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The Senate voted early Tuesday morning to defeat an amendment sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to create a new top marginal tax rate for the nation’s wealthiest income earners and use the money to double the size of a proposed rural hospital relief fund from $25 billion to $50 billion. Senators voted 22 to 78 against a motion to waive a 60-vote budget point of order against the amendment. (Bolton, 7/1)

Senate Republican leaders are discussing a proposal to expand an enhanced Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) matching rate to five states, including Alaska and Hawaii, to get the parliamentarian to sign off the proposal, which could be critical to locking down Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) vote. GOP negotiators are floating a plan to expand the enhanced FMAP rate to North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming — in addition to Hawaii and Alaska — and recalculating the formula for higher federal assistance so that it is based on states’ population density, according to a Senate source briefed on the discussion. (Bolton, 6/30)

Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) on Monday sided with Democrats who were trying to strike a provision from the GOP’s megabill that would bar Planned Parenthood health centers from receiving Medicaid funding for services provided to low-income women across the country. The two were the only Republicans to vote for a motion to waive a budget point of order against an amendment to remove the provision. (Bolton, 6/30)

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised Monday that language that would block Planned Parenthood from Medicaid funding eligibility would be permissible for inclusion in the sweeping budget reconciliation bill, a major blow for the nation’s largest provider of reproductive services. (Raman, 6/30)

President Donald Trump’s allies love to talk about the food we’re eating here in the US: too sugary, too processed, too artificially dyed. What they’re not talking about, though, is how many Americans don’t have enough of it, whether it’s healthy or not. If the Republicans get their way, the number of them will only go up. Exactly how the right-leaning majorities in the House and Senate will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP, is being negotiated. But their intentions are clear: Shrink its reach, reduce the benefits of the people still on it, and leave it to the states to take the blame. (Shanker, 6/30)

House fiscal hawks are looking at the math underlying Senate Republicans’ sprawling domestic policy legislation, and they don’t like what they see. As Senate Republicans try to muscle President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” for final passage, they’re on track to violate a budget framework brokered between House fiscal hawks and Speaker Mike Johnson. Under that framework, if the GOP piles on tax cuts over $4 trillion, they’d need to match them dollar-for-dollar with additional spending cuts beyond the $1.5 trillion in the House-passed bill. (Guggenheim, 6/30)

A massive legislative package Senate Republicans are trying to pass this week would hurt the lowest-earning Americans financially while boosting the incomes of wealthier households, according to a Yale Budget Lab analysis issued Monday. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” would reduce income by 2.9% (about $700) for the bottom 20% of households, according to the Yale analysis. These households have an income of less than $13,350, it said. (Iacurci, 6/30)

Elon Musk said Monday he would follow through on threats to establish a third party if President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is enacted by Congress. Musk said on X his “America Party will be formed the next day” after its passage. He posted as the Senate moved closer to a final vote on what he called an “insane” domestic policy bill. (Svirnovskiy, 6/30)

The Supreme Court on Monday tossed aside a handful of lower court rulings that sided with transgender Americans, requiring that judges in those cases revisit their decisions in the wake of a blockbuster ruling this month that upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. The justices upended rulings that blocked state policies excluding coverage for gender-affirming care in state-sponsored health insurance plans. The high court also tossed out an appeals court ruling that went against Oklahoma in a challenge to the state’s effort to ban transgender residents from changing the sex designation on their birth certificates. In a loss for the transgender Americans who sued, those decisions will now be reviewed again. (Fritze and Cole, 6/30)

The US Supreme Court signaled interest in Bayer AG’s bid to stop thousands of lawsuits blaming its top-selling Roundup weedkiller for causing cancer, seeking the Trump administration’s view on whether to hear the company’s appeal of a $1.25 million verdict. Bayer contends a 2023 Missouri state-court jury that sided with a man who blamed Roundup for his cancer shouldn’t have weighed a claim that the company failed to properly warn consumers about the product’s health risks. Bayer says such claims are preempted by federal law. (Feeley, 6/30)

