so it gave employers a way to compete. But it’s really that tax exclusion that is responsible for the fact that more than half of U.S. residents have health insurance through an employer, because it works like this: If your employer gives you a dollar of cash, you have to pay federal income and payroll taxes on that, and you’re left with, on average, at the margin, 66 cents. The federal government takes a third of it. But if the employer gives you that same dollar as health insurance, then you get a dollar’s worth of health insurance. So you can see how this sort of distorts the prices, the after-tax prices that people face, when they’re choosing between more cash wages and spending that money on other things versus spending money on health insurance, employer-sponsored health insurance. And so people more often buy employer-sponsored health insurance, they demand more of it than they would otherwise, and this also lets employers end up controlling about, for the average family with employer coverage, $20,000 of the worker’s earnings. And all of these effects end up increasing spending on employer-sponsored insurance and increasing prices for health insurance, and the fact that it’s encouraging a form of insurance that disappears when you change jobs means it’s creating gaps in health insurance coverage. So, for decades, economists have said: Hey, this is a real problem. We need to solve this. And I would argue that it is really the reason that Congress wanted to enact the Affordable Care Act in the first place, to fill some of the gaps that this exclusion created. 

Rovner: So, Liz, originally this was considered a good idea. It’s like, Oh, we’re encouraging the creation of a new fringe benefit for workers: health insurance. When did it outlive its usefulness? 

Fowler: That’s a great question. I think our workforce is very different. Employment is very different than it was back in the 1940s and ’50s, when my parents or grandparents had the same job for decades and they all got health insurance through their workplace. That has eroded over time. I don’t know exactly, Michael probably knows exactly, what the trajectory has been. We’re now down to about 50% of employees receiving healthcare through their workplace. But people are employed in different ways than they used to. I’ve had several jobs throughout the course of my career. People don’t stay in the same job for decades anymore. And people piece together work in ways that they didn’t. Maybe they have more than one job. Maybe they have a part-time job over here and a part-time job over there. This tying health coverage to employment, I think, has become, is starting to become, anachronistic. And I think for me, in particular, watching the debate over HR1 [congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act] and trying to tie Medicaid coverage to employment or community engagement brought up this whole question of: Why do we tie health benefits to work in 2026? 

And so that’s part of why I wanted to revisit this policy question, which we tried to tackle in the Affordable Care Act and didn’t get very far. And the sort of the distorted version that we included in the law, the “Cadillac tax,” was repealed with a bipartisan â€” what, almost unanimous â€” vote. So I think it’s time to sort of ask these questions again. It’s a very expensive part of the tax code. It’s one of the largest if not the largest tax expenditure in the U.S. tax code, to â€” what â€” close to upwards of $300 billion a year that this benefit provides to a group of workers who are more likely to get health coverage and more likely to get generous health coverage, and at the higher end of the income scale more likely to see a larger benefit. So all of these questions, I think, are ripe for revisiting. 

Rovner: So one of my most vivid memories from covering the Affordable Care Act was a roundtable hearing that the Senate Finance Committee had with all of these economists from across the spectrum talking about how to pay for the Affordable Care Act. And I remember â€” I actually went and looked this back up â€” one of the senators asked what would be the best way to pay for it And one by one by one, these witnesses, eminent health economists from literally every part of the political spectrum, says you need to do something about the employer tax exclusion, literally every one. And obviously, as you said, Liz, they tried. There was sort of the beginnings of this that we called the Cadillac tax, and it was ultimately repealed. Why is this so hard if it, as you guys point out, it doesn’t make very much sense anymore? 

Cannon: Well, it creates a lot of benefits for a lot of very powerful groups. It benefits the health industry because the government is effectively penalizing workers for every dollar of their earnings that they don’t spend on health insurance and medical care. It benefits large employers because they can spread the administrative costs of providing health insurance over a larger number of workers, which means they can take the savings and offer higher salaries than their smaller competitors do, which gives them an advantage in the labor market. So between those two groups right there, you have a very powerful coalition that has blocked, defanged, repealed every effort to try to limit or reform the exclusion, and there have been a lot. Presidents [Ronald] Reagan, [Bill] Clinton, Bush the younger, [Barack] Obama. Presidential candidate John McCain famously tried to reform the tax exclusion, and Barack Obama really, I would say, demagogued that that proposal. I didn’t favor that proposal either, but McCain’s policy director says he still has nightmares about the attack ads that Obama ran. And it’s because of the fear those â€” it’s not just that people have a financial interest in preserving this huge tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. It’s the fear that those special interest groups are able to demagogue, to play upon that people with employer-sponsored health insurance who have expensive medical conditions will lose their coverage and be left with nothing. 

Now I am not a fan of the Affordable Care Act, or what I now call Obamacare. We’ve discussed this. Liz and I do not see eye to eye on that one. I would repeal it tomorrow if I could. But if it is in place, then it actually helps with that problem. It helps with this fear that people would, if we reform the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance, that people will lose their coverage. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that employer coverage will stick around for the vast majority of workers, but for those for whom it does not, the Obamacare exchanges are there as a sort of safety net, so that should make the politics a little bit easier. 

Rovner: So, obviously, the Cadillac tax didn’t work. What would be a step that would, that possibly could happen, that we could take to start to move away from this? 

Fowler: Well, one of the things that we initially tried to do in the Senate Finance Committee, in an early version of the Affordable Care Act, was to cap the exclusion. So you can say above the 80th percentile, or the 85th percentile, or something lower â€” below that will still exclude it from income. But if you get very generous coverage, very expensive coverage, we’ll start to— 

Rovner: Like Cadillac-type coverage? 

Fowler: Well, but the difference is we’ll include that as income for the worker. I think that’s where we ran into problems and political challenges. I think there was some reluctance to tax individuals, and Oh, that looks like a new tax increase. So the Cadillac tax was, OK, let’s instead put that tax on employers and insurers instead of the workers, and that became very unpopular with, as you can imagine, the employers and the insurers. So it makes sense why it’s been a tortured history and it’s been hard to get done. I think one of the reasons, and Michael talked about this, why it was a little bit scary to go down this road in the past, because you didn’t know where people would get their health coverage if you tried to change the employer structure we have now. But now there is a place. There are marketplaces. And the bigger that risk pool, and the more people are part of it, I think the more affordable and the more stable it becomes over the long run. 

Additionally, I’m not sure employers want to stay in this business. I think it’s becoming very unsustainable to continue to provide very costly insurance that, where the cost is rising at quite a rapid pace, certainly higher than wages, and is eating more and more of a household’s income over time. And so I think if we really lift up the hood and start looking at the potential impacts, the opportunities, the options, the policy options on the table, and have an honest debate about what this could look like, I think there would be more openness perhaps now than there was back in 2010. 

Rovner: Well, thank you both for kicking this off. Michael Cannon. Liz Fowler. This was great. 

OK, we’re back. It’s time for our extra credit segment. That’s where we each recognize a story we read this week we think you should read, too. Don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. I’ve already done mine this week. Anna, why don’t you go next? 

Edney: Sure. Mine is in Politico Magazine. One of the co-authors is our podcast colleague Alice Miranda Olstein. It’s “.” And I thought it was a really smart look at something Trump had said, again talking about things he did in his first administration, that we could end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by 2030 and put policies in place to try to get there. And Alice and her colleague talked to a lot of top former administration people to look at what happened, and it seems to be not one single lightning bolt but sort of that there were all these other policies around Trump 2.0 that â€”DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] and other things that cut a lot of this type of funding â€” that created this situation we’re in now, where no one, except maybe Trump himself, thinks we’re going to meet that 2030 goal. 

Rovner: Yeah, a lot of differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, as we’ve been discussing. Sheryl. 

