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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump endorsed a House Republican budget plan that would impose hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, a healthcare program jointly funded by federal and state money, which helps provide coverage for Americans with lower incomes, including pregnant women, children and people with disabilities, among others. Trump endorsed the plan over another Senate proposal, which sought to pass much of his legislative agenda through two separate bills. Trump, who had previously said either plan was fine with him, said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday that the House plan was better, in his mind, because it puts most everything he wants into “one big beautiful bill.” (Walker, 2/19)

Trump’s seemingly contradictory comments — shared in a Fox News interview Tuesday evening and then Truth Social Wednesday morning — are also fueling confusion and concern among Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are looking to him for political cover as they contemplate a potentially risky vote. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said he has “concerns” about “the House’s proposal for very deep cuts to Medicaid.” (Leonard, Cancryn and King, 2/19)

Health plans are lobbying the Trump administration to scrap a proposal dating from the final days of the Biden administration that would require Medicare and Medicaid to cover anti-obesity drugs, including GLP-1s, for weight loss. Why it matters: The final decision, expected in April, is an important barometer of which health care interests have President Trump's ear, since many providers, patients and drugmakers want Medicare to cover the products. (Goldman, 2/20)

A bill that could repeal voter-approved Medicaid expansion narrowly cleared its first chamber of the Idaho Legislature. After an hour and a half of debate Wednesday, the Idaho House on a narrow 38-32 vote passed a Medicaid expansion reform-or-repeal bill. House Bill 138, by Rep. Jordan Redman, R-Coeur d’Alene, requires Idaho to enact 11 Medicaid policy changes or repeal Medicaid expansion — a policy that lets more low-income Idahoans be eligible for the health insurance assistance program. (Pfannenstiel, 2/19)

The office of Indiana Gov. Mike Braun announced on Wednesday that Braun recently signed an executive order surrounding Medicaid costs for Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, therapy. According to a news release from Braun’s office, the order establishes a group that would explore the containment of the cost for the therapy while maintaining the quality of care for Hoosier children and young adults. ABA is a therapy for the early treatment of autism. (Gay, 2/19)

President Trump remains blocked from ending birthright citizenship in the U.S. after a federal appeals court ruling on Wednesday night. The big picture: Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship is facing multiple lawsuits, including from Democratic attorneys general and civil rights groups who say it violates the Constitution. The case is likely to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. (Falconer, 2/19)

In one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first moves as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the agency released guidance Wednesday for the US government, external partners and the public that offers a narrower definition of sex than the ones used by many scientists and that aligns with a January executive order signed by President Donald Trump. The department also launched a website promoting these definitions and created a video defending a ban on transgender women participating in women’s sports. (Christensen, 2/20)

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020. (Cain Miller and Paris, 2/20)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should recruit scientists who want to seek proof that vaccines cause autism, one of his past advisers said at a POLITICO event Wednesday. Del Bigtree, who was Kennedy’s communications director during his presidential campaign and now leads a group promoting Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, dismissed widely replicated studies finding no link to autism because he alleged that they were conducted by scientists who wanted to find that result. (Payne, 2/19)

Dr. Mehmet Oz has agreed to divest stakes worth millions of dollars in numerous healthcare companies, including UnitedHealth Group and HCA Healthcare, if he is confirmed as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In an ethics agreement posted by the Office of Government Ethics Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead CMS said he would end investments in many companies within 90 days of confirmation. He also said upon confirmation, he would resign from numerous advisory positions he holds. (Early, 2/19)

Drug company executives on Tuesday touted their industry’s work to keep and make Americans healthy during a Washington event that came on the heels of one of their biggest critics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., being sworn in to helm federal health agencies. PhRMA CEO Steve Ubl took to the stage at The Anthem to carefully walk the line between supporting the Trump administration and cautioning against policies that could damage the drug industry — obliquely nodding at the tension between the industry’s goal of getting new medicines to market and Kennedy’s desire to address health problems with less pharma influence. (Gardner and Lim, 2/19)

AdvaMed, the medical device lobby, pushed back Wednesday on the Trump administration’s weekend firings of Food and Drug Administration employees. AdvaMed CEO Scott Whitaker sent a letter Tuesday to administrators at the Health and Human Services Department urging them to consider the terminations’ potential ramifications on patient health and medical device innovation. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, he noted that many of the roles were funded, at least in part, by fees paid by device makers to help speed the review of their products. Device companies have already noticed delays, he said. (Lawrence, 2/19)

