October 22, 2025 – The Week in Health Care News
Your digest on the happenings in health care this week | October 22, 2025
Committee News
On Oct. 13, Committee Member Dr. Max Cooper spoke at a news conference hosted by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon to highlight the importance of taking action on health care amid the shutdown fight. The event was covered by Metro Philadelphia in their article, “Local leaders call for action on health care amid government shutdown” which features a quote from Dr. Cooper.
Dr. Cooper appeared on a Facebook Live on October 14th with Planned Parenthood Votes on the importance of the Supreme Court Retention election.
On Oct. 15, Committee Executive Director Dr. Rob Davidson appeared on The Mark Thompson Show to talk about the politicization of the FDA and changing vaccine guidelines.
Michigan Advance: No savings for Michigan, only cuts to health care (written by third-year University of Michigan medical student Andrew Martinez and Committee Member Dr. Alex Janke)
On Oct. 17, Richmond family medicine and Committee Advocate Dr. Susan Miller participated in a roundtable for World Menopause Day with Rep. Jennifer McClellan (VA-04) to highlight how many Virginians could lose access to no-cost contraception if the ACA premium subsidies expire and urge leaders to renew the credits (video HERE.)
On Oct. 17, the Cap Times published an op-ed by Committee Advocate Dr. Callie Cox Bauer titled, “Wisconsin families deserve health data privacy.”
Government Shutdown News
Efforts to extend the ACA premium subsidies to get the government open again seem to be falling on deaf ears in the White House. Vice President JD Vance said on Face the Nation, “The tax credits go to some people deservedly. And we think the tax credits actually go to a lot of waste and fraud within the insurance industry.” However, Republicans are finding themselves in a familiar Obamacare dilemma while Trump is MIA in the negotiations and leaving the country at the end of the week.
In Georgia, the 2026 ACA marketplace insurance rates have been released and the increases are shocking.
POLITICO: It’s ‘too late’ to extend ACA subsidies without major disruptions, some states and lawmakers say
Roll Call: USDA’s Rollins says food stamp funding to dry up in two weeks
New polling by Navigator shows that, by a 19-point margin, more people are more worried about health care costs rising and Americans losing health care coverage than they are about the shutdown itself.
BBC reports that a small number of Republicans are open to extending the ACA premium subsidies, at least for a couple of years.
Despite a bipartisan effort to stop cuts to the Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) program, $8 billion of cuts went into effect anyway thanks to the shutdown. In a letter to Congressional leaders, a coalition of lawmakers said, “The Medicaid DSH program is a vital resource for hospitals treating low-income patients in our communities. The funds are used to support critical hospital services in both rural and urban areas of the country, including burn and trauma unit services and maternal and child health care.” An additional $16 billion in cuts is set to follow for the next two fiscal years.
With the recent firings, nearly one in four CDC employees have been let go this year. Former officials are sounding the alarm that the move has left the US unprepared to deal with “daily public health as well as for emergencies.” Evidence of that is seen in the silencing of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report – referred to as the “Voice of CDC” – which isn’t being published during the shutdown, a departure from the past.
In addition, the Department of Education fired nearly everyone in their special ed office.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought predicts that it’s likely that more than 10,000 federal employees are likely to be let go during the shutdown, fulfilling a core goal of Project 2025 of which he was a key author.
STAT has the details on CMS’s on-again-off-again threats to stop Medicare payments to doctors.
HEALTH CARE un-covered shows how the big health care winners during the shutdown are private insurance companies because they can operate with far less oversight. “During shutdowns, the watchdogs go silent, but the wolves keep hunting,” writes Wendell Potter.
Trump Administration News
The cost of Trump’s budget bill has exploded from $4.9 billion to $8.8 billion thanks to Medicare price negotiation exemptions being given to orphan drugs.
The Washington Post: Poll shows who supports RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement. Apparently, it’s not Senate Majority Leader John Thune who recently said, “If I were a woman, I’d be talking to my doctor and not taking, you know, advice from RFK or any other government bureaucrat for that matter.” It’s also apparently not his nephew Joe Kennedy III.
Maybe it’s because of things like this: RFK Jr. to unveil new guidance encouraging more saturated fats:
Kennedy has argued that Americans need more trans and saturated fats, not less, saying foods like butter, cheese, milk and red meat have been unfairly demonized for decades. The updated guidance could be released as soon as this month.
MedPage Today: Want to Call CDC to Report a Possible Disease Outbreak? Fuhgeddaboutit:
Thinking of calling CDC to report a potential disease outbreak? Don’t bother; no one will answer, a former CDC employee said Tuesday.
“If it’s an infection that is being seen in the hospital in four different patients, and the infection control nurse calls [the CDC] ... You are working with the physicians, the nurses, the schools, the restaurants, to try and sort through, ‘What is going on and what can we do?’” said Karen Remley, MD, MPH, former director of the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities… But [now] there’s nobody to answer the phone.”
Meanwhile, new AXIOS/IPSOS polling shows a marked decline in trust of federal health agencies.
Meanwhile, via The Hill: “A group of two dozen public health leaders for major U.S. municipalities signed a letter published Monday, stating their united stance on supporting vaccinations and denouncing ‘repeated false claims’ coming from federal officials.”
Former CDC officials are saying that physician groups need to ‘step up to the plate’ as CDC guidance becomes harder to trust. At the same time, NPR reports, rural doctors are battling misinformation and outright hostility.