Stolberg: So my extra credit is “Tennessee Pharmacies Sell Potent Ivermectin, Led by Anti-Vaccine Doctor Who’s Taken ‘Bucketloads.’” And this appears in Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. It’s by Brett Kelman and Rachana Pradhan. And what I love about this story is it talks about how ivermectin, this drug that actually is a Nobel Prize-winning, generally safe drug approved for treating parasitic diseases in humans, has become kind of this ideological touchstone in our society. And it started during the covid pandemic. And now we’re seeing where people on the right and other influencers were pushing it as a treatment for covid without evidence that it worked, and in fact despite FDA warnings that taking too much of it could cause harm. And now it’s sold over the counter in Tennessee, and Marjorie Taylor Greene was promoting it as a treatment for hantavirus, and— 

Rovner: Which it’s not. 

Stolberg: Which it’s not. Exactly. And it’s just sort of taken on this life in our culture, and I guess I just feel like this story sort of reflects something about this cultural moment and how we are addressing medicine and healthcare as a society, 

Rovner: Indeed. Lauren. 

Weber: So I chose a story titled “,” by Benjamin Mazer in The Atlantic. And it posits this basically interesting thesis, which is that a lot of these chatbots that people use, and even doctors use, are not really regulated by the FDA, and so you kind of are interacting with AI in any sort of healthcare setting, whether you know it or like it or not, and whether those tools are up to snuff or not. And the ending of the article is really the most alarming, because it basically is like: Is this like Uber and Lyft, where Uber and Lyft just disrupted the market so much that we all had to get on board without regulating it more, and that that’s what could happen to hospitals? And I think it’s a really interesting and fascinating question of: What is the role of government regulation when it comes to these AI tools being used in a hospital setting? And are they anywhere near equipped to catch up with what’s going on right now? 

Rovner: Yeah, it’s a really thoughtful piece. All right. That is this week’s show. Thanks to our editor, Emmarie Huetteman, and our producer-engineer, Francis Ying. We also had production help this week from Taylor Cook. A reminder: What the Health? is available on WAMU platforms, the NPR app, and wherever you get your podcasts, as well as, of course, kffhealthnews.org. Also, as always, you can email us your questions or comments. We’re at whatthehealth@kff.org, or you can find me still on X, , and on Bluesky, . Sheryl, where are you on social media these days? 

Stolberg: I am @SherylNYT  and . 

Rovner: Anna. 

Edney: @annaedney  and . 

Rovner: Lauren. 

Weber: @LaurenWeberHP â€” the HP is for “health policy” —  and . 

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

Credits

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Taylor Cook Audio producer
Emmarie Huetteman Editor

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Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/podcast/what-the-health-451-democrats-obamacare-midterms-rfk-vaccines-june-18-2026/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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Democrats Seek To Spotlight Rising Health Costs by Forcing Vote on Trump Regulation /insurance/aca-payment-parameters-rule-congressional-review-act-resolutions-democrats/ Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2251059 In a move that mixes pure politics with weedy congressional procedures, Senate Democrats are seeking to force a vote to overturn a Trump administration rule that they say will make it harder to enroll in Affordable Care Act health plans and sharply raise out-of-pocket costs for those who do stay covered.

The measure is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled Congress, but Democrats could use the vote against their opponents on the campaign trail.

When the ACA rule was released in May, the Trump administration as a means to combat enrollment fraud, lower premiums for some people, and offer a wider range of insurance plans, including ones with no set network of doctors or hospitals.

But many Democrats warned the changes would hurt consumers already suffering from high healthcare costs as well as higher prices for gas, groceries, and other household needs. Estimates from the administration found the regulation, called a notice of benefit and payment parameters, could cause to lose ACA coverage.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon plan to introduce on Wednesday a to block the rule.

Baldwin told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News in a statement that the rule is “misguided” and said she was “committed to doing everything she can” to stop Republicans from “kicking Americans off their health care.”

The directive from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is an annual exercise that sets standards for ACA coverage during the coming year. Some of the changes in the finalized 2027 rule are technical, but many would affect consumers directly.

They include tighter income verification requirements. The rule also stipulates more eligibility checks on people applying outside of the normal annual enrollment period for such reasons as marriage, divorce, or loss of job-based coverage.

ACA plans themselves would look different too. Insurers would be able to offer some plans with 30% higher out-of-pocket limits (the amount consumers may have to pay each year in cost sharing such as copayments and deductibles), with a new ceiling as high as $15,600 for individual coverage or $31,200 for a family plan.

The Democrats’ effort to overturn the rule is the definition of a long shot; it would need a majority of votes in both the House and the Senate. But simply forcing a floor vote is likely to be seen as a win by the minority party.

“What Democrats are trying to do is get Republicans to vote on policies that would be unpopular if they rose to the level of public consciousness,” said Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Democrats want to showcase that they want to change these policies, even if don’t have the votes to accomplish it.”

Congress has authority under the review act — enacted as part of a larger law in 1996 — to overturn rules issued by federal agencies. such disapproval resolutions have passed, hundreds have been introduced, often mainly to draw attention to an issue.

It is one of the few levers a minority party has to force action on the floor of the Senate.

That’s because if only 30 senators sign a discharge petition to send the measure to the floor, the Democrats get a vote, without needing to go through a Republican-controlled committee or hold a hearing. A companion resolution is expected to be introduced in the House on June 17.

And there’s no doubt that Democrats will try to use any floor vote on health costs as a litmus test for Republicans in the November elections.

“Time and again Democrats have used Republican efforts to undermine the ACA to their political advantage in campaigns, and this year will be no different,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

Polls show that the GOP could be vulnerable if Democrats can convince voters their party would do better on health costs, which are a top concern among voters.

, for example, found that 73% of adults see healthcare costs as a very big problem for the country, leading both inflation and the federal budget deficit. KFF’s tracking polls have found healthcare costs to be a top concern, even among Make America Healthy Again supporters allied with President Donald Trump.

At least half of people who identify as MAHA voters say those health costs on their decision to vote and which party they support.

Medical costs in general typically rise faster than inflation, driven by increased hospital and doctor bills and use of drugs, devices, and other healthcare. That leads to higher costs for employers that offer health plans to their workers and for taxpayer-supported programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as higher premiums for insurance plans sold under the ACA. The consultancy PwC projects the cost to treat patients this year will , the highest in nearly two decades.

Higher premiums and lower subsidies also hit many ACA enrollees this year, with about 1.2 million fewer sign-ups than for 2025 as of January.

Costs “are a good Democratic talking point,” said Joseph Antos, a former government health official who is now a senior fellow emeritus at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “Trump was going to solve inflation, and instead, what do we have?”

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/insurance/aca-payment-parameters-rule-congressional-review-act-resolutions-democrats/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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They’re Uninsured After Obamacare Became Too Costly. And They’re Far From Alone. /insurance/uninsured-obamacare-affordable-care-act-aca-canceled-coverage-north-carolina/ Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2248771 SUGAR GROVE, N.C. — Year after year, Ross and Rebecca Tobiassen saw their healthcare costs rise, having relied on the Affordable Care Act for federally subsidized health insurance since its start in 2014. Year after year, the couple in western North Carolina kept their coverage, believing the peace of mind was worth the cost.

But in December, that changed. The Tobiassens decided to cancel their insurance when Rebecca saw the cost of their monthly premiums would jump from $130 to more than $550.

“It makes no sense,” she said. “It’s not worth it anymore.”

The couple own and are the only employees of a small auto shop just west of Appalachian State University in the North Carolina mountains. Rebecca worries about her husband, whose work as a mechanic can be dangerous. A spring once shot a metal ball joint into their garage wall like a gun. A heavy object crushed Ross’ thumb. In 2020, Ross became mostly blind in one eye after repeatedly getting metal shards in it and developing an infection in his cornea.

The Tobiassens are among the Americans who canceled their ACA coverage after Congress allowed enhanced tax credits that helped pay for insurance plans to expire at the end of 2025. The Tobiassens benefited from those tax credits — like expected to drop or be dropped from their coverage as the year progresses, unable to keep up with the higher costs.

