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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has unveiled numerous potential changes to Affordable Care Act exchange plans that could have far-reaching implications for enrollees and what they pay for coverage. In its draft payment rule for exchange plans in 2027, released Monday, the agency proposed getting rid of standardized coverage and accepting non-network health plans as qualified health plans. CMS also seeks to further broaden access to catastrophic coverage and continue a crackdown on exchange brokers. The proposal also would affect risk adjustment auditing policies for exchange plans. (Early, 2/9)

House Judiciary Committee Republicans have subpoenaed eight Affordable Care Act health insurers for documents as part of a widening investigation of potential fraud surrounding the use of premium subsidies in the individual market, Axios has learned. (Goldman, 2/10)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Obamacare Sign-Ups Drop, But The Extent Won’t Be Clear For Months

More Americans than expected enrolled in Affordable Care Act health insurance plans for this year, after premium subsidies were dramatically cut — but it remains to be seen whether they’ll keep the coverage as their costs mount. It’s all part of a drama that roiled the ACA’s 2026 open enrollment period. Congressional debate over whether to extend more generous subsidies made available under the Biden administration led to the longest-ever government shutdown and focused public attention on rising health care costs and the affordability issue. (Appleby, 2/10)

The Trump administration plans to rescind $600 million in public health funds from four states led by Democrats because it finds the grants “inconsistent with agency priorities,” according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. The programs slated to be cut are in California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota. They include grants to state and local public health departments as well as to some nongovernmental organizations. A list of the cuts was shared with relevant congressional committees on Monday. (Mandavilli, 2/9)

The leader of the political engine behind Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement plans to favor candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump in this year’s elections. MAHA will work with candidates Trump supports to get “the best possible outcome for public health, for the issues that MAHA has been backing over the last year,” said Tony Lyons, president of the political group MAHA Action, at an event held by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington Monday. (Paun, 2/9)

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers is taking another shot at legislation that advocates hope could boost antibiotic development efforts. The Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance (PASTEUR) Act, reintroduced last week by five members of the US House of Representatives, aims to revitalize the antibiotic and antifungal development pipeline by changing how the federal pays for novel antimicrobials. The bill was first introduced in Congress in 2020 and re-submitted in subsequent years but has never received a floor vote. (Dall, 2/9)

US lawmakers have sent a letter to federal health officials demanding answers on how and why a controversial vaccine trial in West Africa received federal funding. The letter from Democratic members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Acting Director Jim O’Neill asks for all documentation regarding the decision to award a five-year, $1.6 million grant to a team of Danish researchers conducting the study, which aims to assess the overall health impact of the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose in Guinea-Bissau. (Dall, 2/9)

President Donald Trump’s unconventional plan to lower prescription drug prices is being met with a skeptical eye from Republicans as Congress places a greater focus on drug pricing ahead of the midterm elections. (DeGroot, 2/9)

More than 3,000 pharmacy and lab workers with the United Food and Commercial Workers union in Southern California joined a “second wave” of health care professionals striking against Kaiser Permanente on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. Meanwhile, the strike is showing signs of spilling over beyond just Kaiser. (Maio, 2/9)

Thousands of New York City nurses reached a tentative labor agreement with local hospitals, signaling an end to a weeks-long strike where negotiations were complicated by the Trump administration’s cuts to health-care programs. The New York State Nurses Association said approximately 10,500 of its members reached preliminary agreements with Montefiore Health System and several Mount Sinai hospitals late Sunday and early Monday, according to a statement from the union. Nurses are expected to vote on ratification between Monday and Wednesday and would return to work on Feb. 14 if the contracts are approved. (Sapienza and Davis, 2/9)

Adequate staffing, flexible scheduling, and better wages and benefits might entice registered nurses (RN) who recently left hospital employment to return to practice, a cross-sectional study suggested. Among roughly 1,700 RNs who left their jobs in the last 5 years without retiring, 65% said they would be more likely to return if staffing were adequate, according to Karen Lasater, PhD, RN, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia. (Firth, 2/9)

