February 11, 2026 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | February 11, 2026
Top News Stories
The Wall Street Journal: Negotiators Say Talks to Restore ACA Subsidies Likely Dead:
Top Senate negotiators said an effort to renew expired healthcare subsidies had effectively collapsed, likely ending the hopes of 20 million Americans that the tax-credit expansion could be revived and lower their monthly insurance premiums.
A Galveston, Texas, man is the first to avail himself of the state’s new abortion bounty program:
A Galveston County man has filed a lawsuit against a California doctor he accuses of providing abortion-inducing pills to his partner, leveraging for the first time a new Texas law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers for up to $100,000.
In July, Jerry Rodriguez filed the original lawsuit that accused Dr. Remy Coeytaux of providing his girlfriend with abortion pills at the direction of her ex-husband.
The lawsuit alleges the woman’s ex-husband ordered the abortion pills from Coeytaux. Subsequently, Rodriguez’ girlfriend took the pills and terminated a pregnancy on Sept.19, 2024 and another pregnancy in January 2025. Rodriguez claims in the lawsuit that he was the father in those pregnancies.
Attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act
Fierce Healthcare reports that junk plans are back on the ACA marketplaces:
Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented regulations that limited insurers to two nonstandard plan designs per metal level on the ACA marketplaces, with the goal of simplifying the shopping experience for consumers.
In the proposed Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for the 2027 plan year, released Feb. 9, the CMS said it intends to discontinue those limits as well as requirements that plans offer standardized options on the exchanges. [...]
The proposed rule further aims to expand affordable options by allowing for plans that include lower deductibles but higher out-of-pocket maximums.
A new Senate Finance Committee report details the devastating impact of the Republican spending bill – what Committee members call “The Republican Big Ugly Bill” – on the US health care system. It’s not good.
Trump Administration News
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) & Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) News
Last week, Democrats issued ten demands, what they are calling “guardrails”, on DHS officers as a condition for voting for a bill to restore funding for DHS that expires next week. One of the guardrails impacts medical facilities, and is in line with reforms that the Committee is calling for in a sign on letter:
Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
This week, Senator Katie Britt, the GOP chairwoman of the panel that oversees DHS spending, called the Democrats’ demands “ridiculous,” increasing the chances of a DHS shutdown on Friday.
The Texas Tribune reports that two cases of tuberculosis were detected at an El Paso ICE facility and CBS News reports that two inmates have measles at another Texas detention facility, ICE’s largest detention facility for children.
The sharing of Medicaid data with immigration officials is having an unintended effect:
"If hospitals tell people that their Emergency Medicaid information will be shared with ICE, it is foreseeable that many immigrants would simply stop getting emergency medical treatment," said Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families. "Half of the Emergency Medicaid cases are for the delivery of U.S. citizen babies. Do we want these mothers avoiding the hospital when they go into labor?"
On Feb. 6, the Committee emailed the letter signed by over 2,200 medical professionals to congressional offices, calling on them to reinstate and codify “sensitive location” protections for health care facilities and get ICE out of hospitals.
Other Trump Administration News
The New York Times: Trump Administration to Cut $600 Million in Health Funding From Four States. The cuts impact only blue states with Democratic governors.
MedPage Today has a rundown on what’s in the Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) reform section of the government funding bills Trump signed into law last week.
Apparently Dr. Oz did not get RFK Jr.’s memo about vaccines, urging Americans to “Take the [measles] vaccine, please. We have a solution for our problem.” This flu season, 60 kids have died, 90% of whom were not vaccinated.
Dr. Oz also wants Americans to work longer to fix the deficit and fund Medicare and Medicaid. (Video HERE.)
Kirk Milhoan, Chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), doubled down on his belief that public health is not the “first order” concern of the group. Americans should view the panel “more as a safety committee,” he told POLITICO. “Efficacy will be secondary,” he said.
The New York Times reports that, thanks to RFK Jr., food makers can say their foods have “no artificial colors” so long as the dyes they use aren’t petroleum based. Prior to that, they had to have no added dyes of any kind.
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s anti-vaxx ACIP committee isn’t finished raising doubts about COVID-19 vaccines.
“Six years ago, 85% of Americans, and 90% of Republicans, trusted the CDC. Now less than half trust the CDC on vaccines,” KFF President and CEO Drew Altman, PhD, said in a news release following the release of their latest polling. “The wars over COVID, science, and vaccines have left the country without a trusted national voice on vaccines, and that trust will take time to restore.”