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case centering on how much states can regulate pharmacy benefit managers. The high court rejected without comment an appeal by Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready (R). In 2019, Oklahoma passed a law that would have regulated how PBMs construct pharmacy networks and steer patients to preferred retail locations. PBM trade group the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association sued to block the law, alleging Mulready overstepped his regulatory authority. (Tepper, 6/30)

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away without comment a claim brought by the group formerly run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleging that its anti-vaccine speech was censored by the social media company Meta Platforms. Kennedy, now the Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration, founded and was chairman of the group, Children's Health Defense, that sued Meta, the operator of sites such as Facebook and Instagram. (Hurley, 6/30)

Eyes are on federal regulators in the wake of a Supreme Court case that could alter how politics affect preventive and other services’ coverage requirements. Industry experts are closely watching to see how HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might involve himself in a preventive coverage recommendation process that has been the purview of an independent panel of healthcare experts. (Early, 6/30)

The Department of Health and Human Services will renew funding to states for cancer prevention and tracking efforts, alleviating anxieties among local officials about the future of their work. (Cueto, 6/30)

More than 14 million people could die over the next five years because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to an analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet. Researchers calculated the lifesaving benefits of USAID funding over a 21-year period, then used the data to determine how many lives would be lost without USAID funding in the future. (Bendix, 6/30)

Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered rare open criticism of the Trump administration — and singer Bono recited a poem — in an emotional video farewell Monday with staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Obama called the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID “a colossal mistake.” (Knickmeyer, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: HHS Eliminates CDC Staff Who Made Sure Birth Control Is Safe For Women At Risk 

For Brianna Henderson, birth control isn’t just about preventing pregnancy. The Texas mother of two was diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal heart condition after having her second child. In addition to avoiding another pregnancy that could be life-threatening, Henderson has to make sure the contraception she uses doesn’t jeopardize her health. (Pradhan, 7/1)

Several times a year, a dozen or so health professionals from across Southeast Asia spend a week in Singapore examining human excrement. They scoop sewage out of manholes and bring it back to a bright, sterile lab at the city-state’s environmental agency, where they concentrate the wastewater, dribble it into test tubes and evaluate it for pathogens. At these training sessions, organized by Duke-NUS Medical School—a leader in infectious disease research—they learn how to extract genetic materials that might indicate the presence of viruses. (Kan, 7/1)

Federal health agencies are expected to adopt so-called "gold standard science" in line with an executive order, but many in the research community worry this framework creates yet another avenue for political appointees to control what is deemed legitimate evidence. Characteristics of gold standard science listed in the order include being reproducible, transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, accepting of negative results, and without conflicts of interest, among others. (Robertson, 6/30)

Hershey Co. will remove synthetic dyes from its snacks by the end of 2027, the latest in a string of major food companies that have announced similar moves. The Pennsylvania-based maker of Hershey’s chocolates, Jolly Ranchers candy and SkinnyPop popcorn cited the challenges of navigating the profusion of new state legislation around food dyes. (Peterson, 7/1)

Top dairymaker Lactalis says it will assess ingredients in newly-acquired yogurt brands like Yoplait and Go-Gurt as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Movement” campaigns for changes in the US food supply, including reducing sugar and removing artificial ingredients. The company, which completed its acquisition of General Mills’s US yogurt business on Monday, will start discussions on ingredients within the next 30 days, said Lactalis US Yogurt Chief Executive Officer Bill Cassidy. The deal was first announced last September. (Peng and Davis, 6/30)

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has assembled a team that he says will work on ways to expand a federal program aimed at compensating people who have been injured by vaccines, though his power to make big changes without congressional action is unclear. (Cirruzzo, 7/1)

Driven by a desire to help ex-servicemembers with mental illness, GOP lawmakers led a failed campaign last year to persuade the Biden administration to approve psychedelic drugs. Now they may have found the ally they need in President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Schumaker, 6/29)

