51��Ƶ

A new draft regulation would tighten access to health insurance exchange subsidies as federal agencies continue implementing President Donald Trump’s tax law. The IRS issued a proposed rule Wednesday that would set stricter definitions of who qualifies for tax credit subsidies, toughen eligibility verification requirements and narrow access to financial assistance for noncitizens. This regulation would complement pending rules from the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Early, 10/14)

The Trump administration has cut health subsidies for 189,000 people on the Affordable Care Act exchanges after it said it found duplicate beneficiaries on Medicaid and Medicare, and enrollees who were deceased. Removing those subsidies will save $738 million in improper payments this year, CMS officials said at a Wednesday press conference. Officials said they plan to remove subsidies for another 3,500 people by the end of the month, as the Trump administration continues its crackdown of the ACA exchanges. (Hughes, 10/14)

The Trump administration is delaying by 90 days a federal rule that could prevent Americans from obtaining prescription drugs from licensed international pharmacies. (Silverman, 10/14)

Three former Food and Drug Administration chiefs lit into the Trump administration Wednesday, criticizing the now former FDA officials who oversaw a massive staffing exodus and saying they robbed the agency of institutional knowledge that will take years to restore. (Cirruzzo, 10/14)

The cost of living adjustment, or COLA, for next year will be the largest since 2023. Retirees will see the extra money in their benefit checks starting in January. (Miller, 10/14)

They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk. Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats. (Sanchez and Clark, 10/14)

The woman looked down at her lunch and, as hungry as she was, knew she couldn’t eat it. The chicken at the ICE immigrant camp was pink, cold and watery, the vegetables overcooked and falling apart. She placed a hand on her expanding belly and worried, as she did every day — would she be able to nourish her baby inside? (Johnson, 10/14)

House Democrats are preparing an ambitious 100-days agenda focused on delivering their campaign promises — making life more affordable and conducting vast oversight of the Trump administration — if the party seizes majority control in next month’s elections. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if the party wins power, said the Democrats will be united “right out of the gate” on reinstating Affordable Care Act tax breaks, reversing Republican Medicaid cuts, holding votes against the Iran war and undoing President Donald Trump’s tariff regime. (Mascaro, 10/14)

Corin Denmon has a lot of concerns for Florida and her country, but there is one topic that she puts above the rest. "Healthcare. I'm voting for anybody that has healthcare on their ballot as a priority," Denmon said. Healthcare affordability is the cause of a lot of anxiety for voters across the country ahead of an election where the general concept of affordability dominates the conversation. (Pedersen, 10/14)

Republicans running for governor across the country are backing away from abortion bans they once endorsed. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, calls his state’s 20-week abortion limit “settled law.” Just three years ago, he co-sponsored a bill that would have banned abortion six weeks into pregnancy. (Luthra, 10/14)

Secretaries of state’s offices in Ohio, Louisiana and Oklahoma were sent packages this week with mysterious powders, just weeks before the offices are set to oversee the midterm elections. Oklahoma and Louisiana reported receiving the envelopes, while Ohio said U.S. Postal Service investigators intercepted a package destined for it. (Coronell Uribe, 10/15)

On September 14, far-right influencer Chaya Raichik, known online as Libs of Tiktok, attacked a Washington state high school on Facebook for displaying a Pride flag. “Hey Mercer Island High School, why does your profile photo display a mutilation flag??” she wrote, tagging the school’s account in the post and attaching a photo of the entrance. (Pisoni, 10/14)

The Transgender Education Network of Texas on Wednesday sent a cease and desist notice that demanded two digital messaging companies stop a client from impersonating the LGBTQ+ advocacy group in a series of texts sent this week to Texans. (Runnels, 10/14)

About 40% of high school students reported binge eating in the past month in a large new government survey, putting a spotlight on how widespread this common form of disordered eating is among young people in the U.S. (Todd, 10/15)

Measles is sometimes dismissed as an unserious disease or ‘just a rash.’ But the highly contagious virus can cause serious illness not just during initial infection but years later, after patients appear to have made a full recovery. This delayed complication, a rare, almost invariably fatal brain disease known as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), is highlighted in a new report published yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases. (Bergeson, 10/14)

By the time many children with measles are sick enough to be hospitalized, the illness has already swept through entire families, blindsiding parents who had no idea the virus could cause such severe complications. (Edwards, 10/14)

The chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), argued the Trump administration is not promoting vaccinations vigorously enough amid a massive measles outbreak that has claimed multiple lives in 2026. “My concern as a physician is that everyone should be vaccinated for measles,” Cassidy told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And you may think it only affects me. That’s not true because you infect other people.” (Chakraborty, 10/14)

