August 13, 2025 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | August 13, 2025
The Committee To Protect Health Care in the News
Committee Board Member Dr. Priya Pal was joined by other physicians and health care advocates for an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of Medicaid. The event was covered by KCTV 5 in Kansas City.
On August 1, Committee Advocate Dr. Alisan Kula spoke alongside former Delegate Elizabeth Guzman at Americans for Contraception’s roundtable focused on the Virginia Right to Contraception Act, a bill that would have codified the right for patients to use and for doctors to prescribe FDA-approved forms of contraception, including condoms, IUDs, emergency contraceptives, and the pill. Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed the bill earlier this year. Click HERE for a video of Dr. Kula speaking at the event.
Committee Board Member and founding member of the Committee’s Reproductive Freedom Taskforce Dr. Kristin Lyerly joined SiriusXM's The Briefing with Steve Scully for a live radio hit digging into Trump's broken campaign promises about reducing IVF costs for families.
Dr. Lyerly also spoke at Fair Share America’s August 8 town hall in Oshkosh about the harm Medicaid cuts will have on Wisconsinites. WFRV covered the event: Oshkosh town hall discusses impacts of 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act'.
Reproductive Rights
The Indiana Court of Appeals upheld the state's near-total abortion ban by rejecting a move to add exceptions to the ban.
Louisiana Illuminator: Louisianians can now sue out-of-state doctors who provide abortion pills
CNN: Department of Veterans Affairs looks to end certain abortion services for veterans
Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act News
The Hill: ACA premiums set to spike
The Hill: Appeals court upholds dismissal of US Chamber challenge to Medicare negotiation
The Hill: 2 more cases challenging Medicare negotiation rejected in federal courts
Trump Administration News
On August 5, RFK Jr. announced that the government is pulling a half billion dollars in funding to develop new mRNA vaccines in order to focus on "safer, broader vaccine platforms." Experts call the move “reckless” and “a huge blow to our national security.” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya says the reason for pulling the funding is because “a large fraction of the population distrusts” the mRNA “platform”.
Related from STAT: As mRNA falls out of favor for HHS, are cancer vaccines next?
The Hill: Trump threatens pharma tariffs of up to 250 percent
Last week, one of the items in this newsletter was, “The top vaccine and gene therapy official at Trump’s FDA, Dr. Vinay Prasad, is out” following pressure on Trump by influencer Laura Loomer. This week, the item is: “The top vaccine and gene therapy official at Trump’s FDA, Dr. Vinay Prasad, is back in.”
The New York Times: Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Company Donations
In another Trump family grift, last month, Trump sent letters to large pharma firms telling them that they had 60 days to comply with his demand to create direct sales platforms and make other policy changes to lower drug prices. Bloomberg reports that his son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on the board of a company that just rolled out a new service that (you probably already guessed it) will help these companies launch direct sales platforms.
On August 8, a gunman attacked a CDC campus, killing a police officer before he was killed. ABC News reports that the shooter had grievances toward the Covid vaccine. The Washington Post reports that many CDC employees are furious at RFK Jr.
Jerome Adams, surgeon general during Trump’s first term, says the shooting must be a wakeup call. “[I]t took more than 18 hours for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to issue a public statement condemning the violent act”, he wrote in an op-ed for STAT. “Kennedy’s delayed and tepid response, coupled with his own record of inflammatory claims, has only deepened the wounds and amplified a dangerous sense of betrayal among America’s frontline public health workers.”
Dr. Caitlin A. Smith, a surgeon, wrote a powerful op-ed in Slate where she shows how RFK, Jr. has already created an atmosphere of distrust of the medical community. “MAHA adherents view doctors as, at best, just another voice in a chorus of health influencers—and at worst as self-interested profiteers pushing unneeded treatments,” she writes.
Trump’s MAHA Commission submitted its strategy to the White House this week but so-called “scheduling issues” are preventing its public release for several more weeks, CNN reports.
Other Health Care News
Michigan Advance: When hospitals buy physician practices, prices go up
The 19th: Pregnant people in rural parts of the country are running out of places to give birth
HEALTH CARE Un-Covered: As Americans Struggled, Health Insurers Made a Record-Breaking $71.3 Billion in Profits
At a recent Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders referenced a recent report by Wendell Potter in calling out insurance giants for using vertical integration to avoid medical loss ratio provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
The VA is cancelling union contracts with most of its unions.
FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have also canceled their collective bargaining agreements.
Related from ProPublica: Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump as Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals. As of September of last year, over 122,000 VA employees were veterans themselves. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the agency has lost thousands of ‘core’ medical staff under Trump.