July 16, 2025 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | July 16, 2025
Attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act
On July 7, Committee Advocate Dr. James Fleming, a Kansas City psychiatrist, spoke at Fair Share America’s bus tour stop in Kansas City, MO, about the harm Medicaid cuts will have on Missourians and to hold Sen. Josh Hawley accountable for his vote.
On July 10, Committee Advocates Dr. Henry Rozycki and Dr. Laurence Clark spoke at an SEIU press conference on the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals. The physicians spoke at the General Assembly alongside U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee Chair Ghazala Hashmi, and other advocates. The event was covered by Black Virginia News and Blue Virginia.
RFK, Jr. wants you to know there are no cuts to Medicaid in the Trump budget bill, saying, “First of all, there’s no cuts on Medicaid. There is a — there’s a diminishment of the growth rate of Medicaid, which is bankrupting our country.”
CNN's Manu Raju had a walk-and-talk interview with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who voted for the Trump budget bill, then said, “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” During the interview, she struggled to defend her vote. Watch it HERE.
Following the passage of Trump’s budget bill, Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden tweeted “YES!” in response to another person’s tweet about the harm the new law will do to millions of Americans. He subsequently deleted the tweet but not before it received widespread condemnation.
Since many of the provisions of the Trump budget bill don’t kick in for months and years, hospitals believe they can fight to keep them from being implemented.
More than 300 rural hospitals may close because of the bill, according to research conducted by the University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center for Health Services Research.
Implementation of the new Medicaid work requirements is going to cost the states a LOT of money just to run the program since the Trump budget bill allocates a total of just $200 million to help them out.
While most of us are decrying the cruel new Republican law that will strip health care from millions and millions of Americans, one Republican wants to make things even more cruel. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson wants another bill to repeal Medicaid Expansion under the Affordable Care Act. If he is successful, up to 20 million people will lose their health care coverage.
Former top insurance executive-turned-industry whistleblower Wendell Potter (the guest on this week’s episode of the Paging America podcast with Dr. Rob and Miles Baker) says the Republicans’ new “Medicare Advantage Reform Act” is a sham and little more than a giveaway to “Wall Street-owned Medicare Advantage insurers.”
Trump Administration News
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says that immigrant farm workers who are deported could be replaced by Medicaid beneficiaries needing to satisfy new draconian work requirements, presumably by picking fruits and vegetables in summertime farm fields.
Following a July 8 Supreme Court decision allowing HHS to move ahead with its plans, “thousands of employees across US federal health agencies received an email Monday afternoon telling them they were out of a job as of the close of business,” CNN reports.
ICE agents are showing up in hospitals, “with ski masks and looking intimidating to the general patient, affecting the overall health of the community because it's creating an atmosphere of fear instead of wellness,” reports an emergency medicine physician in Los Angeles.
404 Media reports that ICE is using a massive but obscure insurance and medical bill database called “ISO ClaimSearch” to find people to deport.
President Trump is threatening to impose up to 200-percent tariffs on imported drugs “very soon.”
The CDC is poised to be led by two people who lack public health/medical experience.
RFK, Jr.’s rank hypocrisy was on display once again as he toured and touted a company whose meals contain ultra-processed ingredients, ingredients he claims are responsible for many of Americans’ health problems. “This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” he said after a visit to the plant.
In a move seemingly designed to raise doubts about its own legitimacy, the FDA has published 200 complete response letters for drugs that have already been approved.
Nine major pharmacy groups sent letters to some of the nation's largest health insurers and their trade association requesting that the insurance giants continue to cover vaccines without increases or changes to patient cost-sharing in the wake of the undermining of vaccines by the Trump administration.
Trump’s Department of Justice has subpoenaed more than 20 doctors and clinics involved in performing transgender medical procedures on children.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has dropped charges against a Utah plastic surgeon who threw away COVID-19 vaccines and gave children saline shots instead of the vaccine. He also was accused of selling faked vaccination cards.
Reproductive Rights
Following the passage of Trump’s budget bil, two regional Planned Parenthood affiliates have stopped accepting Medicaid.
Planned Parenthood’s Central West End clinic in St. Louis, however, will resume offering abortion care to patients following an order from Circuit Judge Jerri Zhang released last week.
For a second time, a county clerk in New York has refused to file a more than $100,000 civil judgment from Texas against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.
Via cleveland.com – Ohio court allows advanced practice clinicians to provide medication abortions.
Other Health Care News
On July 9, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal health care-fraud unit was questioning former UnitedHealth Group employees about the company’s Medicare billing practices, which appear designed to defraud the government.
On his Substack HEALTH CARE un-covered, Wendell Potter wrote, “I’ve been at this for so long and have seen so much. And it’s hard to overstate how significant the latest revelations from The Wall Street Journal are.”
Just seven months after voters in Missouri approved a paid family and medical leave law that requires employers to provide paid sick leave benefits to workers, the state legislature overturned it and, last week, Gov. Mike Kehoe signed it into law.
A federal judge in Texas agreed with the Trump administration and the credit industry that medical debt should be part of everyone’s credit reports, overturning a rule from the Biden administration that removed medical debt because it is based on one-time, short-term expenses.
Representative Earl "Buddy" Carter (R-GA) has introduced H.R. 4317, which has bipartisan support and would regulate pharmacy benefit managers.
Doctors will likely see a bump in Medicare pay rates starting in 2026.