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President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” would make sweeping changes to U.S. health care, leaving millions of vulnerable Americans without health insurance and threatening the hospitals and centers that provide care to them. (Constantino, 7/1)

The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s "big beautiful bill," which narrowly passed Tuesday, includes a provision that would prohibit federal Medicaid funding for any healthcare services provided by clinics that also provide abortion services for one year. The Senate parliamentarian Monday ruled that the language banning federal funding for Planned Parenthood for one year does not violate the chamber’s Byrd Rule, clearing the way for the provision to be included in the bill. (Landi, 7/1)

The tax bill approved by Senate Republicans on Tuesday includes a proposed $6,000 deduction for seniors, the legislative version of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to end taxes on Social Security payments. The new deduction is one of the flashiest provisions in the Trump tax legislation, and the White House has been eager to tout it as a major economic benefit for Americans 65 or older. But the provision would not benefit tens of millions of low-income seniors, and it would hasten the date by which the Social Security trust fund runs out of money, according to nonpartisan estimates. (Stein, 7/2)

The Senate brought the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 and its more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other healthcare programs one critical step closer to President Donald Trump’s desk Tuesday. Healthcare organizations have sharply criticized the legislation since Trump and the Republican majority in Congress began working on the measure in January. Following the Senate action, trade associations slammed the bill, saying it would devastate providers and patients. (Hudson, 7/1)

If you’re among the 78 million people on Medicaid or the 24 million with a health plan from the insurance marketplaces, changes to how you qualify for and enroll in coverage — and what medical providers are available to you — could be on the way. Republicans are looking to squeeze savings from these two major programs that provide many lower-income and disabled Americans with health coverage, as they hustle to pass a huge, tax-cut-extending legislative package President Donald Trump has demanded before July 4. (Winfield Cunningham and Abutaleb, 7/1)

Millions of low-income Americans could experience staggering financial losses under the domestic policy package that Republicans advanced through the Senate on Tuesday, which reserves its greatest benefits for the rich while threatening to strip health insurance, food stamps and other aid from the poor. For many of these families, the loss of critical federal support is likely to negate any improvements they might have seen as a result of slightly lower taxes, experts said. (Romm, 7/1)

President Trump’s tax-and-spending megabill seeks to implement a policy long championed by Republicans: work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. Policy analysts expect millions of people to lose coverage either because they won’t bother to comply with the new rules or because they aren’t able to keep up with the paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles states will erect for proving eligibility. (Walker and Mosbergen, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Republican Megabill Will Mean Higher Health Costs For Many Americans

President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” cuts federal spending on Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplaces by about $1 trillion over a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, threatening the physical and financial health of tens of millions of Americans. The bill, which the Senate passed Tuesday, would reverse many of the health coverage gains of the Biden and Obama administrations, whose policies made it easier for millions of people to access health care and reduced the U.S. uninsured rate to record lows. (Galewitz, Appleby, Rayasam and Wolfson, 7/2)

New Trump administration rules that give millions of people a shorter timeframe to sign up for the Affordable Care Act’s health care coverage are facing a legal challenge from Democratic mayors around the country. The rules, rolled out last month, reverse a Biden-era effort to expand access to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance, commonly called “Obamacare” or the ACA. The previous Democratic administration expanded the enrollment window for the coverage, which led to record enrollment. (Seitz, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: To Cut Medicaid, The GOP’s Following A Path Often Used To Expand Health Care

President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill would make some of the most sweeping changes in health policy in years, largely affecting Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans — with reverberations felt throughout the health care system. With only a few exceptions, the budget reconciliation process — which allows the political party in control to pass a bill with only 51 votes in the Senate, rather than the usual 60 — is how nearly every major piece of health legislation has passed Congress since the 1980s. (Rovner, 7/2)

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving forward with a dramatic reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services, finding that the mass firings and organizational changes were probably unlawful. In an opinion accompanying the order, Judge Melissa R. DuBose of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to wipe out entire programs and reorient the agency’s priorities and work far exceeded his authority. (Jewett and Montague, 7/1)

Sixteen Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Monday challenging the Department of Education’s cuts to mental health funding for schools. In April, the Education Department announced the $1 billion cut to mental health funding, citing concerns with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives embedded in the contracts. The states allege the contracts were unlawfully terminated under the Administrative Procedure Act and that the cancellation goes against congressional mandates. The lawsuit says the cuts would cause “immediate and devastating harm” to schools. (Cochran, 7/1)