Former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said she is concerned about the speed at which Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is scrapping federal programs to cut costs. “I think that certainly looking at payments is absolutely OK, but you need to make sure that you’re doing it with knowledge about what these programs do and a real understanding that if you make a tweak here, you can really have a significant effect on people, because this is real money,” Brooks-LaSure said Wednesday at a health care event hosted by Politico. (Irwin, 2/19)

Professors, researchers, and faculty members from several Chicago colleges rallied at the University of Illinois Chicago on Wednesday to protest the Trump administration's planned funding cuts to research grants. ... Faculty members from UIC, the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and many more gathered at UIC on Wednesday to talk about their schools' groundbreaking research, medical advancements, and workforce training for students. (Feurer, 2/19)

Groups that receive foreign aid are asking a federal judge to find the Trump officials now running the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in contempt of court for not reopening the flow of money to thousands of programs around the globe, as the judge has ordered. In a filing Wednesday afternoon, the plaintiffs said that each day the funding is delayed, millions of people across the world who rely on it suffer. It urged the judge to impose penalties until the U.S. government complies. (Langfitt, 2/19)

Scientists around the country fear that an apparent halt of the Federal Register's publication of meeting schedules for research grant reviews is an attempt to evade a judge's order that was supposed to lift the Trump administration's freeze on federal research funding. Pausing Federal Register notice publication means numerous NIH study sections and advisory councils -- panels of subject experts who evaluate each grant application -- can't meet to make decisions on those proposals. (Clark, 2/19)

At the nation’s borders, federal workers keep the country safe in many ways: Some investigate sick passengers. Some examine animals for dangerous pathogens. And some inspect plants for infestations that could spread in this country. Late last week, the Trump administration dispatched hundreds of those federal employees with the same message that colleagues at other agencies received: Their services were no longer needed. (Mandavilli and Anthes, 2/19)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stopping a successful flu vaccination campaign that juxtaposed images of wild animals, such as a lion, with cute counterparts, like a kitten, as an analogy for how immunization can help tame the flu. The news was shared with staff during a meeting on Wednesday, according to two CDC staffers who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, and a recording reviewed by NPR. (Stone, 2/19)

While millions of vaccine doses are made using chicken eggs each year, experts say the current egg shortage won't hamper next year's flu vaccine production cycle. Previous bird flu outbreaks and decades-old public health infrastructure have led industry to protect the hens used for vaccine production, experts told MedPage Today. Moreover, flu vaccines that don't require eggs are available, and mRNA-based flu shots are in development. (Robertson, 2/19)

After a moderate influenza season last year, flu has returned with a vengeance this winter. The CDC estimates flu has killed between 16,000 to 79,000 people (including 68 children), infected between 29 million and 51 million people, and hospitalized up to 820,000 since Oct. 1. This season is now being regarded as the most severe flu season in the U.S. in 15 years. (Asin, 2/19)

Workers at the only lab in California with the authority to confirm high-risk bird flu cases will go on a brief strike next week, claiming that years of understaffing, poor training and burnout have left them struggling to protect the state’s food chain from the rampant virus. ... Limited career advancement and poor management prompted a staff exodus early last year, former lab workers said, and chronic staffing shortages have since increased errors and left remaining workers ill-equipped to handle virus testing. (Ziegler, 2/19)

Some lots of raw pet food sold in two states are being recalled after two indoor cats became ill with bird flu earlier this month and were euthanized due to the severity of their illnesses. Officials in Oregon and Washington issued public health alerts late last week after tests confirmed highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the felines, which lived in different households in Multnomah County, Oregon. (Gibson, 2/19)

As the Trump administration dismantles the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and retreats from funding global public health efforts, mpox – formerly known as monkeypox – is at greater risk of becoming a wider global emergency, according to aid workers and global health experts. “It’s a real mistake not to be doing everything we can to control this while we’re still able to,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University focusing on risk assessment of infectious diseases. “Taking huge steps backwards is only going to make everything worse.” (Adams, 2/20)

U.S. hospitals are on track for a crisis come 2032 that may lead to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths each year. This is the warning of a study by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who found that hospitals are not only fuller now than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic—but are on track to exceed the critical threshold of 85 percent hospital occupancy within just seven years. (Randall, 2/19)

UnitedHealth Group’s insurance business is offering certain employees the option to accept buyouts if they agree to resign in the coming days, CNBC reported Wednesday. The healthcare conglomerate is making a voluntary program available to some full- and part-time employees in UnitedHealthcare’s benefits operations division who submit their resignation by March 3, according to the report. (Berryman, 2/19)

Health insurance customers in more parts of the country have new advocates in their battles against claims denials: state governments. States have long had regulatory authority over the individual and small-group health insurance markets, but a growing number of agencies is taking on a greater role assisting consumers as they transition out of a federal system and take matters into their own hands. (Tepper, 2/19)

