From Kaiser Health News and other sources:
‘Most effective way’ to prevent measles is vaccination, RFK Jr. says, in most direct remarks yet: Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Sunday that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” his most direct statement yet on the issue, following the death of a second child of the condition in the outbreak in West Texas.
Kennedy, who has long described the vaccine as dangerous, has largely avoided endorsing its use since the start of the outbreak, and he stopped short of explicitly saying he “recommended” it in his latest remarks, as public health officials have called on him to do.
DOJ launches task force targeting ‘harmful barriers to competition’: The Justice Department has launched an anticompetitive regulations task force, aimed at identifying and eliminating federal and state regulations that hinder market competition — including in healthcare.
The initiative will operate within the DOJ’s antitrust division and expand ongoing efforts to combat policies that limit business dynamism, increase consumer costs and reduce innovation. The move reflects a broader deregulatory push by the Trump administration, anchored in recent executive orders focused on rolling back rules that impose undue burdens on businesses, particularly small enterprises.
Nonradiologists interpret nearly 44% of imaging studies, researchers find: Nonradiologists interpreted 43.6% of office-based imaging studies in 2022, according to a study published April 2 in the American Journal of Roentgenology.
Blockbuster Deal Will Wipe Out $30 Billion in Medical Debt. Even Backers Say It’s Not Enough:
Undue Medical Debt, which buys patient debt, is retiring $30 billion worth of unpaid bills in a single transaction with Pendrick Capital Partners, a Virginia-based debt trading company. The average patient debt being retired is $1,100, according to the nonprofit, with some reaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Key Safety Hotlines Disrupted By HHS Cuts: Teams manning government hotlines for reporting adverse events from foods, supplements and cosmetics, and call centers that provide other essential safety information were among the thousands of Health and Human Services Department employees laid off last week. The Food and Cosmetic Information Center fields tens of thousands of calls annually from consumers and industry representatives about recalls, nutritional information and food business requirements, along with unintended health consequences from using FDA-approved products.
ICYMI:
35% of Americans cannot afford or access healthcare: Gallup: Reaching the highest level since 2021, 11% of U.S. adults are considered “cost desperate,” a group Gallup defines as those who recently could not afford needed care and medicine. Overall, more than one-third of U.S. adults report they cannot access quality, affordable healthcare.
Gallup and West Health surveyed 6,296 adults in late 2024 for their annual Healthcare Indices Study. Since 2021, the share of cost desperate Americans has increased most significantly among Hispanic adults (18%), Black adults (14%) and households earning less than $24,000 annually (25%), according to survey results released April 2.
The survey found no meaningful change among white adults or middle- to high-income households. Disparities in healthcare access across race, ethnicity and income are at their highest point since this annual survey began in 2021.
About health insurance/insurers
Medicare gets a big (unofficial) surprise: a 17-year extension on when it’ll run dry: The Congressional Budget Office recently published its long-term predictions of the federal budget and buried a big surprise for people who follow the Medicare program. The government’s primary piggy bank that pays for Medicare benefits won’t be depleted until 2052 — 17 years later than what CBO analysts predicted last year.
Inside HCSC's plan to go national after Cigna deal FYI
About hospitals and healthcare systems
25 health systems ranked by long-term debt FYI
Court strikes down FDA rule to regulate hospital lab tests: A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the FDA does not have the authority to regulate laboratory developed tests as medical devices, striking down the agency’s recently finalized rule.
The decision, issued in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, sided with the American Clinical Laboratory Association and other plaintiffs who argued that the FDA overstepped its authority, according to documents reviewed by Becker’s.
About pharma
Ousted FDA Vaccine Director Calls Kennedy's Start 'Very Scary' : Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official pressured to resign over his disagreements with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., warned in an interview published Friday that Kennedy’s tenure at the HHS has been “very scary” so far. ... In his resignation letter, Marks said he had been “willing” to work to address Kennedy’s “concerns” about vaccine transparency and safety but determined Kennedy only wanted “subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
Trump admin nixes Biden-era obesity drug coverage plan: The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Friday that it will not finalise a proposal to expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage of weight-loss drugs, reversing course on a plan floated during the final months of the Biden presidency that would have helped millions of Americans pay for the pricy medications.
A CMS spokesperson said the agency doesn't believe expansion is "appropriate at this time," but added that it may revisit the idea after a closer look at the drugs' potential benefits and financial impact, including to state Medicaid agencies
.J&J hit with $1.64B penalty for illegal drug marketing practices: A federal judge has ordered Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen unit to pay $1.64 billion for illegally promoting HIV drugs Prezista and Intelence.
U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi imposed a $360 million penalty and $1.28 billion in civil fines, to be paid to the federal government, for 159,574 false claims submitted to federal healthcare programs, according to court documents reviewed by Beckers.
FDA tells drugmakers to redo studies run by a contract research firm due to data integrity issues: n a rare move, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told an unspecified number of drug companies that studies used to support therapeutic equivalence of some of their medicines have been rejected due to false data generated by a contract research organization.
The agency identified “significant” problems with data integrity and the way studies were conducted by Raptim Research, which had been hired by the drugmakers to test their medicines. The FDA expressed concern, specifically, about in-vitro studies, which are run to test biological processes.
Threat of future tariffs on pharmaceutical imports alarms health care community: Generic medicines make up nine of 10 prescriptions in the U.S., nearly half of which come from India, which exports about $9 billion in generic drugs to the U.S., according to data last year from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. Nearly all of the United States' generic drugs come from overseas. In a last-minute move Wednesday, the Trump administration excluded pharmaceuticals from Wednesday's retaliatory tariffs, giving consumers a break for now.
About the public’s health
CDC's Office of Smoking and Health Eliminated: The CDC's Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) was eliminated in its entirety April 4.
About healthcare IT
Critical Condition: Legacy Medical Devices Remain Easy Targets for Ransomware: Analysis found that 99% of healthcare organizations are vulnerable to publicly available exploits.
About healthcare personnel
RFK Jr. Said HHS Would Rehire Thousands Of Fired Workers. That Wasn't True:
When HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday that he planned to rehire 20 percent of the employees he’d just terminated, he insisted such a move was “always the plan.” Turns out, it wasn’t the plan at all. HHS has no intention of reinstating any significant number of the staffers fired as part of a mass reduction-in-force on Tuesday, despite Kennedy’s assertion that some had been mistakenly cut, a person familiar with the department’s plans told POLITICO.
About health technology
A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis to restore naturalistic communication This innovation is an incredible scientific advance:
Here we used high-density surface recordings of the speech sensorimotor cortex in a clinical trial participant with severe paralysis and anarthria to drive a continuously streaming naturalistic speech synthesizer. We designed and used deep learning recurrent neural network transducer models to achieve online large-vocabulary intelligible fluent speech synthesis personalized to the participant’s preinjury voice with neural decoding in 80-ms increments. Offline, the models demonstrated implicit speech detection capabilities and could continuously decode speech indefinitely, enabling uninterrupted use of the decoder and further increasing speed. Our framework also successfully generalized to other silent-speech interfaces, including single-unit recordings and electromyography. Our findings introduce a speech-neuroprosthetic paradigm to restore naturalistic spoken communication to people with paralysis.