The Trump administration has terminated contracts with publishing giant Springer Nature, according to a report by Axios and confirmed to MedPage Today by an HHS spokesperson. German-owned Springer Nature has long received payments for subscriptions totaling millions of dollars from the NIH and other federal agencies, Axios reported. However, in a statement provided to MedPage Today in an email, a spokesperson for HHS said: "All contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active. Precious taxpayer dollars should not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science." (Henderson, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: ‘MAHA Report’ Calls For Fighting Chronic Disease, But Trump And Kennedy Have Yanked Funding

The Trump administration has declared that it will aggressively combat chronic disease in America. Yet in its feverish purge of federal health programs, it has proposed eliminating the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and its annual funding of $1.4 billion. (Hilzenrath, 7/2)

The University of Pennsylvania said on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the federal government that will limit how transgender people may participate in its athletic programs, bowing to the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the law that bans sex discrimination in education. The government also said the Ivy League school had pledged to “adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’” that comply with the Trump administration’s reading of Title IX and a pair of executive orders that the president issued this year. (Blinder, 7/1)

Brown University’s top officials warned Monday of “significant cost-cutting” amid the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and the likelihood of more reductions ahead. (Unglesbee, 6/30)

For decades, researchers have been collecting samples from hundreds of thousands of women and tracking their health. The work has deepened our basic understanding of human health, but now the entire project is in danger. (LaMotte, 7/1)

The Trump administration has backed away from a maneuver in which it sought to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead in a critical Social Security database, part of a strategy to pressure them to self-deport. In April, the Social Security Administration placed roughly 6,300 migrants whose legal status had been revoked on its “death master file,” a vital data set that gets distributed to banks, lenders and other financial institutions. (Berzon, Siegel Bernard and Nehamas, 7/1)

The Trump administration violated federal privacy laws when it turned over Medicaid data on millions of enrollees to deportation officials last month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged on Tuesday, saying he and 19 other states’ attorneys general have sued over the move. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s advisers ordered the release of a dataset that includes the private health information of people living in California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington, D.C., to the Department of Homeland Security, The Associated Press first reported last month. (Seitz and Kindy, 7/1)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday toured a new immigration detention center surrounded by alligator-filled swamps in the Florida Everglades, suggesting it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration races to expand the infrastructure necessary for increasing deportations. Trump said he’d like to see similar facilities in “really, many states” and raised the prospect of also deporting U.S. citizens. He even endorsed having Florida National Guard forces possibly serve as immigration judges to ensure migrants are ejected from the country even faster. ... Before arriving, Trump joked of migrants being held there, “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.” (Licon and Weissert, 7/1)

Erica Lubliner is a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who directs a clinic that offers mental-health services to Latinos. She provides care to a wide range of patients: first- to fourth-generation immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, and undergraduate and graduate students at U.C.L.A., many of whom are the first in their families to go to college. She usually meets patients in her bright office on campus in Westwood, where paintings by Mexican artists hang on the walls and children’s books are within easy reach. But, after the ICE raids began around the city last month, she moved her appointments online. Lubliner’s patients are safe in her clinic, she told me, “but even getting here can be scary.” (Cadava, 7/1)

Tuesday morning, the nation’s largest insurance company, UnitedHealthcare and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center announced they had reached a multi-year agreement that will allow some 19,000 UnitedHealthcare and Oxford health plan customers to remain in-network for their cancer care. (Goodman, 7/1)

Ascension Health has sold four Michigan hospitals to Beacon Health System. The transaction closed Tuesday and includes four hospitals — Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo, Borgess Allegan in Allegan, Borgess-Lee in Dowagiac and Borgess-Pipp in Plainwell — plus 35 outpatient clinics and an ambulatory surgery center, according to a Tuesday news release from Beacon. Beacon is rebranding the Ascension Southwest Michigan hospitals to Beacon Kalamazoo, Beacon Allegan, Beacon Dowagiac and Beacon Plainwell. (Hudson, 7/1)

Sharp HealthCare will lay off 315 employees and reduce executive pay as the nonprofit health system grapples with rising costs and reimbursement pressure. The layoffs largely affect nonclinical workers, including senior leadership, and amount to 1.5% of its workforce, the San Diego, California-based system said in a statement Monday. Sharp President and CEO Chris Howard plans to reduce his compensation by 25%, and other senior executives will take a 15% pay cut. (Kacik, 7/1)