Established by the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act during the covid pandemic, the expanded subsidies reduced monthly premiums for many families and prompted a tidal wave of new sign-ups, doubling ACA enrollment to .

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is expected to on how many people are no longer covered under the ACA, but an , citing Wakely Consulting Group research, showed enrollment could drop from over 22 million at the end of 2025 to as low as 16.5 million in 2026. 

In North Carolina, individual ACA sign-ups for 2026 were down 22% compared with the year before, a greater drop than any other state, amounting to a decrease of more than 213,000 people, . While the Tobiassens’ two teenage daughters remain on Medicaid, Rebecca said the new prices showed that the federal government doesn’t care about families like hers.

“We’ve known that you don’t care about us,” she said, “but you’re making it plain and simple now.”

Ross Tobiassen sits in a chair inside a home office. His wife Rebecca looks at him.
Ross Tobiassen became mostly blind in his left eye after repeatedly getting metal shards in it while at work in his auto shop and developing an infection in the cornea. (Andrew Jones/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

The couple’s insurance hadn’t helped them cover all their medical needs. When the pain from Ross’ eye infection worsened five years ago, Rebecca insisted he go to a specialist, who told them that fixing the eye through cornea replacement surgery and require Ross to take six months off.

Ross chose a less expensive treatment to kill nerves in the eye instead.

The couple know they’re taking a risk by not being insured. If something were to happen, they could face an enormous medical bill.

Ross, 47, said the blindness in the one eye doesn’t significantly affect his job. He works long hours, sometimes into the night to keep up with demand.

“I try not to think about it too much,” he said. “I just work.”

Uninsured, With No Backup Plan, After Obamacare Became Unaffordable

Rebecca Tobiassen, 44  
Sugar Grove, North Carolina 

Rebecca Tobiassen owns a small auto repair shop with her husband, Ross, in the western North Carolina mountains. She says their family could no longer afford Affordable Care Act insurance after tax credits expired last year and their monthly premiums shot up from $130 to more than $550. They have no immediate plans to sign up for coverage elsewhere and are saving up for out-of-pocket expenses instead. “We just need to be able to afford to get help when we seriously hurt ourselves,” she said of the U.S. healthcare system. 

Katie Alexander oversees volunteers for Pisgah Legal Services, a western North Carolina nonprofit that helps low-income people secure health insurance. Alexander has helped North Carolina and Tennessee residents try to get ACA marketplace plans since Obamacare’s launch. She said she’s never seen anything like this year. 

Nearly 100 Pisgah clients, out of about 700 that Alexander’s team worked with during open enrollment, decided to drop insurance this year, and many others chose cheaper ACA plans with less coverage, Alexander said. 

Alexander said the people who have dropped their coverage include Lyft and Uber drivers. They’re trying to start their own businesses. They are artists and people who can work only part-time, because they’re chronically ill. Some are unable to get insurance through their employers, or they make too much to be on Medicaid.

“Even for folks who don’t have chronic illnesses,” Alexander said, “there’s just this nagging at the back of your mind, kind of constantly, of: ‘Don’t get hurt. Don’t get sick. Because you can’t afford that.’”

ACA premiums and deductibles steadily increased for years starting in 2022, then spiked during the enrollment period for 2026 plans, . The Tobiassens have seen every dip and rise in plan costs since 2014 when the plans launched. They joined immediately and paid about $30 a month, Rebecca Tobiassen said.  

“You actually felt like you were benefiting,” she said.

But through the years as the marketplace became more expensive, the couple made concessions, switching at one point from a silver plan — historically the — to a bronze. The plan mostly provided for the couple’s basic needs.

As they saw their deductibles and premiums rise over more than a decade, Rebecca feared the day would come when they could no longer afford even the cheapest plan.

“Plans are unaffordable, no matter how you cut it,” said , a healthcare policy researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. “It’s just who is shouldering the unaffordability.” 

Ross Tobiassen looks at supplies in his mechanic garage. A white SUV is parked behind him with its front hood popped open.
Ross Tobiassen built his auto shop, which he owns with his wife, next to his home on his property in western North Carolina. (Andrew Jones/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)
A sign for Ross Auto Repair, owned by Ross and Rebecca Tobiassen.
Ross Tobiassen says his job as a mechanic can be dangerous — he works late into the evenings sometimes to keep up with demand. (Andrew Jones/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

Gidwani and health economist , in a , found that most bronze plans, the cheapest ACA options for many, would be unaffordable without subsidies for the average person using the federal healthcare coverage.

Without subsidies, many families using these plans don’t make enough to afford premiums or deductibles, Gidwani’s research shows.

People who drop health insurance also change what’s known as the “risk pool,” Gidwani said, when a group of people share financial hazards. 

If healthier people drop out of the risk pool, fewer people subsidize the people who get sick, Gidwani said. That means premiums for the people who get sick will increase again in the future, she added.

“That becomes what we call a death spiral,” Gidwani said.

Even if the subsidies hadn’t expired, taxpayers would have borne an estimated over the next decade to cover them, Gidwani’s study noted.

After dropping coverage they’d relied on for 11 years, the Tobiassens have no plans to return to the ACA marketplace. They looked into alternative options through a faith-based healthcare organization but decided to go without.

For now, they don’t have a plan B. They’ve set aside some money for a medical emergency. And if their savings run out, Rebecca Tobiassen said, they have a couple of last resorts to lean on: credit cards or family members.

Are you struggling to afford your health insurance? Have you decided to forgo coverage? Click here to contact Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and share your story.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/insurance/uninsured-obamacare-affordable-care-act-aca-canceled-coverage-north-carolina/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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1 in 4 Covered California Enrollees Could Get State Aid Under Newsom Proposal /insurance/covered-california-aca-obamacare-insurance-premium-subsidies-affordability/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000 /?p=2246828
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When Congress allowed covid-era subsidies for health insurance to expire, California used its own funds to offset the hike in Obamacare premium costs for residents with low incomes.

But the reach has been limited.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom negotiates his last budget with the legislature, the Democrat wants to offer financial help to more than 1 in 4 enrollees in Covered California, the nation’s largest state-run health insurance marketplace. Democratic lawmakers, who hold a supermajority, are still debating the plan.

“My budget proposal would KEEP $0 monthly plans for low-income Californians to help clean up the financial disaster Trump created,” Newsom , where he often chides the president and GOP Congress.

have put up their own funds to keep Affordable Care Act plans affordable and residents insured as the rising cost of healthcare has emerged as a among voters. Newsom’s $300 million proposal would make California’s program among the most generous, but even the nation’s richest state can’t patch a left by the expiration of enhanced subsides at the end of last year.

“The gap between what people can pay in their monthly budget and what health insurance costs is so big that it’s a lot for states to take on,” said , a senior research fellow at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “They’re going to have to figure out how they can finance that.”

New Mexico lawmakers have of the lost federal subsidies with state money. It seems to have worked; New Mexico saw in marketplace enrollment this year, but state analysts that the subsidy program isn’t sustainable.

and , which, like California, tax residents , are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to keep premium payments low. Their hope, healthcare experts say, is to avoid the exodus seen in states such as Georgia that didn’t offer enrollees help.

Since the enhanced subsidies expired, have seen their premium payments increase by $65 a month on average.

Conservatives including have long argued that the subsidy expansion was too generous to high-income enrollees and .

“There are never enough subsidies to make health insurance affordable because subsidies are the problem,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “They are causing people to turn a blind eye to fraud and waste and excessive prices because it’s someone else’s money that they’re spending, not their own.”

Helping the Poorest?

People who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid got relief starting in January after Newsom and legislators softened the blow for about 300,000 of the lowest-income enrollees. They offset lost federal premium tax credits for individuals who last year and partially filled the gap for those who earned up to $25,823.

