This post is a sharing of part of the newsletter of the Committee to Protect Health Care
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Edited by Chris Savage
View the full newsletter on the web here: ProtectMed.org/MidweekPage56.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Midweek Page, a weekly newsletter from the Committee to Protect Health Care designed to keep members, advocates, and partners informed on the news, public policy, and politics of health care.
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Attacks on Medicaid
ACTION! ››› Physicians can unite and take action to protect patient access and public health. Save Medicaid HERE!
Last week, President Trump told Sean Hannity that “Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched.” The next morning, however, he posted on Truth Social that he supported the Republican’s budget package which would require massive cuts to Medicaid.
Leading up a potential House vote yesterday, Republicans were divided on whether or not to support what Trump is calling his “big, beautiful bill”. From reporting by Forbes:
The [GOP] fiscal year 2025 spending plan would likely lead to about $800 billion in cuts from Medicaid over the next decade, part of $2 trillion in overall spending cuts to help pay for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts plus boosts in defense and border spending. […] While the resolution doesn’t explicitly call for cuts to Medicaid, skeptical lawmakers have warned there’s virtually no other way to achieve the $880 billion in cuts the resolution tasks the Energy and Commerce Committee with finding without slashing Medicaid spending. […] Moderate Republicans in vulnerable districts and those where significant portions of their constituents are on Medicaid have expressed resistance to any Medicaid spending cuts. […]
Assuming all Democrats vote against the spending plan, Republicans can afford to lose just one vote under their 218-215 majority in the House.
In order to achieve the goal of cutting Medicaid by $880 billion, Republican lawmakers are proposing adding a work requirement to receive Medicaid benefits. As health care advocates know, Medicaid is health insurance, not a jobs program, and work requirements, explicitly spelled out in the notorious Project 2025 manifesto, are nothing more than sneaky cuts to Medicaid. Not only that, evidence shows they don’t work:
As Congress considers expanding work requirements to more states, Gibson said Arkansas and Georgia provide real-world examples of how these programs work.
“It costs a lot more than people think it’s going to cost, because the administrative costs are very high compared to the actual medical care that’s provided,” Gibson said. “It’s not cost-effective.”
In the end, the House voted to pass the budget resolution at just after 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday night.
The debate over kneecapping Medicaid is giving Congressional Democrats plenty of fodder to go after their Republican colleagues. And they plan to use it:
House Democrats hammered Republicans on health care to win back the majority in 2018. Now, they are preparing to punish them again.
Private messaging guidance from party leaders, sent to Democratic lawmakers ahead of a planned Tuesday budget vote and obtained by POLITICO, urged them to accuse Republicans of “betray[ing] the middle class by cutting Medicaid while giving huge tax breaks to billionaire donors.” And it encouraged members to “localize” the effects of slashing billions from Medicaid.
“It is critical that you make the damaging local impacts of this legislation real for the people you represent,” said the memo circulated on Monday.
ACTION! ››› Physicians can unite and take action to protect patient access and public health. Save Medicaid HERE!
Trump Administration Watch
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Since taking the helm at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) has created turmoil and anxiety that is interfering with the important work the department does. He has overseen the gutting of various agencies that work on drug and device approvals, maintaining food safety and responding to new threats, like avian flu, fostered a rise in vaccine skepticism (including postponing an annual CDC vaccine meeting), called into question antidepressants used by many Americans to treat mental health issues, slowed or even halted essential health care research, and driven many leaders in the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resign:
Kennedy has taken control of the nation’s health apparatus amid a barrage of firings and abrupt policy shifts, marking the start of a tenure that allies and adversaries alike equate to a hostile takeover of the agencies he spent the last two decades maligning. […]
The upheaval triggered by Kennedy’s confirmation as the nation’s top health official has shaken much of the HHS workforce, which endured days of mass layoffs that hollowed out whole offices and decimated morale.
Meanwhile, as makers of non-regulated supplements see this as a major opportunity to cash in, Big Pharma is feigning excitement about RFK Jr. taking the helm at HHS:
“We have a disruptor-in-chief in President Trump and a new HHS secretary — both of which are committed to overturning the status quo,” PhRMA president and CEO Steve Ubl said in his remarks at the industry group’s policy forum this week.
“We embrace disruption because we are disruptors,” he added. “We see an opportunity to fix what’s broken, to get more impact out of every health care dollar we spend and to make America healthier by launching a new era of medical innovation.”