Health systems are revamping leadership teams and organizational structures to operate more efficiently, but some may fall for a short-sighted cash grab if restructuring isn’t handled carefully. Reimbursement pressures and potential funding cuts are leading many systems to rethink their governance models and trim their ranks. At the same time, growing industry consolidation and an aging workforce are leading to executive reshuffling. (Kacik and Hudson, 7/1)

Hospitals are experimenting with virtual reality headsets to better train staff on infection-control procedures by keeping portable equipment clean. About one in 31 patients in acute care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities and long-term acute care hospitals contract those infections every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC and other federal agencies such as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are working to develop tools, recommendations and programs for infection-prevention strategies. Health systems are too. (Dubinsky, 7/1)

Anne Wojcicki’s bid to buy 23andMe, the genetic testing company she cofounded nearly 20 years ago, has received the court greenlight. That means Wojcicki’s nonprofit TTAM Research Institute will purchase “substantially all” of San Francisco-based 23andMe’s assets for $305 million. The transaction — which arrives more than three months after 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy — is set to officially close in the coming weeks. (Grantham-Philips, 7/2)

Woebot Health this week shut down its core product, a pioneering therapy chatbot. Its demise was hastened by the new wave of conversational artificial intelligence that Woebot foreshadowed. (Aguilar, 7/2)

Last week, Tara Eacobacci had an appointment with her doctor that was devoted exclusively to the topic of health insurance. A major change to her prescription benefits meant the medication she was using to manage her weight – a treatment that had taken years of trial and error to get right – would no longer be covered by insurance. (McPhillips, 7/1)

A measles case has been confirmed in Natrona County, the first in the state since 2010. According to the Wyoming Department of Health (WDH), an unvaccinated child contracted the illness from an unknown source. (Tan, 7/1)

The New Mexico Department of Health (NMDH) today reported eight more measles cases, all from Luna County, where officials last week announced an outbreak at a detection facility in Deming. The new cases push the state’s total, some of which are linked to the large West Texas outbreak, to 94 cases. Last week, health officials announced that five detainees at the facility had tested positive for measles. The facility houses 400 inmates and employs 100 staff. (Schnirring, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: As Mosquito Season Peaks, Officials Brace For New Normal Of Dengue Cases

As summer ushers in peak mosquito season, health and vector control officials are bracing for the possibility of another year of historic rates of dengue. And with climate change, the lack of an effective vaccine, and federal research cuts, they worry the disease will become endemic to a larger swath of North America. About 3,700 new dengue infections were reported last year in the contiguous United States, up from about 2,050 in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Reese, 7/2)

With the clock ticking on Tuesday’s start of the fiscal year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the state's 2026-26 budget totaling $117 billion on Monday. The finalized spending plan includes more than $1.16 billion for health care initiatives that support mental health and addiction services, cancer research, maternal and child health, elder care, and veterans’ services. (Mayer, 7/1)

North Carolina is poised to receive $150 million from a new multi-state legal settlement with pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, for their alleged role in fueling the opioid epidemic. (Knopf, 7/2)

The owner of two allegedly fraudulent COVID-19 testing labs linked to a disgraced former executive of Loretto Hospital pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges he was part of a sprawling fraud scheme that siphoned more than $290 million in federal funds for testing that never occurred. (Kubzansky, 7/1)

Striking city workers waved signs at traffic near Philadelphia City Hall and formed picket lines outside libraries, city offices and other workplaces as nearly 10,000 blue-collar workers walked off the job Tuesday. Seeking better pay and benefits, District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees announced the strike on its Facebook page early Tuesday. ... Police and firefighters are not on strike, but the DC33 membership includes 911 dispatchers, trash collectors, water department workers and many others. (Dale, 7/1)

State laws that protect and expand access to in vitro fertilization take effect Tuesday and in coming months as lawmakers continue working to address questions surrounding the procedure more than a year after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling muddled its legality. In Tennessee, state law codifies the right to IVF and other fertility treatments beginning Tuesday. (Somasundaram and Malhi, 7/1)

Scientists have detected microplastics — the tiny and pervasive fragments now found in our seas, drinking water, food and, increasingly, living tissue — in human semen and follicular fluid, according to new research. (Rogers, 7/1)