A large study examining the use of AI chatbots for medical advice found that people using large language models did not make better health decisions than those relying on traditional sources and may be exposed to inaccurate and inconsistent guidance. The randomized study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford, involved nearly 1,300 participants who were asked to assess medical scenarios and decide on appropriate next steps, such as seeing a general practitioner or going to a hospital. Participants who used large language models, or LLMs, performed no better than those who relied on online searches or their own judgment, according to a Feb. 9 news release on the findings. (Diaz, 2/9)

When it’s time to have a difficult conversation with a dying patient about whether to insert a feeding tube, Dr. Jonathan Chen, an internist at Stanford, practices first with a chatbot. He asks the bot to be a doctor while he plays the role of the patient. Then he reverses the roles. He feels uncomfortable doing it. The bot is so good at finding ways to talk to patients. ... So what is a doctor for? (Kolata, 2/9)

Cigna plans to cut about 2,000 positions by the end of February. The reductions make up less than 3% of the healthcare company’s global workforce. Cigna also offered voluntary retirement to an undisclosed number of employees. Cigna did not say how many of the 2,000 positions were filled, which types of roles are affected or who was offered a voluntary retirement option. (DeSilva, 2/9)

Molina Healthcare’s decision to exit the Medicare Advantage market is the latest sign that the glory days have come to an end. The health insurance company will not sell standard individual Medicare Advantage with prescription drug coverage plans in 2027 and focus instead on Dual Eligible Special Needs Plans, Molina Healthcare announced when it reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday. Like other insurers, Molina Healthcare has struggled to make the numbers work in recent years. The company estimates underperformance in the segment will cost it $1 in earnings per share this year. (Tepper, 2/9)

Medicare accountable care organizations saw yet another year of growth in 2025 as President Donald Trump’s administration began to put its stamp on value-based care policy. ACOs and similar arrangements have grown increasingly common since the 2010s, and the value-based care sector expects the growth seen in recent years will only continue. (Early, 2/9)

The Oregon Health and Science University board of directors unanimously passed a resolution authorizing negotiations with the National Institutes of Health that could end all experiments on monkeys and shift the federally funded Oregon National Primate Research Center into a sanctuary. (Silverman, 2/9)

The most recent FluView report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows an additional eight pediatric deaths last week, raising the season’s total to 60 pediatric deaths from flu complications. Approximately 90% of the 60 children were not fully vaccinated against influenza. The CDC estimates there have been at least 22,000,000 illnesses, 280,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 deaths from flu so far this season. (Soucheray, 2/9)

Influenza vaccination is associated with significantly lower odds of myocardial infarction (MI), according to a large meta-analysis published late last week in BMC Public Health. (Bergeson, 2/9)

With only a snort a week, a new drug might keep patients safe from several viruses — and the University of Maryland is willing to pay more than $1,000 for people willing to test it. The nasal-spray medicine called INNA-051 may boost immune defenses, reducing illness from respiratory viruses and researchers at the university’s School of Medicine have put out a call for testers. (Hille, 2/9)

Three members of Congress say the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during his Senate confirmation hearings in response to newly revealed emails that undermine his testimony that a trip he took to Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines”. The governor of Hawaii, a medical doctor who responded to the crisis, also spoke out – saying that the disclosure of the emails by the Guardian and the Associated Press show Kennedy misled the Senate and that he should step down. (Smith, 2/9)

California health officials have confirmed a second measles case in a person who visited Disneyland in January, just one week after another case was reported. The Orange County Health Care Agency (HCA) announced that it had been notified about a confirmed case of measles in a person who visited Disneyland on Thursday, Jan. 22. (Phillipp, 2/9)

Health officials have identified Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as a place where people may have recently been exposed to measles. The Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) confirmed that a measles patient traveled through Terminal 4 on Jan. 29.There have been three confirmed cases of measles within Maricopa County. (Petersheim Jr., 2/9)

Mexico’s most populous state said Monday it was stepping up health screening at schools and recommended the use of face masks for students and staff as the country confronts a growing measles outbreak. The decision by Mexico state followed similar measures announced last week in the western state of Jalisco, site of the country’s largest outbreak, where masks are now required in the schools of its capital Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city. (2/10)

New research from NYU Langone Health might explain why some patients experience incessant “brain fog” and memory issues long after a COVID infection. The researchers propose that long COVID may trigger changes in the brain that resemble the biological processes seen in diseases like Alzheimer’s. (Swartz, 2/10)