The governor now wants to expand subsidies to those who earn up to $31,920 this year for an individual and $66,000 for a family of four — an estimated 218,000 additional people.

Veronica and William Walter, who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, earn less than $40,000 a year in one of the nation’s most expensive regions. They’re counting on a more generous state healthcare tax credit if they have to pay for health insurance next year.

A woman sits at a dining room table.
Veronica Walter says she wouldn’t be able to afford the nearly $200 monthly premium for health insurance that she and her husband would likely pay on Covered California, even after a proposed expansion of state subsidies. (Christine Mai-Duc/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

A car accident two years ago left William temporarily disabled, qualifying the couple for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

Now he’s back at work as a security guard, and Veronica said she’s worried they’ll be kicked off Medi-Cal. She’s even more worried about how they’ll get by with federal premium tax credits not nearly as generous as before.

“Without it, we’re going to be facing worse problems than we have now,” she said. Under Newsom’s proposal, Veronica and others in the highest eligible income bracket could receive an average monthly subsidy of $36 a person.

“For them, $36 a month is the sort of thing that can make a difference between keeping coverage and losing coverage,” said Peter Lee, former executive director of Covered California. “We can’t fix everything with that gap, but we can focus the dollars on those who need it most.”

The Walter family, though, may still face a nearly $200 monthly premium payment to cover both of them, $130 more than they previously paid for healthcare and prescriptions through Covered California.

“I can’t afford that, not really,” said Veronica, a pet sitter who works part-time at a school. “A giant state like this with this many people, and this many resources? You can’t just leave the people with nothing for healthcare or healthcare they can’t afford.”

California policy researchers and health advocates acknowledge the limits of a partial subsidy but say that concentrating funds on those who earn less is the most efficient way to maximize impact. People who drop coverage are , healthier, and less likely to have high healthcare costs — all factors that help stabilize the insurance risk pool. Without coverage, Lee said, they’re also more likely to experience debt from medical emergencies or leave unpaid hospital bills that strain the .

Cary Sanders, senior policy director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, a health advocacy group, said the state’s move last year kept low-income enrollment in Covered California steady and reduced racial disparities in coverage.

“It’s working; it’s just that it’s not enough,” Sanders said. “We need the federal subsidies back.”

Still No Help for Many

When Congress passed enhanced subsidies in 2021, it capped monthly premium payments for even the highest earners at 8.5% of income. Those temporary enhancements allowed about 8 million Americans to choose robust plans with no monthly premium payment last year and helped double Obamacare enrollment to of 24 million.

At the end of last year, 22 million of them lost that help when the GOP-led Congress blocked the extension.

The pressures on Obamacare enrollees don’t stop at premiums. Federal legislation Republicans passed last summer known as the also shortens enrollment windows, tightens income verification requirements for subsidies, and requires enrollees who earn more than they projected to pay back the full amount.

Even if Newsom’s proposal passes, most Covered California customers won’t get state help. Nearly 1 million enrollees — 52% — earn above the $31,300-a-year individual earning cutoff.

Victoria Garzouzi was one of many middle-income retirees hit with one of the most extreme premium increases: The monthly payment for her low-level bronze plan jumped eightfold to $1,600.

To make ends meet, she came out of retirement and dipped into her savings. “I’m working to pay for my insurance,” she said. “I am an army of one.”

Despite a $6,000 deductible, her health insurance premium payment is more than the mortgage on her two-bedroom house. She’s putting off a needed cataract surgery until October, when she turns 65 and qualifies for Medicare.

While GOP leaders have not publicly weighed in on the state subsidies, some Democratic lawmakers have questioned why more help hasn’t been proposed.

Assembly member Dawn Addis, who chairs the chamber’s budget subcommittee on health, suggested Newsom could tap an additional $230 million from a fund for healthcare cost relief — money raised from a state penalty levied on those who can afford to enroll in health insurance but choose not to.

Lawmakers have previously criticized state officials for socking away much of the penalty revenue, which was supposed to go toward healthcare affordability. After California discontinued its premium subsidies thanks to increased federal assistance, the Newsom administration said the state was saving to help consumers once those temporary subsidies expired. Instead, California borrowed from the subsidy fund to cover state budget shortfalls, to the tune of $771 million. Starting this year, the subsidy fund should see an influx of cash as the state pays back the loan.

At a May legislative hearing, Joseph Donaldson, then a Department of Finance analyst, said maintaining the reserve was a prudent and financially sustainable approach.

Dylan Roby, a public health professor at the University of California-Irvine who consults for Covered California, said the focus on lower-income enrollees is deliberate. They qualify for federal subsidies that higher earners don’t, maximizing federal investment and strengthening the broader system.

“You end up with more advanced premium tax credits flowing into the state that you would have been leaving on the table,” he said.

State lawmakers have until June 15 to pass a state budget. Then, Covered California’s board would decide eligibility and benefit amounts, a decision that could come this summer, with new subsidies starting Jan. 1.

Even with the extra help, Walter and her husband worry they won’t be able to afford a potential $200 monthly premium payment. Walter said she’d likely have to rely on free clinics or ration medications.

“I take so many pills, I rattle,” she said. “That, on top of the $200? For us, it really adds up.”

Veronica Walter sits on her living room couch.
A pet sitter and part-time school employee, Veronica Walter is worried she and her husband wouldn’t be able to afford monthly health insurance premiums next year even with more generous state subsidies. (Christine Mai-Duc/Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News)

Are you struggling to afford your health insurance? Have you decided to forgo coverage? Click here to contact Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and share your story.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

This <a target="_blank" href="/insurance/covered-california-aca-obamacare-insurance-premium-subsidies-affordability/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

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The Drip, Drip, Drip of Declining Coverage /podcast/what-the-health-450-aca-enrollment-drops-june-11-2026/ Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:56:29 +0000 The Host
Julie Rovner photo
Julie Rovner Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl 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.

When Congress failed to extend the covid-era enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, many experts predicted millions of people would lose coverage because they would be unable to make payments toward the higher premiums. It has taken a few months, but that prediction seems to be coming true.

Meanwhile, controversy in the medical community about how — or whether  â€” to work with the Trump administration burst into the open at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association, as members who were handing out an editorial criticizing the administration’s cuts to biomedical research were evicted from the event, prompting a backlash.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, Lizzy Lawrence of Stat, Sandhya Raman of Bloomberg Law, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Lizzy Lawrence photo
Lizzy Lawrence Stat
Sandhya Raman photo
Sandhya Raman Bloomberg Law
Lauren Weber photo
Lauren Weber The Washington Post

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

  • A from The Commonwealth Fund highlights enrollment declines in Affordable Care Act marketplaces, a trend experts predicted when Congress did not renew the enhanced ACA tax credits at the end of 2025. As consumers continue to struggle with rising costs for groceries, gas, and other expenses, individuals who lost that additional financial assistance to purchase health insurance may be facing higher premium costs and more out-of-pocket expenses.
  • Concerns over the difficulty of implementing the administration’s Medicaid work requirements, along with potential legal challenges, may mean the regulations could be delayed or even reversed. For example, doctor and patient groups contend that the requirement that physicians determine whether each individual can work the required 80 hours per month will create unintended consequences, such as paperwork and bureaucratic hassles, for patients and their doctors, rather than decrease fraud in the program.
  • On Capitol Hill, fewer days in session and more days on the midterm campaign trail, plus a lack of bipartisanship, likely mean that lawmakers may be less willing to find a path forward to strengthen the financial solvency of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. The programs’ annual trustees’ report found that the two entitlement programs, which provide benefits to millions of people, will technically become insolvent in 2033. In recent years, lawmakers have been inclined to act only when facing an imminent deadline rather than taking action to avoid a future problem.
  • Leaders of the American Diabetes Association apologized for having security escort several doctors and researchers, including the editor-in-chief of the association’s flagship medical journal and a past president of the ADA, from the group’s annual research meeting for distributing a journal editorial criticizing the administration’s cuts to biomedical research. The incident highlighted how fearful some nonprofit leaders are of taking on the Trump administration.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF’s Tricia Neuman, who is retiring this month as a senior vice president and the executive director of the Program on Medicare Policy. 