The Joint Commission has unveiled an overhaul to its healthcare accreditation and certification process that will cut hundreds of requirements for hospitals, streamline patient safety practices and give stakeholders as well as the public a clearer look into what’s expected of an accredited facility. Called “Accreditation 360: The New Standard,” the changes are described by the organization as “the most significant, comprehensive evolution of Joint Commission’s accreditation process since 1965.” (Muoio, 6/30)

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) started the roll-out of a new digital format designed to streamline access and use of the organization's 88 clinical guidelines. The digital makeover, called the NCCN Guidelines Navigator, will not replace the traditional PDF-based guidelines but instead will offer a complementary means to navigate through the treatment guidelines and recommendations, NCCN CEO Crystal Denlinger, MD, told MedPage Today. Access to the navigator will be included with every free NCCN account for non-commercial use. (Bankhead, 6/30)

Home health companies stand to lose more than $1 billion in Medicare payments under a proposed rule the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published Monday. The proposed changes would represent a decrease of 6.4%, or $1.14 billion, in Medicare payments to home health agencies in 2026 compared with 2025, CMS said in a fact sheet. (Eastabrook, 6/30)

OptumRx is removing prior authorization mandates for more drugs. So far this year, the pharmacy benefit manager has eliminated reauthorizations for 140 medications patients use to treat chronic conditions, the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary said in a news release Monday. Insurance companies and PBMs require patients and clinicians to obtain reauthorizations for some drugs in cases of long-term safety concerns or potential dosing changes. Beginning Tuesday, OptumRx will cut prior authorizations for another 60 medications that treat seven chronic conditions, including HIV, high cholesterol, hypertension and and others. (Tepper, 6/30)

UC Health and Blue Shield of California, which are at an impasse over the terms of a new contract that could disrupt health care for thousands of Californians, have extended the deadline for reaching a new agreement from July 9 to Aug. 9. This means the thousands of Californians who get medical care at UC Health through Blue Shield of California — including many in the Bay Area who go to UCSF and One Medical, a UCSF affiliate — have an additional 30 days of breathing room before potentially having to find a different health insurer or pay out-of-network rates for services if UC Health and Blue Shield cannot reach a new contract. (Ho, 6/30)

Banner Health is gearing up for major growth plans over the next decade, President and CEO Amy Perry said. Perry said a combination of fast-growing market populations, plans to diversify service lines and partnership opportunities is expected to help the health system double its size in 10 years. Phoenix-based Banner operates more than 30 acute-care hospitals, 50 urgent care centers and hundreds of other centers and clinics across six states. It employs more than 55,000 people. (Hudson, 6/30)

Gerald Quindry was facing a quandary. The 73-year-old retired engineer received a statement last year that Medicare, his health insurance provider, had been billed $15,500 for urinary catheters — but his doctor had never ordered them, and Quindry never wanted nor received them. Quindry complained to Medicare. But he said the representatives seemed nonplussed by his complaint, and he could find little information about the incident himself beyond news reports of catheter-related fraud in the government program. (Diamond and Weber, 6/30)

As two excavators took turns chipping away at the concrete overhang of one of the former Atlanta Medical Center building’s entrances, a handful of Atlantans who used to work there recorded the demolition with their phones. Meta Anthony donned a purple T-shirt with the hospital’s logo emblazoned on the back. The former employee said that she started in nursing school but quickly found her passion as an administrative secretary at the facility where she went on to work for four decades. (Bunch, 6/30)

Joseph Giordano, the former head of surgery and director of the trauma center at George Washington University Hospital who helped perform lifesaving measures on President Ronald Reagan after he was shot during an assassination attempt in 1981, died June 24, two days after his 84th birthday. He died at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital of complications from an infection, said his son Christopher Giordano. (Schudel, 6/30)

California leaders on Monday rolled back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis. For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they found objectionable. (Rosenhall, Karlamangla and Nagourney, 6/30)

Genetic testing company 23andMe’s recent sale to a research institute “does not comply” with California’s landmark genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said Monday. What happened: Bonta’s office said the terms of 23andMe’s sale, approved Friday by a federal bankruptcy judge, run afoul of the state’s Genetic Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to obtain opt-in consent from customers before selling their genetic information to third parties. (Katzenberger, 6/30)