A former White Sox pitching prospect is suing the team, claiming he was pushed into taking a COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 that resulted in severe allergic reactions that eventually derailed his career. (Armentrout, 2/9)

Patients diagnosed as having cancer in the United States in 2020 and 2021 had significantly worse short-term survival than those diagnosed before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a population-based cohort study published last week in JAMA Oncology. Analyzing data from more than 1 million US patients diagnosed as having invasive cancer in 2020 and 2021, a team led by researchers from the University of Kentucky looked at the patients’ 1-year cause-specific survival (CSS) rates and compared them with those of cancer patients diagnosed from 2015 to 2019. (Bergeson, 2/9)

Both chambers of the California Legislature voted Monday to send a $90 million grant package for women’s health clinics to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, moving quickly to shore up the state’s reproductive health programs against cuts pushed by President Donald Trump’s administration. (Graham, 2/9)

A new bill proposed by an Orange County assemblymember would make it a crime to steal someone’s DNA — such as collecting genetic material from a discarded cup, straw or strand of hair and submitting it for testing without permission. (Hunt, 2/9)

Two Florida companies that provide computer code and designs for making 3-D printed guns and ammunition magazines are being sued by the state of California and the city of San Francisco, who say its products are allowing people to create illegal ghost guns. (Bernstein, 2/9)

Comparing social media platforms to casinos and addictive drugs, lawyer Mark Lanier delivered opening statements Monday in a landmark trial in Los Angeles that seeks to hold Instagram owner Meta and Google’s YouTube responsible for harms to children who use their products. Instagram’s parent company Meta and Google’s YouTube face claims that their platforms addict children through deliberate design choices that keep kids glued to their screens. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums. (Huamani and Ortutay, 2/10)

She begged California's CARE Court to help her son. He died 10 days after it dismissed his case. (Bollag, 2/9)

Colorado Medicaid officials are pausing a few proposed cuts that would have affected children and adults with severe disabilities who are cared for at home by family members after state lawmakers found the cuts too painful to support. (Brown, 2/9)

When a patient expresses a mental health concern to their primary care provider, that typically generates a referral to a behavioral health specialist. Then that specialist contacts the patient to schedule an appointment. It can take multiple tries to get the appointment scheduled, and then the first available slot is sometimes weeks away. By then, the opportune moment to engage with the patient has likely passed, or their mental health issue may have escalated into a crisis. (Knopf, 2/10)

It’s been months since Tonya Henderson has felt her hands. Originally from California, Henderson has been in St. Louis for about a year, sometimes sleeping on church porches and sometimes in a tent near the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood. “These freeze bites are no joke, these burns are no joke,” Henderson said. “It hurts, it hurts! My toes hurt. Nothing else is cold but my toes and my fingers.” (Fentem, 2/9)

From her home in Donaldsonville, La., less than three miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge. The odor, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended an elementary school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during recess, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away. (Alexander, 2/10)

Rhonda Anderson has spent nearly three decades fighting for clean air and water in Detroit. As an environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club, she led campaigns to raise awareness about lead poisoning of babies and children in the vicinity of steel mills and is part of a Clean Air Act lawsuit against the EES Coke Battery, a local industrial facility. (Kutz, 2/9)

Tim Baucom has done this before. The Milan Cortina Games will be his third Olympics as a wax technician for the United States’ cross-country ski team, a job characterized by long flights schlepping tools and duffel bags of gear halfway around the world, and even longer days prepping skis. His objective is to help American athletes gain even a fraction of a second in competition. But for the first time at an Olympics, he won’t have what was once one of the most powerful tools in his kit: fluorinated ski waxes. (Winters and Root, 2/10)

For most people, if not everyone, the pandemic days of masking are behind us. In certain corners of the Winter Olympics in Italy, though, things still look a lot like they did in COVID times. Some athletes are taking extreme measures to stay healthy. (Herz, 2/9)

Sarah Newberry Moore had long believed that motherhood would mark the end of her career sailing at the world championship level. A five-time national champion, she didn’t know of many women who had made it to the Olympics as mothers, even as many of her male peers competed at the highest level while raising children. (Gale, 2/6)

If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea — if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily. People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years.“ (Belluck, 2/9)