Sutter Health will invest $1 billion to expand its services across Northern California's East Bay region, including a new flagship campus in Emeryville. The health system announced Wednesday that the campus will feature a new medical center with up to 200 beds as well as a regional destination for ambulatory care. The plans also leave room for future expansion, according to the announcement. (Minemyer, 2/19)

It’s been one year since the unprecedented Change Healthcare cyberattack crippled hospitals, medical groups, payers and pharmacies. For some providers, troubles linger. The industry continues to grapple with the aftermath of the breach of UnitedHealth Group's technology subsidiary, which exposed data on 190 million consumers. ... UnitedHealth is still working to bring at least three platforms fully online, according to its Change Healthcare status webpage Tuesday. (Berryman, 2/19)

The Federal Trade Commission’s legal action against the three largest pharmacy benefit managers will move forward after a federal judge rejected their bid to halt the case. In a court filing Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp denied a request by CVS Health’s CVS Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group’s OptumRx for a preliminary injunction in the FTC’s in-house case examining their influence over insulin costs. (Berryman, 2/19)

Just a week after an American Academy of Neurology (AAN) committee found "limited efficacy" for epidural steroid injections to treat chronic back pain, an international panel is going much further, calling for an end to these and a host of other common interventions. (Gever, 2/19)

Hims & Hers Health Inc. is expanding beyond its successful foray into providing copycat weight-loss drugs with the acquisition of a home blood-testing company. The telehealth provider purchased Sigmund NJ LLC, which uses a US-approved device for home testing of hormones, cholesterol and other markers of health, according to a statement on Wednesday. New Jersey-based Sigmund markets its services as Trybe Labs. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. (Muller and Lauerman, 2/19)

Four years after Apple announced a study to explore how its products could be used to support people with asthma, an application developed from that research is now available to the public. Called Asthma Tool, the free software allows users to track their symptoms and triggers and to use wearable devices to monitor vitals, like resting heart rate, for signs that asthma may be acting up. (Aguilar, 2/20)

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis. The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found. The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital. (Presser, Suozzo, Chou, Surana, 2/20)

Abortion clinics in the staunchly Republican state of Missouri this week resumed procedures for the first time in years, despite a continued push by conservative state leaders to block a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights that voters approved in November. It was a remarkable moment after an extended fight. Missouri was the first state to enact an abortion ban after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Then in 2024, it became the first state with a near-total ban to approve a citizen-sponsored abortion rights amendment. (Zernike, 2/19)

Doctors at Main Line Health can now monitor new mothers' blood pressure remotely to keep them safe and healthy. High blood pressure is a leading cause of maternal mortality. Now, Lankenau Medical Center has a user-friendly way to help moms at risk. Newborn baby Adonis is thriving, but his mother, Jennifer Noble, is being carefully monitored for preeclampsia, chronic high blood pressure that can be very dangerous. (Stahlv, 2/19)

Accidental drug overdose deaths in San Francisco are ticking back up after several months of declines, according to preliminary figures released by the Medical Examiner’s office Wednesday. January marked the third consecutive month that overdose fatalities increased — a reversal of the hopeful downward trend that began last summer and held through most of the fall. (Ho, 2/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: An Ice Rink To Fight Opioid Crisis: Drug-Free Fun Vs. Misuse Of Settlement Cash

A Kentucky county nestled in the heart of Appalachia, where the opioid crisis has wreaked devastation for decades, spent $15,000 of its opioid settlement money on an ice rink. That amount wasn’t enough to solve the county’s troubles, but it could have bought 333 kits of Narcan, a medication that can reverse opioid overdoses. Instead, people are left wondering how a skating rink addresses addiction or fulfills the settlement money’s purpose of remediating the harms of opioids. (Pattani, 2/20)

The Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to give preliminary approval to remove language that requires cultural competency as part of continuing education requirements for several licensed mental health professions. This move has prompted support from those who are against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and opposition from mental health providers who say it will hurt the experience for patients, particularly those of color. However, officials with the state’s mental health licensing authority say people have misunderstood their motives, as political discussions surrounding DEI have turned a simple rule change into something more. (Simpson, 2/19)

Heartland Alliance Health announced Wednesday that its clinics and food pantries will remain open, reversing an earlier decision to close at the end of the month. The nonprofit said on its website that all its health clinics, food pantries, and medical case management and outreach services will remain open and active. (Harrington, 2/19)