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

Julie Rovner: Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Anguished Parents. Doctors in Tears. Utah’s Long Measles Outbreak Takes a Toll,” by Amy Maxmen.

Sandhya Raman: CIDRAP’s “,” by Liz Szabo.

Lizzy Lawrence: The Chicago Tribune’s “,” by Christy Gutowski and Gregory Royal Pratt.

Lauren Weber: ProPublica’s “,” by Annie Waldman.

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

  • Politico’s “,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Robert King.
  • The New York Times’ “,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
  • MedPage Today’s “,” by Kristina Fiore and Kristen Monaco.
  • Stat’s “,” by Anil Oza.
  • Fierce Healthcare’s “,” by Paige Minemyer.
  • Stat’s “, Federal Investigators Find,” by Casey Ross and Bob Herman.
Click to open the transcript Transcript: The Drip, Drip, Drip of Declining Coverage

[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, from Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and WAMU Public Radio in Washington, D.C. Welcome to What the Health? I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. And, as always, I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters covering Washington. We’re taping this week on Thursday, June 11, 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 video conference by Lauren Weber of The Washington Post. 

Lauren Weber: Hello, hello. 

Rovner: Lizzy Lawrence of Stat News. 

Lizzy Lawrence: Hi there. 

Rovner: And Sandhya Raman of Bloomberg Law. 

Sandhya Raman: Hello, everyone. 

Rovner: Later in this episode, we’ll have my interview with my colleague Tricia Neuman, who’s stepping down from her post here as KFF senior vice president and executive director of the Program on Medicare Policy, after a long and distinguished career shaping and analyzing the nation’s most prominent health insurance program. But first, this week’s news. I want to start this week with kind of a slow-motion news story that I want to make sure doesn’t get overlooked. It’s the continuing signals of declining health insurance coverage in the U.S. The Commonwealth Fund reports this week that state Affordable Care Act marketplaces are seeing the predicted shedding of policies by consumers who can’t make their premium payments. In Maryland, for example, 13% of enrollees fell off their plans between open enrollment and April of this year. That’s compared to just 3% last year. At the same time, more people are becoming underinsured because they, quote, “bought down” coverage from gold- or silver-level policies to bronze, leaving them with lower premiums but often multi-thousand-dollar deductibles. Meanwhile, three Democrat-led cities and a Democrat-led county have sued the Department of Health and Human Services over the regulation governing sign-ups for next year’s Affordable Care Act plans, charging that changes like allowing non-network plans and still higher out-of-pocket caps violate the terms of the ACA itself. So what is the outlook for the ACA, now that it’s June and it seems pretty clear that Congress is not going to extend those additional subsidies that expired at the end of last year? 

Weber: I’d say it’s not looking good, Julie, the way you just laid it out. I mean, I think the bottom line is this is a train wreck we’ve been watching in slow motion for many, many months, in the sense that you’re going to see a lot of people lose coverage. This is not exactly happening during a booming economic time, so you’ve got people cutting back because of high grocery bills, high etc., and then they see their health care go up tremendously, and they can’t cut it. And then they end up in plans that could leave them with massive bills at the end of the day. I do think this will lead to more of a groundswell of outcry, because it’s hitting folks â€” most affected, as The Commonwealth Fund pointed out, are not those in the lowest category; it’s the folks â€¦ where the subsidies ran out kind of in the mid-tier. And so you’re getting some more middle-class or lower-middle-class folks that are seeing some very, very steep health care bills. 

Rovner: Yeah, and as you point out, at the same time they’re seeing their gas bills go up, and their grocery bill’s up and basically prices for everything else. But I mean, I think there was a lot of like real sticker shock with the insurance, because you know, well, you know, gas is up $1 a gallon, and it hurts to go from paying, you know, $25 or $30 to fill your tank to $45 or $50, it’s not like saying, Hey, you’re going to go from paying $300 a month to paying $1,300 a month, which is what we saw from a lot of people.  

Meanwhile, both doctor and patient groups are up in arms over the new Medicaid work rules issued by the Trump administration last week. Rather than allowing states to automatically exempt from the work requirement people with certain conditions that would qualify them as, quote, “medically frail,” the rules stipulate that beginning in 2028 Medicaid recipients will have to prove at least twice a year not just that they have a condition, but that that condition prevents them from working. Patient groups say that will result in people who most need health insurance losing it and possibly getting sicker. Doctors, including the American Medical Association, which was conveniently having one of its meetings this week, worry that the burden of making that determination is going to fall on them, and that doctors aren’t trained for these things. They also point out that many chronic conditions fluctuate, leaving people sometimes able to maintain daily activities, like working, and sometimes not. Might this get changed due to the outcry? I think the administration, so far, seems to be saying that not doing it this way lets too many people off the hook. 

Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, I think that this is one of those things â€” again, it’s starting in January 2028. There’s sort of a year tail. I’m curious â€¦ there’s enough time that this could keep getting pushed down the road and possibly reversed, and you know, there’s also legal challenges. I know that my colleagues wrote about the Legal Action Center saying that CMS [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] is exceeding its authority here, so definitely we should be watching to see what happens with that. 

Rovner: Like many people, I was surprised at the rules as they came out. But I’m also a little bit taken aback at how broad the backlash is, particularly to this part â€” to the really, you’re going to require people with cancer to prove that they can’t meet work requirements? And how are they going to do that? And are people on Medicaid really going to be able to get doctors to, like, write them notes to say this person should be exempted? I mean, it just, it seems like a huge bureaucratic morass. 

Lawrence: Absolutely. 

Raman: Oh, I was just gonna say, from all sides, you know, if you are on Medicaid, and maybe there’s the burden of just transportation to get to that appointment, and, you know, having the time and the energy if you have a chronic illness, but then also we’ve heard time and time again how workforce issues, doctors are already overworked and don’t have the time to do so many of the things they already have to do. This is another burden for them to be able to have to eventually do this with the limited time they do have. 

Rovner: Lauren. 

Weber: It also seems incredibly subjective. I mean, I know they said that they’re trying to get to it through the codes, but, as  [Miranda Ollstein], I mean, how does one even really evaluate that? And people can work in different stretches. Also, with the flexibility many people have now to work from home, there is an opportunity for some folks maybe to be able to work, depending on what their job is. It’s just a minefield of unintended consequences, probably. So we’ll see how that goes. 

Rovner: I’ll say, this has a long way to play out. Well, along similar lines, there are also concerns that the new crackdown on fraud that’s being spearheaded by the Trump administration is threatening people’s coverage as well. In Ohio, lawmakers rushing to address home healthcare fraud tried to speed through a bill that included a provision to ban family members from qualifying as care providers for people with disabilities. That was ultimately removed from the bill when it was pointed out that such a change could result in more people having to be institutionalized, costing the state far, far more than paying family members to help people. I’m sure we’re going to see similar efforts to crack down on fraud in more states, because the federal government is threatening to take away money. Although, as administration officials continue to claim widespread fraud throughout the home health and hospice care systems, I imagine that we’re going to see more give-and-take on this one too. 

Weber: It seems like another example of shoot first, look later. I mean, in general, that clearly would have been a very bad provision to keep in the bill. If you know anything about home healthcare, you know that most of the time it is a family member giving up much of their time and effort to keep a loved one in the home. And so wild that that was even in there to start with. I think in general this goes to this long-running conversation around fraud. Again, there is a lot of healthcare fraud. I think we should all be very clear. There’s a lot of fraud that needs to be addressed. But you can say a lot of things about fraud obliquely, but then when you get to the brass tacks, you got to be careful about what you’re doing. So this is just another example of that, and how we’ve seen the Trump administration move on this that may or may not end up in problematic outcomes. 

