January 28, 2026 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | January 28, 2026
Committee News
Committee Exec. Dir. Dr. Rob Davidson is quoted in a Jan. 21 article by The Guardian titled, “The return of measles: how a once-vanquished disease is spreading again”:
Davidson has been a doctor for 28 years, and like many of his peers, he has never seen a case of measles – all because of vaccines, he said. Now, he is preparing for the day he might encounter the disease in a patient.
“This is something we have to be thinking about on a regular basis again,” he said. “It is a gut punch. It didn’t have to be this way.”
Committee Member Dr. Mark Lopatin, a retired rheumatologist in Pennsylvania, is quoted extensively in a Jan. 21 Penn Live article titled, “‘Making America Sick Again’: Protesters counter RFK Jr.’s speech in Pa. Capitol”:
“It’s so important to speak out against what RFK Jr. is doing and acknowledge how he’s hurting patients,” said Dr. Mark Lopatin, a retired rheumatologist. [...]
“When you have a health problem, you want to go to your physician,” Lopatin said. “Your physician’s the one who studied this. Your physician is the one who knows you rather than talking heads who have underlying agendas telling you what’s what and sabotaging scientific research for their own individual gains.”
On Jan. 22, Committee Member Dr. Max Cooper spoke at a rally in Philadelphia to urge the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to prevent impending funding cuts to Medicaid. He is quoted in an article by WHYY:
“We desperately need to increase our health care capacity, and all of our efforts on that front are threatened by making the reimbursement landscape more challenging,” said Dr. Max Cooper, who was an emergency physician at Crozer-Chester Medical Center.
Top News Stories
The escalation of ICE activity in Minnesota is disrupting care at hospitals and clinics that already were navigating shifting legal standards on immigration enforcement in their facilities.
Health workers say many patients aren’t coming in for necessary care out of fear they’ll be detained by federal agents.
“This has become a public health crisis,” Janell Johnson Thiele, a nurse and union leader at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, told Axios.
RELATED: The American Medical Association issued a statement saying that it is “deeply concerned” about ICE in hospitals and emergency rooms.
The Hill reports that the new Chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on
Immunization Practices (ACIP), Kirk Milhoan, does not believe that public health is the “first order” concern of the group and questions the need for a polio vaccine:
“As you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then,” he said…[I]t’s been very important to us, members of committee, is that what we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order.”
When asked where the line was for him when it came to individual autonomy and infringing on the safety of others, Milhoan said, “Let’s just flip that the other way around. What if the child gets a measles vaccine to protect your immunocompromised child and gets a negative consequence from that? Wasn’t that your child causing that child to be harmed?”
Despite Trump’s claim that he’s bringing prescription drug prices down, drugmakers have raised list prices on more than 850 drugs by a median 4% over 2025 prices.
North Carolina has erased the medical debt of 2.5 million residents.
Trump Administration News
At a White House roundtable discussion about health care in rural America with President Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and other healthcare advisers, Dr. Oz, administrator for CMS, said it’s “pretty cool” that they’re having to use robots to perform ultrasounds on pregnant Alabamans because of the shortage of OB/GYNs:
“Alabama has no OBGYNs in many of their counties, so they’re doing something pretty cool. They’re actually having robots do ultrasounds on these pregnant moms so we can actually get those images back to the big center so we know if this child has a problem and we know if that mother is at risk. We have one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world in the country with the best medicine in the world…”
He was immediately derided for making light of the terrible situation of health care deserts in Alabama. The state ranks in the top five worst states for maternal deaths alongside other southern states.
Former Louisiana surgeon general Ralph Abraham, the principal deputy director of the CDC, was recently asked if he felt the US losing its measles elimination status is a significant event. He basically shrugged, saying, “Not really…it’s just the cost of doing business.”
Meanwhile, South Carolina’s measles outbreak has hit nearly 650 people and is now the largest in the country with 538 people in quarantine and 33 in isolation. The state is likely to surpass the 762-case West Texas outbreak that began a year ago.
RELATED from Reuters (via MSN): South Carolina measles outbreak may drag on for weeks or months, state epidemiologist warns
Elon Musk jumped on the robot surgeon bandwagon recently, as well, saying that his “Optimus” robots will be better than human surgeons “at scale” within three years and going to medical school is all but pointless at this point.
Last Thursday, the US officially withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), a process begun by Trump the previous year as one of his first acts after being sworn in. TIME has a rundown on what that means for public health.
POLITICO reports that whether or not the US rejoins WHO largely depends on if its next leader makes Trump happy.
NBC News: Dozens of CDC databases are not being updated — most related to vaccines, study finds
The New York Times: After Donations, Trump Administration Revoked Rule Requiring More Nursing Home Staff:
The nursing home industry…had just won a 10-year moratorium on a rule initiated during President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration to require increased staffing levels in an effort to reduce neglect among residents, which had led to injuries and deadly infections.
Nonetheless, some in the industry, warning that the rule would have substantially increased costs, wanted to make it go away permanently.
So nursing home executives turned to a tool that has proved successful in getting President Trump’s attention: money.
Starting in early August, the industry began making donations that over the course of weeks would eventually total nearly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump and run by his allies.
Later that same month, a handful of nursing home executives who had given the biggest donations joined industry lobbyists at Mr. Trump’s golf club in suburban Washington to plead their case, according to campaign finance filings and people familiar with the meeting. [...]
Complete victory came a couple of months after that, when the White House approved a full revocation.