Former middle school teacher Lorraine Carter Salazar isn't easily embarrassed. But when she began having hot flashes at school about a decade ago, she worried about how she came off to coworkers, students and parents. "It doesn't convey competence," said Carter Salazar, 62. She recounted how parents could tell she was uncomfortable in meetings. One time, a student even fanned her and remarked that she was used to seeing her grandma feeling the same way. (Myscofski, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: California Immigrants Weigh Health Coverage Against Deportation Risk

For months, Maria, 55, a caregiver to older adults in California’s Orange County, has been trying not to smile. If she opens her mouth too wide, she worries, people will see her chipped, plaque-covered front teeth. An immigrant without legal status, Maria doesn’t have health or dental insurance. When her teeth start to throb, she swallows pain pills. Last summer, a dentist said it would cost $2,400 to fix her teeth. That’s more than she can afford. (Boyd-Barrett, 7/1)

Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity from its civil rights code under a law that took effect Tuesday, meaning transgender and nonbinary residents are no longer protected from discrimination in their job, housing and other aspects of life. The law also explicitly defines female and male based on reproductive organs at birth and removes the ability for people to change the sex designation on their birth certificate. (Fingerhut, 7/1)

The Department of Veterans Affairs has reinstated gender affirming medical coverage for a transgender veteran who sued them for refusing to cover her hormone replacement therapy. The VA announced in March that it would no longer cover gender affirming care for trans servicemembers or vets, but that people who were already receiving the medicine would continue to. (Ingram, 6/30)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Feds Investigate Hospitals Over Religious Exemptions From Gender-Affirming Care

The Trump administration has launched investigations into health care organizations in an effort to allow providers to refuse care for transgender patients on religious or moral grounds. One of the most recent actions by the Department of Health and Human Services, launched in mid-June, targets the University of Michigan Health system over a former employee’s claims that she was fired for requesting a religious exemption from providing gender-affirming care. (Wells, 7/1)

Before states banned abortion, one of the gravest outcomes of early miscarriage could easily be avoided: Doctors could offer a dilation and curettage procedure, which quickly empties the uterus and allows it to close, protecting against a life-threatening hemorrhage. But because the procedures, known as D&Cs, are also used to end pregnancies, they have gotten tangled up in state legislation that restricts abortion. (Surana, Presser and Suozzo, 7/1)

Nuribel Amparo, a single mother, lived with her three children in a Route 1 hotel before relocating to an apartment-style shelter in Lynn over the weekend. The family was forced to move as the state winds down its controversial hotel shelter program. But Amparo’s search for a permanent home isn’t done. They face a deadline to find a new place by the end of August. (McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Lozada, 6/30)

A doctor pleaded guilty Monday to sexually abusing sedated patients at his New York City hospital and raping women who were unconscious at his home. Zhi Alan Cheng admitted to abusing seven women, including three female patients he was treating at New York-Presbyterian Queens hospital, the Queens district attorney’s office said. Cheng, now 35, was arrested in 2022 after a female acquaintance discovered a video of him abusing her at his home while she was passed out. (6/30)

Over the weekend Kentucky reported three more measles cases, all from the same family in Woodford County. None of the individuals were vaccinated, health officials from the state said. Kentucky now has six confirmed measles cases in 2025, following the identification of a measles infection in February in an adult state resident. Officials urged vaccination for all residents, especially school children, noting that, for the 2024-25 school year, only 86.9% of Kentucky kindergartners were fully vaccinated against measles. (Soucheray, 6/30)

The alarm over men has intensified in recent years: They’re in crisis — disconnected, dejected and drawn to manosphere influencers peddling antifeminist and far-right ideologies.  “The State of American Men 2025,” a new report published this month by Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, underscores how societal pressures, particularly the expectation to be a “provider,” are taking a heavy toll. It reveals that men are suffering primarily because of what they lack — meaningful relationships, economic stability and healthy gender norms. (Nittle, 6/30)