Dementia cases are set to double within the next 25 years worldwide, warns a new study. There are expected to be 24.7 million new cases of dementia by 2050, up from 11.4 million in 2023, researchers reported Oct. 12 in the journal JAMA Neurology. (Thompson, 10/14)

The study used two methods in two countries. In France, a total of 27.3% of those with dementia had received epilepsy medications, compared to 10.3% of those who did not have dementia. Those results were similar to those in Sweden. (10/14)

A condition that affects millions of American women has been associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. A new review has set out to understand what could be behind the potential connection. Researchers across the U.S. and Iran said that having polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), formerly known as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), has been linked with an increased risk of cognitive vulnerability and dementia, and outlined possible mechanisms behind the connection. (Laws, 10/14)

In the study, researchers worked with 53 people with Lewy body disease and 29 people with Alzheimer's disease. Results showed visual problems were worse for those with Lewy body disease than for those with Alzheimer's disease, and that the two visual processing pathways were affected differently for the two diseases. (10/14)

Scientists detected antibodies against the H5N1 strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in four polar bears in East Greenland in 2025, consistent with previous identification of the virus in birds along linked migratory pathways. A team led by University of Inland Norway researchers analyzed heart blood collected from 28 polar bears harvested in subsistence hunts in 2024 and 2025, publishing their findings yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases. (Van Beusekom, 10/14)

A seventh annual “state of the climate” report, published Wednesday in BioScience, underlines with data what 2026 has felt like: A dangerous and unpredictable climate is here. The study assessed the latest available numbers for 16 major indicators of climate change, such as atmospheric carbon levels, ocean temperature change and amount of land burned in fires. (Wolfson, 10/14)

People with schizophrenia who were also taking GLP-1 drugs for diabetes had fewer psychiatric relapses in a large study of US health records, indicating another potential benefit from the medicines. The patients on GLP-1s were 24% less likely to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital than people not taking the drugs, researchers said, and 29% less likely to go to the emergency room for a mental health crisis. They were also less likely to be admitted than those who took other types of diabetes medicine, according to the study published Wednesday in the Lancet Psychiatry journal. (Kresge, 10/14)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent warning letters to Amazon and Walmart over herpes products sold on their websites. The agency said the items are unapproved drugs that can’t legally be shipped across state lines. The Amazon letter names nine products: FemiClear, HClear for him, HerpCare Ointment, HerpCare Spray, Herstat GST, Genital Herpes Ointment, RoyceDerm Herpes Relief Cream, Terragen HG Formula and Genital Herpes Intimate Wash. (Vohnoutka, 10/14)

The CEO of Compass Pathways said Wednesday that the company, which is preparing to complete the submission of its psychedelic therapy for regulatory review this quarter, will “go slow before we go fast,” warning that negative patient or provider experiences early in the launch could damage the broader sector. (Keshavan, 10/14)

Whoop has never been known for marketing to an older population. Performance athletes headline ads for the wearable company, which aims to turn continuous streams of physiological data into useful insights for behavior change — mostly, for a young, fit customer base. (Palmer, 10/14)

A new platform driven by artificial intelligence could enable patients to communicate with their medical devices in real time to improve their health, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Medicine. Brian Litt, a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, knew that neurological signals that can precede epileptic seizures could be detected by implanted devices — but not immediately communicated to the patient. (Svrluga, 10/14)

Studies show that artificial intelligence can distort memories, raising questions about what happens when machines become keepers of the past. (Cha, 10/15)

Merck CEO Rob Davis told CNBC on Wednesday that he expects the company’s breakthrough cancer vaccine with Moderna to get faster to manufacture over time. Shortening the current six-week timeline could potentially help the companies reach more patients. (Constantino, 10/14)

In a way, Pope Leo XIV may be lucky he got lung cancer now and not, say, six years ago. Treatments have changed so much, specialists say, that the old days are almost unrecognizable. For many patients, said Karen Knudsen, the chief executive of the Parker Institute, lung cancer is no longer the dire diagnosis it was in the past. Dr. Lecia Sequist, a thoracic oncologist at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, said, “I think a lot of people have that gut reaction about lung cancer — that it can be rapidly fatal — but that is a little bit outdated, especially if it’s caught early.” (Kolata and Johnson, 10/14)

After Lisa Moore’s cancer treatments stopped working, the 64-year-old enrolled in a study to try out a new type of drug, one that is programmed to go after disease in cells in a novel way. Ten months later, she went into remission. (Lawrence, 10/15)