RFK Jr. doesn’t rule out “vaccine injury” as the cause of his spasmodic dysphonia, the cause of his “screwed up” voice.
Trump’s father, real estate developer Frederick “Fred” Trump, lived to be 93, but suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in the final years of his life.
“He had one problem,” Trump, 79, said of his father in the interview. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?”
Terris wrote that Trump then pointed to his head and turned to press secretary Karoline Leavitt to prompt him.
“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.
In the same article, Trump gets a White House physician to say he is a healthier president than Obama was.
Reproductive Rights/Attacks on Medication Abortion
Newsweek: US Abortion Bans Have Increased Pregnant Women’s Risk of Dying
Following a state Supreme Court ruling upholding abortion as health care and striking down the state’s abortion bans, anti-abortion extremists in Wyoming want another bite at the apple, saying that the court made “mistakes” when it decided two near-total abortion bans are unconstitutional:
Earlier this month, the high court struck down Wyoming’s Life is a Human Right Act and “chemical,” or medical, abortion ban, which together ban most abortions with a few exceptions. The majority of justices said those laws violate residents’ constitutional right to make their own healthcare decisions.
But the state disagrees. The Wyoming Attorney General’s Office filed a petition to rehear the case on Jan. 20.
The Washington Post: Illinois faces federal defunding for state law requiring abortion referrals
Other Health Care News
In last week’s newsletter, we mentioned that Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) reform legislation is moving forward in Congress. Passage of this legislation was thought to look promising as Matt Stoller, author of the BIG Substack, reveals:
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a payment network, but PBMs are much much more profitable than networks running commodities should be. And the reason is that they have become monopolies with the ability to divert revenue that is supposed to travel over their networks to themselves. [...]
That’s why it matters so much that the House and Senate Appropriations Committees announced they negotiated legislative text in this space. The legislative text is based on the work of Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Crapo, and has been added to “must-pass” bills to keep the government open, so barring something extremely unusual, it’ll be signed into law.
So what does the legislation actually do? Well, the simple answer is that it treats pharmacy benefit managers like public utilities. As I noted before, PBMs run payment networks that connect insurers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and employers. Congress is now saying they have to start treating those networks like public highways.
Similar legislation was nearly passed last year until Elon Musk threw sand in the gears.
The must-pass legislation faces hurdles, however, some from lawmakers who appear to be running interference for the PBM giants. More seriously, Democrats are planning to withhold their votes if the funding legislation includes funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security following the murder of another Minnesotan by federal agents:
“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the D.H.S. funding bill is included,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said in a statement, calling what is unfolding in Minnesota “appalling” and “unacceptable in any American city.”
Recognizing the depth of Democratic outrage, Senate Republicans immediately began examining whether they could separate the homeland security funding from the rest of the package and preserve the bulk of what had been a bipartisan deal to fund a large chunk of the government. The measure also funds the Pentagon and State Department, as well as health, education, labor and transportation programs.
Speaking of PBMs, you probably already know that UnitedHealth operates one of the “Big Three” PBMs. But did you know that they also run a bank that operates as a loan shark business and is driving independent health care providers out of business?
The legislation that would regulate PBMs is part of an omnibus package of bills that also includes positive elements supported by the Committee pertaining to hospital billing practices:
Starting in 2028, providers on separate campuses would be required to bill with separate National Provider Identifier numbers. The move is intended to keep hospitals, which are usually paid more because their facilities offer higher levels of care, from charging more for services at affiliated — but separate — locations.
The language is part of a larger push for “site-neutral” payments, in which care from health providers costs the same amount no matter where it’s offered.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has released its 2026 childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, which continues to recommend routine immunization for protection against 18 diseases, unlike the CDC. The move was endorsed by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and AAP says 12 other medical and healthcare organizations have, as well.
POLITICO: UnitedHealth pledges to return Obamacare profits to customers in 2026
RELATED from HEALTH CARE un-covered: UnitedHealth Group Throws a Hail Mary Before CEO Testifies:
UnitedHealth’s pledge was tucked neatly into prepared testimony from CEO Stephen Hemsley, just hours before he (and four other Big Insurance CEOs) are to be hauled into Congress to testify before two House hearings on health care affordability.
RELATED from The New York Times: Big Insurers Try to Shift Blame for High Health Costs to Hospitals and Drug Makers
File this article from CIDRAP in the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” file: Texas attorney general takes aim at pediatricians who vaccinate, claiming they are part of illegal scheme
Anti-vaxx disinformation is not just for vaccines anymore:
It is not a trend doctors want to see, but pediatricians and OB-GYNs say fewer and fewer parents of newborns are allowing their babies to receive a Vitamin K shot, which has been proven safe for decades.
“And they don’t really know why they’re refusing. They saw it in TikTok or somebody told them, and as a result, they don’t want it - but they can’t list reasons,” said Dr. Candice Foy of Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.
The Washington Post: Can your health records be sold for profit? A lawsuit says it’s happening.:
On the digital superhighway that allows sensitive patient health records to be shared by hospitals and doctors, something seemed off to engineers at Epic Systems: Among the providers with access to the network were names that sounded like law firms.
That observation in 2022 led to an investigation into what Epic — the nation’s largest vendor of electronic health record software — alleges are “organized syndicates” that fraudulently obtained access to nearly 300,000 patient records without their consent, in many cases marketing them to lawyers to allegedly mine for prospective clients.
Can you please comment on the new HHS autism Advisory committee members??