August 7, 2025 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | August 7, 2025
The Committee in the News
On July 28, Committee Member Dr. Henry Kahn, a retired primary-care physician in Atlanta, had an op-ed printed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled, “Medical funding should be a social good”:
[T]he Atlanta Medical Center came to its end because it couldn’t survive in our country’s environment of profit-oriented medical care… The United States stands out among all wealthy societies as the only place where health and medical care are supposed to exist as a business. In other wealthy countries, it’s presumed that health is – and should be – a social good, not a commercial product. [...]
Medical funding in Georgia and the U.S. is in a gloomy place right now. A bright spot can be found among the younger doctors, nurses and trainees who won’t accept the commercial distortion of their duty to deliver care where it’s needed. It’s time for our politicians and bean counters to follow the lead of the more idealistic, coming leadership.
On July 30, Committee Advocates Drs. Makunda Abdul-Mbacke and Janet Osborne spoke at a Roanoke press conference on the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural health care. It was reported in the Roanoke Times, WDBJ, and on the WSLS newscast.
On July 31, the Committee co-hosted a Town Hall in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District with Opportunity Wisconsin that featured Rep. Mark Pocan. The event was covered by the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal in an article titled, “Mark Pocan crosses congressional lines to host a town hall in Derrick Van Orden's hometown.”
On August 1, Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced bipartisan legislation to increase hospital billing transparency for patients, called the “Fair Billing Act”. Committee Executive Director Dr. Rob Davidson was quoted in their press release.
“As physicians and health care providers, our members regularly see how out of control costs prevent their patients from getting the care that they need. When people aren't able to afford necessary health care, they develop worse health outcomes and suffer needlessly. By ensuring each off-campus, outpatient department bills with a unique provider identifier, the Fair Billing Act will improve care delivery, lower costs, and provide much-needed clarity for patients and providers alike.” – Rob Davidson, MD MPH, Executive Director, Committee to Protect Health Care
Reproductive Rights
More than 20 states filed a lawsuit last week against the Department of Health and Human Services over a provision in Trump’s recently-passed budget bill that prohibits Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving Medicaid reimbursements, even if they don’t provide abortion services.
The Washington Post: Trump moves to bar nearly all abortions at Veterans Affairs hospitals
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has announced it will no longer accept funding from the federal government due to the conditions the Trump administration has placed on government contractors and grant recipients.
Northwest Public Broadcasting: Idaho lost over a third of OB-GYNs since enacting abortion laws
Trump Administration News
In October 2024, Trump called himself “the father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall. Now that he’s in office, he appears to have no further interest in helping future parents get IVF treatments:
Last year, Trump said that if he returned to office, the government would either pay for IVF services or issue rules requiring insurance companies to cover treatment for it. The pledge came as Trump faced political blowback over abortion rights after his appointees to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
“The government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that,” Trump said in August 2024. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?”
More than six months into his second term, however, the Trump administration has not publicly proposed new federal subsidies to make IVF free or more affordable. In addition, White House officials are backing away from proposals discussed internally to mandate IVF coverage for the roughly 50 million people on the Obamacare exchanges.
The top vaccine and gene therapy official at Trump’s FDA, Dr. Vinay Prasad, is out:
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine and gene therapy official resigned on Tuesday after a public campaign against him led by the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, according to people familiar with the matter.
Over the past week, Ms. Loomer had taken to social media to attack the official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, for a series of decisions denying approval of new drugs for rare diseases. She highlighted past statements of support he had made for prominent figures on the political left, including Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.
POLITICO reports that the decision was driven by Trump himself, overruling RFK, Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. He is being replaced by newly appointed Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) leader George Tidmarsh, M.D.
Last week, the Senate confirmed Susan Monarez as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC.) Monarez has a Ph.D. but is not a physician.
As the Trump administration has begun breaking down the silos between Medicaid and ICE with its immigration/deportation efforts (discussed at length on last week’s Paging America podcast), it is now moving forward with a plan aimed at making electronic patient records more accessible across the health care system. The move has some observers very concerned. “There are enormous ethical and legal concerns,” Georgetown University law professor and public health specialist Lawrence Gostin told ABC News. “Patients across America should be very worried that their medical records are going to be used in ways that harm them and their families.”
STAT: Representatives of expert groups to be barred from work supporting CDC’s vaccine advisers. Also, at least three members of the CDC's Advisory Committee to the Director have been fired.
AXIOS reports that one way to get there may be direct-to-patient sales by the large pharmaceutical companies.
The Hill: Senate panel rejects Trump cuts to NIH, other health agencies
A group of Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee has opened an investigation into RFK, Jr.’s firing of all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) last month. In a letter to Kennedy, they wrote, “The harm your actions will cause is significant. As your new ACIP makes recommendations based on pseudoscience, fewer and fewer Americans will have access to fewer and fewer vaccines.”
In related news, following Kennedy’s plans to fire the entire U.S. Preventive Services Task Force for being too “woke”, Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, and Senator Elizabeth Warren have introduced a resolution to preserve the group that reviews evidence and makes recommendations for primary care physicians. Kennedy says he is still “reviewing” whether to remove all of the task force members.
When Trump took office in January, his administration took hundreds of federal health-related webpages down. Following a recent ruling from a federal judge, the administration has begun restoring them.
Other Health Care News
The passage of Trump’s budget bill dealt a huge blow to already precarious rural hospitals. A $50 billion “rural health transformation program” was established but will only make up for about a third of the critical federal funding rural hospitals receive, according to KFF. On Face the Nation on Sunday, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said that applications to tap into what some are calling a rural hospital “slush fund” will go out to states in early September.
The Wall Street Journal: Hospital Failures Following Private-Equity Payouts Leave Patients, Taxpayers in Lurch:
The recent collapses of Steward Health Care System and Prospect Medical Holdings, the two biggest hospital bankruptcies in decades, are forcing communities to pay up to fill gaps in patient care and budgets left by the failed chains. [...]
Prospect and Steward were previously owned by Leonard Green & Partners and Cerberus Capital Management, respectively, which collected hefty dividends and payouts from the two companies between 2011 and 2018. The transactions weakened the two hospital chains’ finances, according to an internal investigation by Steward and a congressional probe into Prospect.
Steward in 2016 paid out $790 million in dividends to Cerberus and other equity holders, including its top executive at a time when the company was likely financially insolvent, according to the internal investigation. Cerberus has said Steward was in good financial shape while it owned the company, which it sold in 2020.
Leonard Green and other shareholders collected $654 million in dividends and share sales from Prospect between 2012 and 2018 that eventually led to the company running out of cash, according to the report by a bipartisan congressional committee.
Steward, which owned 31 hospitals in eight states, filed for bankruptcy last year, and Prospect, which still owns 16 in four states, entered chapter 11 in January.
A recent KFF poll shows that most of the public (59%) say they will either “definitely not” or “probably not” get the COVID-19 vaccine this fall – including about six in ten Republicans who say they will “definitely not” get the vaccine.
Related from NBC News: Will health insurance pay for Covid vaccines this fall?:
Without insurance coverage, people could owe hundreds of dollars for the shot.
Most private health plans are required by law to cover recommended vaccines, whether for Covid, measles, or the flu, without charging their members. But that requirement kicks in after the shots are recommended by a federal panel — the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — and adopted by the CDC director, according to the KFF analysis. The committee hasn’t yet voted on Covid vaccine recommendations for this fall. Its next meeting is expected to occur in August or September.