Dr. Rachna Shroff, a physician-scientist who spent much of her career researching treatments for gastrointestinal cancers, has died at the age of 47. She briefly battled an aggressive form of the disease she was trying to cure. Earlier this year, Shroff, associate director of clinical investigations at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, was diagnosed with cancer of an unknown origin after she developed a swollen lymph node in May. By the end of the month, it had spread elsewhere in her body, and testing showed it had likely originated in her stomach or intestine. (Hohman and Kane, 10/14)

As North Carolina hospitals jockey for position in an increasingly competitive health care market, Duke Health is hoping to make another big move into Charlotte. (Crouch, 10/15)

Rush University System for Health, a longtime holdout in Chicago’s consolidating healthcare scene, plans to merge with suburban giant Endeavor Health in a deal that would create the region’s largest health system by sheer number of facilities, with a $1 billion fund for community health, clinical advances and academic medicine and research. The deal gives Rush, which has a flagship hospital in the Illinois Medical District and two community hospitals, a footprint that spans the entire metro area. (Asplund, 10/14)

Nonprofit health systems MultiCare and Samaritan Health Services will merge on Nov. 1 after gaining approval from state regulators, the companies announced Monday. As part of the deal, MultiCare – which operates 13 hospitals –  will begin an affiliation with Samaritan and its network of five hospitals. MultiCare, which is based in Tacoma, Washington, will also invest $700 million over 10 years into Oregon-based Samaritan. Samaritan will continue to use its name, alongside MultiCare’s branding, the health system said. (Halleman, 10/14)

Zocdoc, a virtual marketplace for booking providers, has acquired insurance technology company Sohar Health. The deal marks Zocdoc’s first acquisition since launching in 2007, according to a Wednesday press release. Zocdoc declined to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition, which closed on Oct. 2. Sohar’s platform automates insurance benefits eligibility checks. (Famakinwa, 10/14)

An ongoing procession of large-scale health system dealmaking continued through the third quarter and is becoming the dominant merger and acquisition trend for 2026, according to a recent report. Per healthcare advisory firm Kaufman Hall, which is part of Vizient, the year’s third quarter hosted 16 newly announced hospital transactions, comprising $8.2 billion in total transacted revenue. Both are roughly in line with recent years and remain higher than pre-pandemic historical averages, the firm wrote. (Muoio, 10/14)

The legacy of the Black Panther Party lives on six decades after its founding, in the work of a Seattle medical center started to address systemic health disparities in the African American community, particularly among Black children. Originally known as the Sidney Miller Free Medical Clinic in 1969, it put into practice the national Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program to uplift African Americans as the Black Power movement gained momentum. Now, as the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, it, along with the affiliated Country Doctor Community Clinic, sees tens of thousands of patients in a year. (Williams, 10/15)

A Connecticut Department of Correction doctor repeatedly engaged in behavior that compromised patient care, according to an investigation released on Wednesday by the Correction Ombuds’ office. (Golvala, 10/14)

As health systems focus more on clinical integration and physician alignment, they’re concentrating more resources on the positions key to those goals — including the leaders of their subsidiary medical groups. On average, the CEOs of medical groups saw year-over-year compensation rise more quickly than many other health system executive roles, according to data from consulting firm SullivanCotter. (Broderick, 10/14)

A sizeable proportion of patients reported disrespectful or judgmental language in their medical records, a nationally weighted survey showed. More than one in six adults (17.1%) reported such language in their own medical records or in those of a loved one, Natasha Steele, MD, MPH, of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, and colleagues wrote in JAMA Network Open. (Fiore, 10/14)

51��Ƶ Health News: Listen To The Latest ‘51��Ƶ Health News Minute’ 

Sam Whitehead reads the week’s news: If patients can’t afford their bills, hospitals are typically supposed to offer financial aid — but you might have to ask. Plus, as the number of nursing home beds declines, older Americans are seeking alternatives. (10/15)

North Carolina health officials are warning that West Nile virus is spreading after two deaths were linked to the disease. The two deaths were adults from central North Carolina, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Currently, 2026 is on pace to be the second-highest year on record for West Nile virus cases, after 2024, according to local ABC News affiliate WTVD. (Kekatos, 10/14)

The Arlington County Fire Department failed to provide adequate mental health support to its first responders following the fatal midair collision near Reagan National Airport in 2025, according to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post. ... Many Arlington County Fire Department responders exhausted the department’s workers’ compensation therapy sessions and have since paid out-of-pocket costs for continued care, according to the memo. First responders have reported experiencing increased depression, family strain, alcohol use and sleep disturbances, the memo says. (Scott, 10/14)