KFF Health News: RFK Jr. Misses Mark in Touting Rural Health Transformation Fund [RHTF] as Historic Infusion of Cash
To be clear, the administration doesn’t see the RHTF as somehow replacing the billions of dollars rural hospitals have lost. Rather, they want the hospitals and affiliated organizations to use the funds to invest in new ways of delivering health care for far less money so the hospitals can get by without the $137 billion or more in federal funding they’ve lost. “This isn’t a backfill of operating budgets,” said Abe Sutton, innovation director for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “We’ve been really clear on that.”
ICE is hiring health workers because so many detainees are dying in custody. They’re also detaining pregnant women against federal policy.
The Washington Post: Errors in new Medicare plan portal mislead seniors on coverage
Thanks to inaction by the Trump administration, black lung disease is making a comeback and miners traveled to Washington, DC, to protest.
On the heels of his deal with Pfizer, this past week Trump announced a deal with the British drugmaker AstraZeneca to lower drug prices. He also announced new discount IVF treatments as part of his “TrumpRx” website. The drugs would have “very, very heavily reduced prices — prices that you won’t even believe,” he said.
In January, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy that designated hospitals, schools and churches “sensitive locations” that were off limits to immigration enforcement. The fallout has been predictable. AXIOS reports that is sparking fear and confusion in exam rooms and emergency departments amid a surge in ICE arrests.
“The Trump administration’s new global health strategy, released last month, lists its most important goal as outbreak prevention and response, both to protect Americans and to safeguard the economy,” reports The New York Times. Then they turned around and defunded the programs that would have achieved that goal.
MedPage Today: Democratic Governors Form a Public Health Alliance in Rebuke of Trump Administration
There’s a new attack on vaccines:
Federal health officials are examining the feasibility of taking aluminum salts out of vaccines, a prospect that vaccine experts said would wipe out about half of the nation’s supply of childhood inoculations and affect shots that protect against whooping cough, polio and deadly flu. [...]
Aluminum salts have been in vaccines since the 1920s and are added to enhance the immune-stimulating effect against the virus or bacteria covered by the inoculation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has been a longtime critic of aluminum in vaccines, which he has suggested is linked to autism.
In case you thought he couldn’t get more bizarre, RFK Jr. is planning to investigate chemtrails as part of a larger investigation of illicit climate and weather control and other supposed geoengineering efforts.
Reproductive Rights/Attacks on Medication Abortion
The Michigan Independent: Republican senators ask HHS and FDA to suspend distribution of abortion drug. (Featuring a quote from Committee Board Chair Dr. Kristen Lyerly.)
After being unable to join a lawsuit filed by Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri against the FDA, seeking to restrict access to mifepristone, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has filed a lawsuit of her own. She is challenging the FDA’s decision to let abortion pills be sent through the mail, saying the change violates state law and puts women at risk.
A new bill filed in Florida would update the state’s wrongful death statute to include embryos and allow people to seek civil damages for the wrongful death of a fetus or “unborn child”, reports Jessica Valenti at ABORTION, EVERY DAY. “Legal experts and abortion rights advocates have…warned that wrongful death bills for embryos and fetuses could allow men to retaliate against ex-partners for having abortions,” she writes.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has introduced legislation to prohibit ACA health insurance policies from covering abortion services, even in states where abortion is legal and protected.
But there’s some good repro rights news out of Missouri for a change: The Western District Court of Appeals rejected a request by the attorney general’s office to reinstate several abortion restrictions, focusing mainly on “targeted regulation of abortion providers,” or TRAP laws.
Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, equates birth control and pesticides:
“You’ve got the pill, and it just goes hand in hand with the rise…of industrial agriculture, the spraying of these pesticides,” she said on [Tucker] Carlson’s show. “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles. We have lost respect for life.”
Other Health Care News
If you’re wondering how lucrative Medicare is for insurance companies, AARP received $9 billion in royalties from UnitedHealthcare last year as part of an agreement to continue selling AARP-branded Medicare products.
BenefitsPRO shows another way that insurance giants and Pharmacy Benefit Managers are fleecing customers:
Here’s how they work. Some employers contract with insurers working alongside pharmacy benefit managers and third-party vendors, who designate certain covered specialty drugs as “non-Essential Health Benefits” (”non-EHB”). It is no coincidence that the drugs selected are the ones whose drug manufacturers offer copay assistance to patients… [L]abeling the drugs as non-EHB, the health plan can sidestep Affordable Care Act protections on patient cost-sharing and set employee copays far above the allowed limit.
To avoid those unaffordable copays -- which can total well over $1,000 a month after deductibles -- patients are coerced into enrolling in a special program with the third-party vendor. That entity takes the patient’s information and signs them up for the copay assistance program offered by the drug’s manufacturer. Instead of applying that assistance to the patient’s out-of-pocket maximum or deductible, the PBM, vendor, and insurer split the extracted copay assistance amongst themselves.
This scheme is known as a copay maximizer program. Patients can choose not to enroll, but they’d then incur prohibitively high co-insurance or be forced to pay the full list price for needed medications. And that spending still wouldn’t be applied to their out-of-pocket maximums or deductibles, since the medication was designated as non-EHB.
AP: California to begin selling affordable state-branded insulin beginning next year
The 19th: Cervical cancer could be eradicated. But not with Medicaid cuts and anti-vax politics.