Rovner: Yeah, Dr. [Mehmet] Oz [the CMS administrator] keeps talking about, you know, family members who are helping carry in groceries or driving people to doctors’ appointments. That’s not what these paid caregivers are doing. These are people who are basically unable to work because they need to be with this person that they are caring for 24/7, 365. I mean, there’s a lot of work involved here that’s way more than I think a lot of people who are in Washington or, I guess in this case, in Baltimore writing these rules sometimes realize. And I think that was brought home rather vividly in Ohio when they tried to do this and then were suddenly given the facts on the ground and said, Oops, maybe we should try this another way. But Lauren, you’re right, it’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of fraud to be fought. 

Well, moving on, this week we also got the annual report from the trustees of Social Security and Medicare. Not much has changed from last year as far as when the trust funds that support the programs will technically become insolvent. For Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, it’s still 2033, but a quarter earlier â€” so three months’ difference. Still, that’s only seven years away. In earlier times, I’ve been doing this a long time, seven years to insolvency would set off alarm bells in Congress and the administration, and would prompt action, or at least attempted action. Are we yawning our way into a very large financial crisis impacting one of the most popular health programs in the country? 

Raman: I think it’s a combination of things. A) I feel like every year we are more loose with deadlines. We address them in Congress closer and closer to them. So something that several years ago would be a big conversation ahead of time, we push it closer. And I think also the appetite in Congress to get things done right now is low, to find bipartisan agreement. And so getting something done on this would be quite difficult right now with all the other competing priorities there. 

Rovner: I think they were floating the idea of another budget reconciliation bill â€” “Reconciliation 3.0,” I guess they were calling it. And my reading of the consensus is that it is not happening. Whether there’s not enough appetite or not enough votes, or combination of those two, it doesn’t look like Congress is ready to take on something as big as Let’s make sure that Social Security and Medicare are there for the retiring baby boomers and Gen Xers, who are going to shortly follow

Raman: Especially in a midterms year where they’re not in as much as they might be at other times. 

Rovner: Yes, that’s right. They are definitely in and out. All right. Well, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. 

Meanwhile, over at the Department of Health and Human Services, our podcast colleague  of Secretary RFK Jr. over last weekend, saying he has, quote, “shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department,” and that he, quote, “is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.” And, indeed, the big press event Kennedy had this week was to tout his effort to get medical schools to teach their students more about nutrition, something most medical schools had already been doing, I hasten to add. And, of course, there are still no confirmed, and in some cases even nominated, heads for some major HHS agencies, including the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which oversees things like the Ebola outbreaks. I would note that Kennedy responded to Sheryl’s story just Wednesday â€” so, like, five days after it appeared, basically saying he’s doing much more than she realizes. What are we to make of this whole thing? 

Weber: I would encourage everyone to read Kennedy’s response, and then I would also be curious if Kennedy would like to show me where his public calendars are that he talks about in his tweet, because I would love to look at them, and I’m sure Sheryl would too. But I thought Sheryl’s framing of the story was very clear-headed and accurate. I mean, look, the bottom line is the secretary has not been publicly engaged on the Ebola response at all, which is somewhat surprising. He does not have any of these people in place. I mean, take your pick. I mean, it’s all these agencies are rudderless currently, and he has very clearly expressed serious interest in his pet projects, but has not been as engaged, according to Sheryl and all of our reporting, in some of these other issues. And I think it’s a fair look at what that means for his legacy going forward, and what that will mean in the months to come. 

Rovner: Right. And you know what’s going on actually in health right now. Over at FDA, they’ve apparently begun the safety study of mifepristone, the abortion pill, that the administration has been promising anti-abortion groups for more than a year now. But it appears that study won’t be ready before the midterms, which is actually what Republican strategists had advised, so it wouldn’t further inflame the campaign season. This is up your alley. Is this FDA acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas’ effort to win the permanent job, or is this the White House still trying to kind of placate both sides to the debate for as long as it can possibly get away with? 

Lawrence: Yeah, so Kyle Diamantas has said to many different people that he doesn’t want the job, including to me via an HHS media spokesperson, so I tend to believe him. Although it seems likely that he will be in this role for a while, because of how many leadership positions the HHS needs to fill, and how few days there are of Congress. With the mifepristone study, it seems like, yeah, I mean, I think the timing is not lost on anyone. This seems to have worked out politically pretty well for the Trump administration, where it’s a six-month study, they can kind of see what happens in the midterms, and see, because you know, [Sen. Bill] Cassidy, this is a huge issue for him. Any FDA commissioner they’re going to put in front of him, he’s going to be hammering on mifepristone, pro-life issues. So, as long as they can pursue the strategy that they have been pursuing, of sort of just waiting and seeing and saying that they’re working and pushing it out. I think that’s what they’re going to keep doing. 

Rovner: I guess there’s this continuing promise that the administration will try to sort of rein back in on the mail-order abortion drugs, which is, I guess, what’s really â€¦ I don’t think anybody thinks that they’re going to try to revoke the approval of mifepristone. I think what the anti-abortion folks are hoping now is that they’re going to revoke the mail-order ability of people to get mifepristone, which, of course, we’ve seen people using in abortion-ban states to basically evade those abortion bans. It’s obviously a big deal for both sides that the administration would like to keep under wraps as long as it possibly can. Is that a fair assessment? 

Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, there’s no safety reason to do that, so â€¦ there will be huge blowback from pro-choice advocates, but also within the agency, I would imagine, this would be a huge turning point. 

Rovner: Well, that’s the FDA. Then there is the National Institutes of Health, which actually does have a Senate-confirmed leader, Jay Bhattacharya, although he’s currently doing double duty, also overseeing CDC. But apparently things aren’t so great over at NIH. Last June, 300 NIH staffers published something they called the “Bethesda Declaration,” named for the location of NIH’s main campus, in which they said that the new administration’s policies were undermining the agency’s mission, wasting public resources, and harming the health of Americans and people across the globe. Now, one year later, about 70 NIH’ers have , including one we talked about last week that would give political appointees far more say about who gets research grants and how those grantees can behave. And another policy that would strip civil service protections from many senior employees, so they could more easily be fired for not going along with the administration’s political priorities. I guess this is this week’s trend. What seemed kind of shocking last year is now kind of status quo, right? I saw very little attention to any of these stories that are enormous changes from how the nation’s science agencies have operated over Republican and Democratic administrations in the 40 years I’ve been doing this. 

Raman: I think that one thing we’ve really seen is just how much some of these science-oriented groups have mobilized over some of these issues, just, you know, kind of stating that researchers that have been doing this kind of work for 20, 30, 40 years, that this is so out of the realm of anything they’ve seen before. This would, you know, jeopardize their research and their stability and just the way that they have been doing work for so many years. And I think even with both of the rules that we, that you mentioned, that has been something that has been really amplified by them. But I think it has been, given the number of other things happening, this space not really trickled down to the broader set of folks to really, you know, tap into. We have Ebola, we have so many other things that people, I think, are a little bit more top of mind, even though this is a huge change that under normal circumstances would have more attention paid to it. 

Rovner: Yeah, I think that’s fair. This is sort of the continuing shock and awe that we see of the administration trying to make all of the changes that it wants at once, so nobody gets a chance to focus on any of them. In sort of what we would consider normal times, any one of these would be the overwhelming story of the day. 