Nearly half of young people in a recent study displayed strongly addictive use of mobile phones, a trend that the study results suggest raised the risk of suicidal behaviors. Researchers looked at data from surveys of almost 4,300 children from 2016 through 2022. The children were ages 9 to 10 at the start and were contacted four times over a six-year period. The surveys included questions about mobile phones, video games and social media and assessed the children for compulsive use, difficulty disengaging and distress felt when not using the various items. (McMahan and Docter-Loeb, 6/30)

Most people who survived to age 100 and beyond had amyloid-beta accumulation and, when present, it was tied to cognitive performance, an autopsy study showed. In a study of 95 centenarians, more than half (56%) had a low amyloid load and 9% had no amyloid load, according to Henne Holstege, PhD, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and colleagues. One-third of centenarians (35%) had a high amyloid load comparable to Alzheimer's disease, the investigators reported in JAMA Neurology. (George, 6/30)

Certain types of microbes found in the human gut can absorb toxic “forever chemicals” from their surroundings, a new study has found. When scientists introduced the microbes into the guts of mice to “humanize” their microbiome, they found that the bacteria rapidly accumulated the compounds consumed by the mice. (Udasin, 7/1)

A new analysis of data gathered from a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon suggests some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong. Inflammation is a natural immune response that protects the body from injury or infection. Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as “inflammaging” — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it’s linked to a person’s lifestyle or environment instead. (Ravindranath, 6/30)

Moderna Inc. said its experimental flu shot met its goal in a late-stage trial, clearing the path for its broader strategy of selling combination vaccines. The shot’s efficacy was 27% higher than a licensed influenza vaccine in adults 50 years and older, the company said in a statement Monday. The trial enrolled more than 40,000 adults across 11 countries. (Smith, 6/30)

One lot of reflux medicine got recalled when fluid retention tablets were discovered in the medicine bottles. Teva Pharmaceuticals pulled lot No. 5420094 of 10 mg Metoclopramide tablets in 100-count bottles after “a single 20 mg Torsemide tablet that does not belong was discovered in each of three individual sealed bottles of 10 mg Metoclopramide tablets.” (Neal, 6/30)

A group of Hollywood actors is calling on Amazon to respond to allegations from pregnant workers that the company is failing to offer them accommodations in their warehouses, leading to severe health complications and even miscarriages. (Carrazana, 6/30)

Josh Hawley over the weekend did what anyone who knows anything about his brand of faux-populist politics should have known he was ultimately going to do: Missouri’s senior senator — who has spent months preening as that rare Republican who will steadfastly protect federal health care services for the poor — announced that he will vote to eviscerate federal health care services for the poor. (6/30)

Biologist Martin Blaser of Rutgers University has been one of the most vocal advocates for understanding the pros and cons of H. pylori, which he describes in his 2014 book, Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. He said every mammal has some stomach bacteria — a relative of our H. pylori. (F.D. Flam, 6/29)

For a time, cord blood banker Cryo-Cell International and its partner Duke University seemed to be flying high together on the hope of using cord blood for pediatric neurological conditions. Yet in the past few months, the partnership has all come crashing down. Now, the deal with Duke is dead, and Cryo-Cell says it’s suffered more than $100 million in damages. I saw their collaborative plan as questionable from the start. (Paul Knoepfler, 7/1)

It’s a strange reality when more people recognize you from your videos on social media than from your peer-reviewed papers or “professional” work. During grad school, I could never have predicted that a casual one-minute video about immunology would rack up orders of magnitude more views in an hour than my published research papers would accumulate in ten lifetimes. But this is the reality of science communication in 2025: Dry data analysis is out, storytelling is in, and the implications for public health and the public perception of science are existential. (Morgan McSweeney, 7/1)

Think air travel is just about delays and lost luggage? Your body has other plans. Forget plane crashes and fights about who gets the armrest. If you survive TSA, a middle seat, and boarding group 9, now you have to make it through the flight itself without your body unraveling like cheap luggage on a baggage carousel. (Jim Cameron, 6/29)