June 16, 2025 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | June 16, 2025
In Memoriam: Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman
On June 14, an assassin, posing as a police officer, entered the home of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and shot her and her husband Mark to death. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called the assassination “an act of targeted political violence.”
The Committee in the News
On June 9, the Committee and our partners put out a press release with a round-up about the Protect Our Medicaid Tour across Virginia featuring elected officials, physicians, and advocates. During the tour, they spoke out on the Medicaid cuts moving through Congress that would strip 277,000 Virginians of their health care.
On June 11, Colorado Politics published an op-ed by Committee Member Dr. Yolanda Bogaert titled, “Rx affordability board has chance to decrease cost of Enbrel”.
Attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act
The latest CBO analysis puts the number of people who will lose health care from Republicans’ attacks on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at 16 million. Some are from cuts to the ACA marketplace (a portion of which are from the GOP bill) as well as a failure to extend the premium subsidies for marketplace policies (which hasn’t happened yet but probably will as they expire at the end of the year unless Congress extends them.)
Natasha Sarin at The Washington Post writes that the loss of insurance from reconcilation bill could mean more than 100,000 unnecessary deaths. However, that’s is likely a conservative estimate
As bad as the House bill is, the Senate bill is shaping up to be worse.
A Robert Wood Johnson foundation study shows that one in three adults who work or attend school while enrolled in Medicaid expansion coverage would still be at risk of losing coverage under work requirements in the House-passed 2025 budget bill.
New Navigator polling shows that Medicaid is only getting more popular and Republicans’ efforts to slash it are wildly unpopular, even among Republicans themselves.
KFF Health News: : ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Would Batter Rural Hospital Finances, Researchers Say.
Reproductive Rights
Legislators in Louisiana have approved a bill that allows Louisianans to sue out-of-state physicians who prescribe abortion pills.
On June 10, Maine legislators rejected LD 975, a bill that would have imposed new restrictions and limits on abortion in the state. One of the elements of LD 975 was the requirement for a death certificate for ALL miscarriages.
News 5 Cleveland: Republican lawmakers in Ohio to propose total abortion and IVF ban.
404 Media: A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion.
Trump Administration News
Following his firing of every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the group that has advised the government on vaccine policy for more than 60 years, RFK, Jr. has replaced eight of them. Unsurprisingly, he has chosen some very questionable people for the committee. STAT has a thorough round-up of the eight new members HERE.
Bloomberg reports that two of the new members have been paid expert witnesses for plaintiffs suing Merck & Co. over some of the drug company’s inoculations targeting measles, mumps and cancer.
All of the ousted ACIP members wrote an opinion piece for JAMA titled, “Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at a Crossroads.” In it, they say their removal has “left the U.S. vaccine program critically weakened” and “have stripped the program of the institutional knowledge and continuity that have been essential to its success over decades.”
RFK, Jr. is giving U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy a pick for one of the remaining vacancies.
A former member of the ACIP is recommending that physicians now go to sources other than ACIP for vaccine scheduling recommendations.
It wasn’t just the ACIP members who were purged. Staff who supported their work are gone now, too.
In a jaw-dropping move, the VA has issued new guidelines that stem from an Executive Order signed by Trump in January, allowing doctors in VA hospitals to refuse to treat Democrats and unmarried veterans.
RFK, Jr’s staff. have given data on Medicaid recipients to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
RFK, Jr. recently announced that he will “probably” bar federal researchers from publishing in major medical journals like The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA because he believes they are “sock puppets” that are “all corrupt” and beholden to Big Pharma. Despite this, Marty Makary, Trump’s new FDA commissioner, and Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) took to JAMA to lay out their vision for the FDA.
On Monday, a federal judge ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore grants that the agency cut based on gender ideology or diversity, equity and inclusion. Judge Young, a Reagan appointee, also said, “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion — but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it — that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya faced tough questioning from members of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee last week. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the subcommittee's ranking member, told Bhattacharya that proposed NIH budget request, which contains a roughly 40% cut in NIH funding, appears to be part of a plan to “dismantle the U.S. biomedical research enterprise.”
The Association of American Medical College calls the cuts an “existential threat”. The oncology community is equally livid, calling the “draconian” cuts a threat to “this moment of unparalleled scientific opportunity.” Even Trump’s former Surgeon General, Gerome Adams, is condemning the move.
Nearly a hundred nutrition scientists at NIH have sent an open letter to Bhattacharya, demanding that he commit to “independent science at NIH, free from political interference.” This letter follows on the heels of a similar letter, known as The Bethesda Declaration, that was signed by more than 300 current or former workers from all 27 NIH institutes and sent to Bhattacharya on June 12. That letter demands the restoration of cancelled grants, focusing on "life-saving science" and grants "delayed or terminated for political reasons."
ProPublica is tracking the research that has been lost due to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the NIH.
The HHS’s budget proposal calls for the elimination of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's chronic disease and global health centers along with some of the institutes that are currently part of the NIH, consolidating them into a federal agency that would be known as the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA.)
Following a massive reduction in force, the CDC has quietly reinstated over 460 laid-off employees, MedPage Today reports. That’s almost 20% of the 2,400 who were originally let go.
The HHS decision to remove the recommendation for healthy pregnant people to get the COVID-19 vaccine is being justified using a study that literally proves that the vaccine is safe for pregnant people.
POLITICO points out that RFK, Jr. seems to have overlooked one very important thing in his effort to “Make American Healthy Again”: smoking.
Other Health Care News
WABI 5: Paid Family Medical Leave program in Maine will remain the way it is – The Maine Legislature defeated a series of bills Monday night that were designed to change or repeal the state’s Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program.
In Louisiana, a bill is working its way through the state legislature that would prohibit companies from owning both pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and drug stores. The Senate killed the bill right at the end of the legislative session. Gov. Jeff Landry says he may call a special session in order to move it along swiftly.
Meanwhile, CVS, whose business model is threatened by the PBM bill, is now being investigated by the state attorney general for using its customers’ private information to send text messages, urging people to contact their legislators and ask them to oppose the bill. CVS’s effort appears to be working: When the bill passed the state House on a whopping 88-4 vote, one of those voting against it was a Democrat who said she had received messages from people in her district urging her not to because they feared that they wouldn’t be able to access their medications.
In related Louisiana news, the legislature did pass other PBM-related legislation which now goes to Gov. Landry for his signature.