Well, all of this brings us to what I consider the wildest story of the week. There was plenty of drama at, of all places, the annual research meeting of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans. And props, by the way, to the website MedPage Today for breaking this within hours of its happening last Friday. I will just read the original headline: “.” So the keynote address to open the conference was supposed to be given by NIH Director Bhattacharya, but he dropped out at the last minute. While the audience was inside listening to a talk instead from NIH senior adviser Richard Wojcik, five doctors and researchers, including the editor-in-chief of the association’s flagship medical journal, as well as a past president of the ADA, were outside handing out a thousand copies of an editorial from the journal criticizing the administration’s cuts to biomedical research. At the direction of the organization, those protesters â€” can you even really call them protesters? â€” were escorted out by security and told they could not return to the conference. And from there the backlash began. Sixty-five hundred people signed a letter of complaint to the association. Two top officials resigned, and, finally, five days later, the CEO apologized to the “editorial hander-outers” via a video. But I want to pose a larger question. This was a real-world playing out of the tensions that we were just talking about are boiling within science. Should they try to work with this administration, or should they try to fight it? It would appear that the answer to that is kind of still up for grabs. Isn’t that what this demonstrates? 

Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s a clear tension between what the members of these major medical organizations want, which, like you said, 6,500 people signed that letter. There is a real appetite to try to fight back and push back, but there’s a real fear among leadership to do anything. â€¦ This was just mind-boggling, and my colleague Liz wrote about the backlash, and their decision to escalate the situation in this way brought so much more attention than, you know, five people handing out a journal editorial would initially. So fear can lead people to do things that ultimately don’t serve their purposes. 

Rovner: Yeah, I left out the part about the ADA leaders sort of over the weekend trying to justify the expulsion of the “editorial hander-outers,” as I will call them, by saying, Oh, it could affect our 501(c)(3) status, or they were violating the code of conduct, for, you know, for the meeting. But not only did those things not fly, they did seem to make things worse. Lauren, you wanted to add something. 

Weber: I just want to say that’s probably the most press an ADA meeting has ever gotten in its entire life. So, I mean, if they â€¦ 

Rovner: Absolutely. 

Weber: At the end of the day, I mean, these, as you point out, Lizzy, I mean, this editorial guy read a lot more and got a lot more attention because of it, so we’ll see what happens from here. 

Rovner: Yeah, but I think it’s sort of a cautionary tale for leaders of these organizations who â€” do we want to fight or do we want to try to get along, and maybe you ought to ask your members first? We’ll see if this sort of comes out at other meetings. Now it’s the beginning of the summer, it’s when a lot of these scientific meetings happen. I’ll be watching more of them a little more closely. 

Well, finally, this week, it’s June, and that means it’s the season for working on the spending bills on Capitol Hill. This week we actually got a lengthy public markup of the bill that funds the majority of the Department of Health and Human Services. A reminder: FDA is funded in the Agriculture bill because food. Sandhya, how is the Labor-HHS bill shaping up? It looks like Congress isn’t going to go along with the big cuts proposed by the Trump administration, but that’s not saying there won’t be fights about funding, right? 

Raman: Yeah, so I would say you’re right. The big takeaway from this House markup is that it kind of bucked some of the White House’s suggestions on, you know, what to do with funding for this. They funded $111 billion for HHS, if this is made into law â€” so a much smaller cut â€¦ of what the White House was proposing. That included things like $100 million more for NIH, which has been something in the past worried about cuts; and funded some things that I think we’re interesting, you know, CDC’s office for smoking [Office on Smoking and Health], something that had been subject to the DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] cuts last year; , something else that â€¦  

Rovner: Yeah, I want to address that separate, I want to get to the amendments in a second. But I mean, just sort of in terms of funding, I mean, and we should point out that $100 million for NIH â€” NIH has a budget of like $40-some billion, so yeah, it’s not a big increase. It’s a rounding error increase, but it’s not a cut. 

Raman: Yes, not a cut. So the next step for this would be the House floor, but we might get kind of stalled there just because the issue on the Senate side is they’ve not agreed to top-line numbers for funding yet, and they need those in order to shape out the individual bills. So, without that, we’re kind of in a standstill, and it might be a little bit more like we’ve seen in some of the years past, where the House goes through, they make a bill, they vote on the bill, and then the Senate doesn’t publicly do theirs, but then we get to an agreement a little further down the line. But what Sen. Susan Collins, who heads the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been saying is that, you know, she wants more for NIH than what’s been presented here. But without those top lines, we don’t know. So, we’ll see, you know, in years past, we’ve really just, the funding year deadline has been pushed and pushed and pushed, so â€¦ 

Rovner: Into the next funding year. Often. 

Raman: Yes, and I think, especially like I said, when it’s a midterms year, they’re going to be in far less than normal. It’s not clear when there’s going to be the appetite to get all of that done. 

Rovner: So, often these spending bills, when they move â€” and of course they haven’t moved when they were supposed to for the last however many years â€” but it does sometimes give a chance for lawmakers to express frustration or doubt or simply disapproval with things that the administration is doing. And one of the things that they seem to be expressing disapproval is the administration’s plan to use prior authorization, which is very controversial, in Medicare, and AI â€” in fact, an AI prior authorization in Medicare, and on a bipartisan basis. They voted to tell the administration, No, please don’t do this. I’m wondering, you know, it may not become law on this bill, but this does suggest that there is bipartisan concern in Congress about these efforts on behalf of Medicare, right? 

Weber: Well, I think this goes back to our Medicare insolvency conversation earlier. Who votes? It’s the people that are on Medicare. So, and how unpopular would it be if they were to be limited in what they can access for their health care services? So, I think at the end of the day, the reason that’s bipartisan is these lawmakers know who’s keeping them in office, and prior authorization has a very bad name. I mean, it’s very interesting, because CMS has said that this will help cut down costs, but also has, out of the other side of its mouth, in hearings and so on, Oz has decried insurers using prior authorization. So there’s a lot of “for thee but not for me” vibes going on here. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like this will advance because of the bipartisan opposition. 

Rovner: And of course, Lizzy, your colleagues at Stat have talked about, you know, private companies using enhanced prior authorization, which nobody seems to think is a great idea, and now we have Medicare proposing it. 

Lawrence: Yeah, I was going to say prior authorization, already unpopular, add AI to the mix. I mean, there’s not â€¦ yeah, Bob and Casey, my colleagues, , but just, in general, there is not a lot of goodwill for the AI industry with data centers and all kinds of unpopular initiatives. So, yeah, it makes sense we’re seeing strong bipartisan disapproval of this.  

Rovner: If it doesn’t show up in this bill, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it show up in some other bill that’s more likely to make it to the finish line. All right, that is this week’s news. Now we’ll play my interview with KFF’s Tricia Neuman, and then we’ll come back and do our extra credits. 

I am pleased to welcome back to the podcast my colleague and friend Tricia Neuman, who is retiring as KFF senior vice president and executive director of the Program on Medicare Policy, after a long and distinguished career here and on Capitol Hill, shaping, analyzing, and explaining Medicare policy to people like me, as well as to the nation’s decision-makers. Tricia, thanks for taking some time as you wrap things up. 

Tricia Neuman: Julie, thank you for having me. 

Rovner: So, let’s go back to the beginning, if you can remember that. What got you interested in pursuing Medicare as your health policy specialty? 

Neuman: You know, I didn’t think about it as Medicare, but I thought about it in the context of my family. I was â€¦ I remember watching my grandfather and seeing him struggle. He had Alzheimer’s, and he was trying to tie his shoe, and he couldn’t remember, and I somehow got interested in aging. And I was interested in government, and so I came to Washington ready to do policy, and I ended up at the Senate Aging Committee, which was perfect. And I got into Medicare because I had an older colleague who said, Look, you got to choose a specialty; you can do Social Security, pensions, retirement income, or you can do health and long-term care. Figure it out and go there. And so I did. 

Rovner: Yeah, and like me, you can stay forever if you want to. 

Neuman: And I seem to have stayed forever. 

Rovner: So, what’s the biggest misperception about Medicare as it exists today? People look at Medicare, and it’s like a chameleon. They see all these different things. 