Last year, the White House recommended leucovorin as a potential treatment for autism and the FDA announced that it would change leucovorin’s label to reflect potential benefits in reducing autism symptoms. This past week, the largest study to date of leucovorin’s effectiveness for treating autism traits was retracted because of data inconsistencies and statistical issues, according to a notice posted last week by the European Journal of Pediatrics.
With no evidence to support the claim, Kennedy is now claiming that the keto diet can cure schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, referencing a study that showed the diet can ease some symptoms in some people. The study’s author, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School Dr. Christopher Palmer, told Scientific American, “While I appreciate the secretary’s [apparent] enthusiasm for my research, I have never claimed to cure schizophrenia, and I have never used the word cure in any of my talks or my research.”
Public Citizen published a new report that dissects the grifting trio of Surgeon General candidate Dr. Casey Means, her brother and senior RFK Jr. adviser Callie Means, and their business partner Dr. Mark Harmon:
These individuals have not just advocated for alternative health treatments that often lack scientific support, they have profited from them. In other words, they exhibit the same sorts of conflicts of interest they denounce in traditional medicine. [...]
These influencers-turned-policy leaders’ espousal of principles of transparency and disentangling health from corporate greed are belied by their own business activities in the wellness industry. Their record as influencers suggests not that they will turn HHS away from undue corporate influence, but simply to undue influence from a different set of corporate actors.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) has released a report showing that NIH has terminated or frozen at least $561 million in research on four of the leading causes of death in America.
Reproductive Rights/Attacks on Medication Abortion
Gov. Gavin Newsom to Louisiana AG Liz Murrill who plans to sue California and New York in an effort to force the states to extradite doctors accused of prescribing abortion pills to patients in her state: “Go fuck yourself. California will never help you criminalize healthcare.”
The Sacramento Bee: Lawmakers send $90 million grant package for Planned Parenthood clinics to Newsom
Louisiana Illuminator: Drugmakers ask to intervene in Louisiana lawsuit against mailing abortion drugs:
Two drug manufacturers asked a federal judge Tuesday if they can intervene in a Louisiana-led lawsuit seeking to stop a key abortion drug from being mailed to patients.
The filings come less than a week after the Trump administration sought to pause the case until the Food and Drug Administration completes a review of mifepristone [...]
Unlike the federal government, GenBioPro, mifepristone’s generic manufacturer, and Danco, which makes the brand name version, would ask the court to dismiss Louisiana’s case entirely.
“We are increasingly concerned by extremists’ complete disregard for the large body of scientific evidence supporting mifepristone’s use and safety,” GenBioPro CEO Evan Masingill said in a statement. “We will not stand by while politically-motivated efforts put Americans’ access to medication abortion in jeopardy.”
West Virginia Watch: Bill prohibiting mailing abortion pills to West Virginia heads to state Senate for a vote
Texas Tech University canceled a speech by abortion provider Dr. Shelley Sella because, as Preston Parsons, president of the wider Texas Tech chapter of Turning Point USA and a Texas Tech University freshman, put it, she would have been illegally “speaking on government property, supporting an illegal activity.”
AP: Judge strikes down old Arizona abortion restrictions that clash with voter-backed guarantees:
Arizona must stop enforcing abortion restrictions that predate and contradict a 2024 voter-approved constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights, a judge ordered in a ruling released Friday. [...]
“Each of these laws infringe on a woman’s ‘autonomous decision making’ by mandating medical procedures and disclosure of information regardless of the patient’s needs and wishes,” [Maricopa Superior Court Judge Greg] Como wrote.
KCCI: Iowa lawmaker proposes bill that would ‘treat abortion as murder’
Turns out being anti-vaxx can be hazardous to your health. NPR reports that March for Life attendees may have been exposed to measles.
Other Health Care News
ABC News: 4 times as many measles cases in a few weeks than US typically averages in a whole year: CDC
The Washington Post looks at physicians who ran pandemic response and are now running for office.
POLITICO reports on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Rx boondoggle:
When Gov. Ron DeSantis ran for president in 2024, he touted his plan for Florida to become the first state in the country to import less expensive prescription drugs from Canada into the U.S.
Yet as his time in office dwindles, that plan has been all but scuttled — leaving one contractor with more than $82 million in taxpayer money and no results to show for it…[T]he state’s effort has stalled in part because it failed to win over the Canadian drug industry, which has consistently warned the Canadian government that the U.S. program jeopardized the country’s drug supply.