The reality is that RFK Jr.’s antagonism toward vaccines and pharmaceuticals’ role in treating chronic illness has pharmaceutical executives frightened. Nonetheless, they have quickly abandoned their supposed commitments to public health in a desperate attempt to remain in the good graces of an unabashedly anti-health administration.
The U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled arguments in a case where Trump administration is defending ACA. The Trump administration has taken the surprising position of defending the status quo. However, it is believed to be a ploy to give RFK Jr. more control over an independent government panel known as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine:
The Supreme Court on Monday scheduled arguments for April 21 in a case that could decide the legality of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) requirement that insurers cover certain preventive services.
In a surprising move, the Trump administration said it will continue the Biden White House’s defense of that requirement.
But some legal experts said the arguments being presented by the Justice Department indicate a desire to give Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. substantial control over an independent government task force.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s “Department that’s not a department” of Governmental Efficiency’s (DOGE) slash-and-burn approach to reducing the federal work force, which appears to be having an out-sized impact on health agencies, is now coming back to bite them. The New York Times reports that the FDA has reinstated fired medical device, food, and legal staffers:
The workers had been fired as part of the Trump administration’s efforts, led by Elon Musk, to significantly downsize the federal government and cut costs. But the salaries of many of the fired F.D.A. staff members had been funded by fees companies pay the F.D.A., not taxpayer money.
Last week, Musk’s so-called DOGE team sent out a letter telling federal employees to provide a list of “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” by Monday of this week or be fired. (Their plan is to use artificial intelligence to determine who isn’t pulling their weight and should be fired.) The bullheaded directive appears to have largely flopped as department heads across the federal government have instructed employees not to comply. For example, at HHS, employees were told participation in Musk’s demand is voluntary and poses a national security threat:
Leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told employees the mandatory requirement to respond to an unusual email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which asks each worker in the government to name five productive tasks from the past week, is now rescinded.
Participation is voluntary and “there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,” an email shared with Fierce Healthcare shows. […]
Perhaps most alarmingly, workers were told to “assume what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.”
As Musk is working to blow up our federal government and meddle in European elections, he’s also showering money on a conservative running for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. The New York Times reports that the race has important implications for reproductive rights in the state:
The state’s abortion laws, as well as its legislative and congressional district lines, are likely to be determined by whichever faction controls the state high court in coming months.
Finally, in other Trump administration news, the Washington Post reports that after planning to shut down the free COVID-19 test program, the federal government reversed itself. Also, AXIOS reports that an annual rare disease meeting has been pushed off by HHS. Reproductive Rights
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case, Hill v. Colorado, that would do away with buffer zones around abortion clinics and ultra-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas is livid:
“I would have taken this opportunity to explicitly overrule Hill,” he wrote in his dissent… He argued the court erroneously treated the Hill case differently than others pertaining to the First Amendment because abortion was involved, writing, “Hill’s abortion exceptionalism turned the First Amendment upside down.”
In Wyoming, state legislators are poised to enact a law that would likely shut down the only clinic providing procedural abortions in the state.
In nearby Oklahoma, anti-abortion activists want to give women the death penalty for getting an abortion:
A bipartisan coalition of state senators rebuffed a bill that could have subjected women who receive an abortion to the death penalty, but supporters are vowing to resurrect it.
“We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,” said Alan Maricle, who is part of the Abolitionist Society of Tulsa. […]
The measure would have subjected women who receive an abortion to homicide charges and penalties including life in prison and death sentences.
The bill would have also outlawed abortion-inducing drugs.
Prescription Drug Affordability Boards
Colorado
On February 15, The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction published an op-ed by a retired Colorado emergency medicine physician and Committee Advocate Dr. Tom Meason titled, “Prescription drugs do nothing if patients can’t afford them”:
As a physician, I have seen firsthand the challenges and inequities of our health-care system. But nothing prepared me for the experience of navigating it myself while seeking treatment for a peripheral nerve injury.My physician recommended Enbrel, a medication most commonly prescribed for autoimmune conditions, to help manage my condition. While I was hopeful that it might bring relief, the financial burden quickly became its own source of pain. That’s why I’m glad that Colorado’s Prescription Drug Affordability Board has an opportunity to make Enbrel more affordable, and why I urge them to take it. […]
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