Neuman: Boy, I could give you a few answers to that. I mean, one answer is people think Medicare is going broke. Medicare cannot go broke, but Medicare faces financing challenges. Interesting, you know, we talk about that today. Today’s the day that the “Medicare Trustees Report” came out, and actually, there wasn’t much of a change, a notable change. It was a slight tweak, but it’s still 2033 for the year that Medicare will be insolvent. What that means is that there won’t be enough money to pay all benefits, but it doesn’t mean the program is going broke. To me what it means is it’s time to think about how to finance care for an aging population, and what are the policy options that can do that. It’s generally reducing spending or finding new revenues, but it’s easier to do it in advance than â€¦ to wait until we’re at the precipice of a crisis. So that’s really what it signals to me. But it cannot go broke. 

Rovner: Over the years, Congress has dealt with these periodic, you know, predictions about Medicare insolvency in various ways that they have, you know, sometimes they’ve actually acted when insolvency has seemed relatively near, and sometimes they have acted to make insolvency closer. This Congress doesn’t seem to be as plugged into Medicare as many previous ones. Is that a fair way to put it? 

Neuman: I think it’s fair. Julie, when you and I were working on the Hill, as your beat at the time at the Ways and Means Committee, Medicare was front and center. Medicare was part of budget conversations. Medicare was part of legislation that we dealt with every year. And that meant every year members of Congress worked hard to tweak the program, achieve some savings, also make some improvements. But Medicare was the big story. Really, of late, really, since the ACA, the ACA has been the story, Medicaid has been the story, but Medicare, oddly, has been sort of a stepchild off to the side. 

Rovner: I like to describe Medicare as one of the biggest paradoxes in health policy. Simultaneously, it’s incredibly popular â€” I mean, one of the most popular programs ever created by the federal government â€” and yet it’s actually pretty lacking as a really comprehensive health coverage. I think if people actually had, quote-unquote, “Medicare for All” the way we have Medicare today, they wouldn’t be very happy with it. 

Neuman: I think that’s right. I mean, people I know on Medicare, and soon that will be me, are very happy with the program. They like the fact that â€¦ it’s reliable, they can count on it. There are some issues between people in traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage. But it’s, you know, people are pretty happy. At the same time, there’s relatively high cost sharing, premiums are going up, and Medicare doesn’t cover some of the most expensive things for people as they grow older, such as dental, which is a big one, hearing aids, vision, which is to a lesser extent not quite as expensive. And the big one that nobody really wants to address is long-term services and support, home care for people who need help at home, assisted living, nursing home coverage, all of that is super expensive, and Medicare really doesn’t cover it. And that is a big surprise to families when all of a sudden they have a family member who needs this help and Medicare won’t pay for it. 

Rovner: Yeah, I feel like about every five years, another generation of health reporters discovers, Hey, Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care. I never knew that

Neuman: And a lot of time they’re discovering it because a family member of theirs needs long-term care. 

Rovner: So, I know you’re retiring, but I also know that you’re going to continue to stay engaged, because I know you. What do you think is the biggest challenge that you hope that lawmakers will address in Medicare in the next five, 10 years? 

Neuman: Oh, I have a wish list. I do hope that they’ll continue to put affordability at the top of the list. That means looking at these expenses that are not covered by Medicare, keeping an eye on premiums. Right now, 7 million people on Medicare pay more than 10% of their income on Part B premiums. That’s a big deal. So, keeping an eye on affordability is really important. I also think there should be some attention to simplification. Medicare used to be this easy program, you turned 65, you got on Medicare. It’s not so easy anymore. The average Medicare beneficiary has a choice of dozens of plans, the Medicare Advantage, prescription drugs. It’s too complicated. And it’s not like it’s a one-and-done decision when you turn 65. You really need to think about this each year, and I think that’s a tall order. And simplifying the program would make it a lot easier for our aging population. 

Rovner: Well, you may be retiring, but I’m still going to call on you as my Medicare expert. 

Neuman: Always. 

Rovner: Tricia Neuman, thank you so much. 

Neuman: Thank you, Julie. 

Rovner: OK, we’re back. Now it’s time for our extra-credit segment. That’s where we each recognize a story we read this week we think you should read, too. Don’t worry if you miss it. We will post the links in our show notes on your phone or other mobile device. Lauren, you snagged this week’s most popular story. Start us off. 

Weber: Hats off to Annie Waldman’s “,” which published in ProPublica. I was green with envy upon reading this story. It’s not only beautifully crafted, but it’s just an incredibly incisive takedown, really, of this raw milk farm and all of the people it’s harmed, and how the government has really not stepped in. It hits at so many themes in this MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] moment â€” of free speech and, you know, free medical access, but also the questions of: Do consumers know the amount of risks that they’re taking on? And what is regulators’ role when you have this farm led by this evangelist for raw milk that has been at least linked to over 220 people’s illnesses, some of which are very severe, and continues to produce not only raw milk but milk that it puts into raw cheese that makes people sick. And very sick. This is not just, like, slightly sick, I mean it’s likely that this has potentially sickened way more than the numbers that are captured. It’s a very well-done piece. I could not recommend reading it more. 

Rovner: Lizzy. 

Lawrence: My piece that I chose for this week was from the Chicago Tribune: “,” by Christy Gutowski and Gregory Royal Pratt. Kind of similar to what Lauren was talking about, this is a story about regulatory failure, but in this case with a plastic surgeon operating in Chicago who has killed at least eight women during procedures like tummy tucks and liposuction â€¦ all women of color. He’s operating in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. And Chicago authorities started looking into him to try to revoke his license in 2020, but more than five years later nothing has happened. This was a truly horrifying story, and just major kudos to the reporters, for really, you know, they tracked down all of these women’s families. And in one case there was a complaint that the surgeon, you know, not only allegations that he killed people, but that he had carved his initials into someone. So it’s a really insane piece that I think, yeah, everyone should read. 

Rovner: Yeah. Sandhya. 

Raman: So I picked the story “, and it’s in CIDRAP from Liz Szabo. And this piece is part of a larger series for the 20th anniversary of the HPV [human papillomavirus] vaccine. But Liz just does a beautiful job juxtaposing, you know, one sister who battles and eventually, you know, lost a heartbreaking battle with cervical cancer, and how her sister was in the first batch of folks to get the HPV vaccine 20 years ago. And then, you know, the sister is talking about the importance of wanting her sons to get it that are pretty young. And it just really does a good job of showing the trajectory of how effective the vaccine has been in reducing cervical cancer since its rollout. 

Rovner: Yeah, this is one of the great medical miracles that’s suddenly become controversial again. It’s really good. You should read the whole series. I will post links to it. My extra credit this week is from my Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News colleague Amy Maxman. It’s called “Anguished Parents. Doctors in Tears. Utah’s Long Measles Outbreak Takes a Toll.” Amy went to Utah and found that measles is taking a stronghold there for a whole variety of reasons, including the strength of the supplement industry that teaches residents to suspect mainstream medicine. It’s a really good read that shows the challenges public health still faces in things that we thought we had overcome years, if not decades, ago, like how to prevent childhood diseases like measles. 

All right, that is this week’s show. Thanks to our editor this week, Mary Agnes Carey, and our producer-engineer, Francis Ying. A reminder: What the Health? is now available on WAMU platforms, the NPR app, and wherever you get your podcasts — as well as, of course, kffhealthnews.org. 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 , and on Bluesky . Where are you guys hanging these days? Sandhya? 

Raman: I’m at  and on  @SandhyaWrites. 

Rovner: Lauren. 

Weber: I’m on  and on  as @LaurenWeberHP. The HP is for health policy. 

Rovner: Lizzy. 

Lawrence: I’m on  as @LizzyLaw_ and on  and  (Lizzy Lawrence). 

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

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