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Gerber Products Co. and its parent company, Nestlé USA Inc., alleging the Gerber baby food products contain dangerous levels of toxic metals, according to a Wednesday press release from his office. “Gerber promised parents its food was safe and rigorously tested. Its own tests showed toxic metals in the food. When a company makes promises about what parents feed their babies, I will hold it accountable to ensure those promises are kept,” Paxton said in the release. (Chakraborty, 10/14)

Minnesota is bracing for the Trump administration to cut more of its Medicaid funding — permanently. The state’s top Medicaid official is concerned Minnesota could lose hundreds of millions of dollars for claims it’s already paid out. If that comes to pass, Minnesota would be forced to claw the money back from doctors, hospitals and other people who care for the low-income people in the program. (King, 10/14)

Forgoing normal treks to Rouses and Walmart, Annamarie Gonzales and her neighbors walked a few paces from their Guste High Rise apartments and funneled into a food-filled trailer. Inside, shelves and refrigerators filled with staples such as red beans, cornbread mix, fresh fruit and dairy lined its interior. A departure from its grand opening on Sept. 18 with Mardi Gras Indians and a brass band, the grocery popup’s second appearance at the affordable living complex drew a small, but growing crowd of walker-bound residents. (Perdomo, 10/14)

51��Ƶ Health News: What Texas Reveals About The Obstacles To Getting Hospital Financial Aid

Aimee Carlock needed surgery in August 2025 to treat severe pain and bleeding from her uterus. But first, she needed to come up with $5,500. Texas Health Resources, one of the state’s largest nonprofit hospital systems, told her it wouldn’t schedule the procedure unless she paid up front, Carlock said. The self-employed house cleaner didn’t have the money. “I panicked because I live paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “I have no extra money whatsoever.” (Evans, 10/15)

51��Ƶ Health News: 7 Takeaways From An Investigation Into Financial Aid At Texas Hospitals

Most hospitals offer financial assistance to patients who struggle to afford their bills, often referred to as charity care. But many people are stymied by cumbersome aid applications. Others don’t even know help exists. Hospitals have the ability to proactively screen patients to see if they’re eligible for aid and, if so, automatically wipe out or reduce their bills — a process known as presumptive eligibility. (Evans, Craven McGinty and Levi, 10/15)

A single dose of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is now deemed the most efficient immunization strategy for cervical cancer prevention, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE).  (Boden, 10/14)

New data published this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases reveals why a phase 3 trial for a vaccine targeting extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC) was discontinued early last year. (Dall, 10/14)

Intermittent hemodialysis failed to prove noninferior to continuous renal-replacement therapy for critically ill patients with acute kidney injury and was associated with a higher incidence of death, according to findings from the randomized ICRAKI trial. (Monaco, 10/14)

An accelerated course of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) hinted at the potential to treat co-existing methamphetamine use disorder and depression, early data from a small feasibility trial suggested. The protocol included 10-minute sessions of intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) at least 50 minutes apart for a total of 50 sessions over 3 weeks. Before each session, participants were presented images (cues) to induce craving. (George, 10/12)

In the first large-scale study to compare phenobarbital to diazepam—a long-acting benzodiazepine—researchers found no differences in outcomes between phenobarbital and diazepam, potentially suggesting similar effectiveness. The findings appear online in JAMA Internal Medicine. (10/14)

Benzodiazepine exposure in early pregnancy wasn't associated with congenital malformations, a large cohort study showed. Across more than 4 million pregnancies, children born to women who filled a benzodiazepine prescription during the first trimester did not have elevated risk of congenital malformations compared with children of women with no such fills ... reported Kelly Fung, MS, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues. (Robertson, 10/14)

These drugs have a lot of promise. They could fix sleep apnea and ... American health insurance? (10/15)

If Congress wants to fix the problem, it should reform the No Surprises Act. (Jackson Hammond and Brian Blase, 10/15)

I have spent my career studying nurses and why that workforce so often fails the people it is meant to serve. But my understanding of the system changed deeply the day my daughter died. (Lynne S. Moronski, 10/15)

Shira Fischer, a physician who works in health policy in Boston, sought a speech pathologist for her child in 2022, when virtual appointments became the norm because of Covid-19. “I read their consent and they said they were going to record and use [our appointment] for training,” she said. “And I said, no, my kid has a lisp. The last thing she wants is videos of her lisping to be used for training for who knows how long and who knows what database.” (Alex Rosenblat, 10/15)

California is making a significant investment in behavioral health, and that investment is urgently needed. But if we want to see lasting change, we have to look beyond the buildings being funded and ask a more fundamental question: Where does a person go when they need help today? (Lois Cross, 10/14)