A young girl’s death by suicide is being investigated by school police after her mother says she was bullied by other students who hurled insults at her, claiming her family was in the US illegally. Eleven-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza died on February 8 – five days after her mother found her unresponsive at their home in Gainesville, Texas, according to an online obituary. Her funeral took place Wednesday morning. (Mascarenhas, Lavandera and Killough, 2/19)

Personalized mRNA vaccines show promise as pancreatic cancer treatment, a phase 1 clinical trial published Wednesday in Nature found. Fewer than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest types of cancer. That is, in part, because around 90% of cases are diagnosed when the disease is already advanced. (Sullivan, 2/19)

Higher calcium intake was consistently associated with a reduced risk of colorectal cancer (CRC) across calcium sources and tumor sites, according to a cohort study using data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. Among over 470,000 participants who were cancer-free at baseline, higher total calcium intake was associated with a lower risk of CRC, ... reported Erikka Loftfield, PhD, MPH, of the National Cancer Institute, and colleagues. (DeBenedette, 2/18)

The first prenatal therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) showed promising results, a case report indicated. More than 2 years after the child was born, no identifiable features of SMA have been observed, reported Richard Finkel, MD, of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and colleagues in a correspondence to the New England Journal of Medicine. (George, 2/19)

Built-in mechanical ventilation and portable air cleaners (PACs), used by hospitals to help mitigate the spread of viruses, may actually spread viruses and other pathogens in some instances, according to new research from scientists at the University College London (UCL). The findings were recently published in Aerosol Science and Technology. Particle spread was uneven: In some scenarios, particles were reduced by ventilation and PACs by up to 96%. But the authors also noted that neighboring rooms had unexpectedly increased aerosol migration of 29% due to exhaust mechanics. (Soucheray, 2/19)

In the 2022-23 respiratory virus season, 379,300 people in the United State were hospitalized for influenza, with median cumulative state rates of 23.2 to 249.0 per 100,000 people, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-led research team reports. The aim of the study, recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, was to develop a way to use hospital-based surveillance to estimate hospitalizations for flu by state, age, and month and, ultimately, improve flu burden estimation. (Van Beusekom, 2/19)

In the study, researchers used advanced imaging techniques to examine the retinas of non-hospitalized long COVID patients from the Northwestern Medicine Neuro COVID-19 Clinic and found that patients with long COVID experienced a significant reduction in the density of blood vessels in the back of the eye, compared to healthy individuals. (2/18)

A study today in JAMA Network Open from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), shows a high uptake of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine and the RSV-preventing monoclonal antibody nirsevimab among pregnant women seen during the 2023-24 season, the first RSV season the vaccine and drug were available. A second study, also published today in the same journal, looked at patients seen at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and found a lower uptake of maternal RSV vaccine and nirsevimab (Beyfortus) during the same initial season, but more than half of infants studied were protected. (Soucheray, 2/19)

Dear Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Private equity (PE) is the fastest-growing malignancy of the American healthcare system. In your new position as secretary of HHS, I implore you to protect the health of Americans and put an end to the dangerous practice of leveraged buyouts (LBOs) of healthcare facilities by PE firms. (Richard K. Leuchter, 2/19)

Have the critics forgotten that health care was a mess decades before private equity got involved? PE wasn’t responsible for the explosion in health care prices after Medicare began operations. That was government (with lots of help from self-interested doctors and hospitals). The fact that one-third of Medicare spending is pure waste is not the fault of PE investors either. It’s the result of government loosening or eliminating the market constraints that prevent providers from using asymmetric information to take advantage of patients. (Charles M. Silver, David A. Hyman and Michael F. Cannon, 2/20)

Farmers in Georgia’s northeastern corner woke up on Jan. 15 to discover that birds in their flock of 45,000 chickens were ill and dying. Within 24 hours, the state’s veterinary laboratory confirmed the problem was bird flu. Within two days, the Georgia Department of Agriculture sent an emergency team to kill all infected and exposed birds, disinfect the barns, set up a 10-kilometer quarantine zone around the farm and impose mandatory testing on every poultry operation inside it. (Maryn McKenna, 2/20)

The purge of thousands of employees across multiple agencies within the US Department of Health and Human Services will compromise Americans' health and safety. The indiscriminate cuts mean new parents might wonder about the safety of their infant's formula, the public must wait longer for better treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease, and we might not know if bird flu takes a more serious turn. (Lisa Jarvis, 2/19)

What’s now called diversity, equity and inclusion evolved from the Civil Rights Movement and federal anti-discrimination laws enacted in the 1960s. If DEI efforts don’t exist, we lose a safeguard against the blatant racism and discrimination that were common in the country not that long ago, and some of that is still around. If we don’t keep our guard up, those old days could come back. (Harry Mok, 2/18)