A large, long-term study found that playing a brain training video game may help protect the brain against dementia for decades. Experts say the findings are the strongest evidence yet that cognitive training can create lasting changes in the brain. “It’s very surprising,” said Marilyn Albert, director of the Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “It’s not at all what I would have expected.” (Syal, 2/9)

The NFL is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game. The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field. ( Dubow, 2/7)

A lawsuit that drugmaker Novo Nordisk filed on Monday against telehealth firm Hims & Hers shows how fierce the maneuvering over the booming obesity-drug market has become. In the lawsuit filed in a federal court in Delaware, Novo Nordisk accused Hims & Hers of violating the patents covering its Ozempic and Wegovy drugs used for weight loss by trying to sell custom-made versions of those medicines. (Loftus, 2/9)

The Food and Drug Administration late last year issued a warning letter to MedisourceRx, a compounding pharmacy owned by Hims & Hers, six months after a facility was cited for troubling problems during an inspection. (Silverman, 2/9)

The Food and Drug Administration said Novo Nordisk’s TV advertisement for its newly launched Wegovy pill for obesity included “false or misleading” claims about the medicine’s abilities and benefits to patients. (Constantino, 2/9)

The Food and Drug Administration has rejected a rare-disease gene therapy from Regenxbio, the company said Monday. The one-time treatment, called RGX-121, is designed to replace a malfunctioning gene that causes mucopolysaccharidosis type II, also known as Hunter syndrome, an ultra-rare disorder that causes physical and cognitive impairments. (Feuerstein, 2/9)

Many adverse events listed on statin product labels don't have good evidence that they are actually caused by the drug, a pooled analysis of the clinical trial evidence showed. In individual participant-level data from double-blind randomized controlled trials, only four of 66 assessed side effects attributed to statins on product labels rose above the level of likely false discovery due to multiple comparisons, the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists' (CTT) Collaboration reported in The Lancet. (Phend, 2/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: US Cancer Institute Studying Ivermectin’s ‘Ability To Kill Cancer Cells’

The National Cancer Institute, the federal research agency charged with leading the war against the nation’s second-largest killer, is studying ivermectin as a potential cancer treatment, according to its top official. “There are enough reports of it, enough interest in it, that we actually did — ivermectin, in particular — did engage in sort of a better preclinical study of its properties and its ability to kill cancer cells,” said Anthony Letai, a physician the Trump administration appointed as NCI director in September. (Pradhan, 2/10)

Two analyses detail preferred cervical cancer (CC) screening strategies, with one concluding that most US women would choose in-clinic testing over at-home sample collection, and the other suggesting that the cost-effectiveness and risk-benefit tradeoffs of adapting CC screening strategies by age at human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination favor less-frequent screening and longer intervals between tests rather than the current five-year recommendations in Norway. (Van Beusekom, 2/9)

On Feb. 2, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was investing $100 million in what it called “Great American Recovery.” But despite the new program’s promising rhetoric, the scientific framing of the announcement obscures a deeper policy problem. HHS is advancing a vision of abstinence-only recovery rooted in social connection, while simultaneously rejecting harm-reduction and housing-first strategies that have been shown to create stability, trust and sustained engagement in care. That contradiction weakens the foundation of the initiative and threatens its credibility before it begins. (Nina C. Christie, 2/9)

Isn’t it very dangerous to remove the recommendations for certain infant vaccines, particularly against RSV, in a country that continues to deny new parents the right to paid parental leave? What are the consequences of under-vaccinating millions of babies in a country where working parents have no other choice but to put their literal newborns in a room full of other babies all day? (Ariana Hendrix, 2/10)

Personalized screening does something mammography cannot: It helps identify high-risk people early enough to act. (Leana S. Wen, 2/10)

The uncomfortable question policymakers have avoided is this: If insurers are allowed to exclude the doctors, drugs, and services that people with serious illnesses rely on, have we really banned discrimination at all? (Madelaine [Mattie] A. Feldman, MD, 2/9)

The American health care system suffers from many misalignments of incentives, but one is particularly irksome: When individual patients make prudent decisions about their care, choosing reasonable but less costly alternatives, they capture none of the savings they generate. (Jared Rhoads, 2/10)