While use of estrogen hormone therapy was inversely associated with young-onset breast cancer, estrogen/progestin hormone therapy was linked to a higher incidence among certain subgroups, according to a pooled cohort analysis. (Bassett, 7/1)

Livestock manure around the globe is packed with antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) that could threaten human health, according to a new study in Science Advances. The study was published by Chinese and US researchers, who sampled 4,017 manure specimens from pigs, chickens, and cattle in 26 countries over 14 years. Overall, the searchers found a substantial reservoir of known (2,291 subtypes) and latent ARGs (3,166 subtypes). The detections conferred potential resistance to 30 antibiotic classes. (Soucheray, 7/1)

A new study linking daytime napping to increased mortality rates in older adults may have some rethinking that midday snooze. The study, presented last month at SLEEP 2025, the 39th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, Washington, found that frequent, longer and irregular daytime naps — especially in the early afternoon — were linked to a higher risk of death over an eight-year period. (Quill, 7/1)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Listen To The Latest '�鶹Ů�� Health News Minute' - �鶹Ů�� Health News

Jackie Fortiér reads the week’s news: Gatherings called “memory cafés” can help both people with dementia and their caregivers reduce depression and isolation, and the looming end of some Affordable Care Act subsidies will make ACA plans much more expensive. ... Zach Dyer reads the week’s news: Cannabis use could be riskier for older adults, and research shows covid vaccines in pregnancy can protect pregnant women as well as newborns. (7/1)

Only 20% of Americans understand grilled meats' link to cancer, according to an American Institute for Cancer Research survey. Grilling meats — including hot dogs, chicken and fish — can create potential carcinogens, including heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Plus, hot dogs themselves were declared carcinogens in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. (May, 7/2)

Pregnant women who consume a diet high in inflammation-promoting foods may be increasing their child's risk of developing type 1 diabetes, a study found. The findings, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, suggest that an expectant mother's diet could have long-term implications for her child's immune health. (Gray, 7/1)

Dairy products might be meddling with your dreams. New research published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology surveyed sleep habits, particularly dreams, and compared them with peoples’ eating habits. One of the findings? The worse lactose intolerance symptoms people had, the more intense their nightmares were. (Srinivasan, 7/1)

Packed with essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals and fiber, vegetables are at the heart of a healthy diet, with doctors recommending consuming multiple portions a day. However, while good for the body, they may not necessarily be good for the teeth. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València, in Spain, which found that plant-based diets can have a permanent, damaging effect on your tooth enamel. (Azzurra Volpe, 7/1)

In a recorded message to Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused members of “not taking vaccine safety seriously” and announced that under his leadership, the United States would stop funding Gavi. This is a deadly mistake. Since 2000, Gavi has supported vaccination of more than 1 billion children and prevented an estimated 18.8 million deaths. (Tom Frieden, 7/2)

Planned Parenthood, the massive, 108-year-old network of women’s and reproductive health clinics that operates almost 600 health centers across the United States, may not survive the Trump administration. Long a hated symbol on the right, and unable to summon enthusiastic support from the left, the medical network has nevertheless remained a symbolic and material cornerstone of women’s equality, serving millions of patients – many of them indigent or low-income – each year, and housing one of the biggest feminist and pro-choice lobbying and litigation shops in America, in addition to being one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers. (Moira Donegan, 7/1)

Much of the dialogue surrounding the hundreds of billions of proposed Medicaid cuts passed by the Senate on Tuesday is centered on the impact on nearly 80 million Medicaid enrollees, half of whom are children. What does not receive as much attention, and which I’d argue is underappreciated, is how cuts to Medicaid would impact all children by devastating pediatric health systems, not just those in the program. (Anireddy Reddy, 7/2)

The cost of many medications in our country is outrageous, unjustifiable and in some cases unconscionable. The root causes are complex; the solutions uncertain. As a physician interacting with pharma for many decades, my opinion is that the drug industry consistently puts company profits before patients’ welfare. Additionally, careful study of agency reports demonstrates that PBMs do not lower the costs of drugs. Many, myself included, believe they increase the price of the drugs we physicians prescribe. (John C. Hagan III, 7/1)

As a retired middle school teacher who spent 40 years guiding students through challenging lessons, I know how to explain complex concepts. I also know how to recognize when a system is not working. What I have learned from the past two years navigating the kidney transplant process is this: We are failing thousands of families, and we do not have to. (Ellen Weis, 7/1)