Today is my oldest child's birthday and in honor, she decided to donate $100 to children's medical care and $50 to feeding kids. "If you want babies to survive, mama, you gotta feed them and give them health care." You sure do, sweet kiddo. Glaringly obvious, even to a 9 year old.

This is frightening and is going to kill people. The CDC estimates that so far this season (which is not over) there have been 280,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths from flu. Looks like the FDA wants that number to increase next year.

FDA refuses to review Moderna’s influenza vaccine

FDA refuses to review Moderna’s influenza vaccine, which could raise concerns about the agency’s posture toward vaccines and drug approvals more generally.

statnews.com

In case you needed another reason to love Bad Bunny more. Education + art = power.

Brent Staples@bstaples.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Bad Bunny has a consulting historian. news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...

UNCONSCIONABLE. I am beyond angry that this is what my tax dollars are going towards.

ProPublica@propublica.org · 7mo ago

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

New paper alert! We looked at all #ACA plans nationwide, evaluating (1) choice set and (2) affordability. Sobering results: the avg ACA consumer has 121 plan options to consider -- far too many to be able to make a good decision. (1/n)

1) Health Savings Accounts #HSA are a solution to the wrong problem -- they don't address #ACA #premium costs and only deal with point-of-care costs. 2) we find HSA-based plans are terrible for people w/ various chronic illness. Which is >50% of the American pop. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

High-Deductible Health Plans and Receipt of Guideline-Concordant Care

This cohort study examines receipt of guideline-concordant health care among individuals with chronic illness enrolled in high-deductible health plans compared with those enrolled in non–high-deductib...

jamanetwork.com

Putting in some #ASHEcon abstracts for 2026 -- topics are: health insurance selection and consumer decision making; insurance affordability; ACA insurance; costs of care. Please ping me if you have papers in those topics and would like to submit a session with me!

Sobering work out today. Compared to 18 OECD countries, kids are ~80% more likely to die in the U.S. -- mostly due to prematurity or SIDS (infants) and gun violence/car crashes (kids). >31% of U.S. kids have a chronic illness. All of this likely to get worse due to recent funding cuts.

Trends in US Children’s Mortality, Chronic Conditions, Obesity, Functional Status, and Symptoms

This study aims to determine how US children’s health has been changing from 2007 to 2023 using multiple data collection methods and a comprehensive set of health indicators.

jamanetwork.com

“The PSTF’s members, Kavanaugh wrote, must be appointed by the HHS secretary, who can also fire them whenever he pleases. And… Kavanaugh wrote that the HHS secretary can also directly supervise and overrule the PSTF’s decisions about which treatments must be fully covered by insurance.” 😳

The Supreme Court Just Handed RFK Jr. New and Extraordinarily Frightening Power

Congress did not give Kennedy, or any other HHS secretary, these powers. SCOTUS did.

slate.com

Please read this and share widely, esp w/ your elected representatives. “Targeted projects… were seeking cures for future pandemics, examining the causes of dementia and trying to prevent HIV transmission. The mass cancellation of grants in response to political policy shifts has no precedent.”

Shattered Science: The Research Lost as Trump Targets NIH Funding

The Trump administration cut research funding that sought cures for future pandemics, examined the causes of dementia and tried to prevent HIV transmission. More than 150 researchers shared with ProPu...

projects.propublica.org

Every flashbang could instead be a meal for a poor kid. Every hotel room for a National Guardsman deployed to fire at our neighbors could house a homeless vet. Every "less-than-lethal" bullet pulled from a journalist's eye could be already needed healthcare for anyone else. All of this is a choice.

Well, well, well.

Dave Levitan@davelevitan.bsky.social · last yr.

Hm interesting bit from Sen. Cassidy's floor speech endorsing RFK Jr www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/pre...

Medicaid work requirements are a bad solution to a non-problem. & as part of the not-beautiful bill, if ppl get kicked off Medicaid for work requirement issues, they aren’t eligible for ACA subsidies, making that insurance out of reach. Cue chronic disease going unmanaged, hospitals w/ bad debt

Opinion | We Saw Medicaid Work Requirements Up Close. You Don’t Want This Chaos.

nytimes.com

22 years ago I pivoted from working on antibiotic resistance to pandemic viruses. Since then, I've argued that if we care about saving US lives in expectation, advance capacity for producing bird flu vaccine offers by far the greatest expected return on investment. ... We were so goddamn close.

Trump administration cancels plans to develop a bird flu vaccine

The Department of Health and Human Services is ending a $766 million contract with the vaccine company Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine for flu strains with pandemic potential, including bird flu.

npr.org

Habeus Corpus.

Georgetown scholar recalls terror and 'mockery of due process' in immigration jail

A Georgetown University scholar who was targeted for deportation by the Trump administration said he was terrified in immigration jail.

apnews.com

This public comment period on COVID vaccine availability ends tonight at 11:59pm ET. Please make your voice heard! www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

Chise@sailorrooscout.bsky.social · last yr.

GUYS. The comment period for this ends in THREE DAYS. PLEASE if you have even a little bit of time, submit a comment here: www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD... Let them know EVERYONE should be able to get COVID vaccines. They BACK DOWN when WE PUSH BACK. www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/f...

Remembering the days when we had a president who could speak so knowledgeably on health care policy that he published a sole author paper in JAMA, with 68 citations.

US Health Care Reform: Progress and Next Steps

In this Special Communication, President Barack Obama reviews the Affordable Care Act: why he pursued it, what it has effected, and how the health care system can still be improved.

jamanetwork.com

New paper alert! Are you in a high-deductible health plan (HDHP)? Chances are you or someone you know are. We studied whether ppl with chronic illness can get the care they need in these plans. Read on for more! 1/n

High-Deductible Health Plans and Receipt of Guideline-Concordant Care

This cohort study examines receipt of guideline-concordant health care among individuals with chronic illness enrolled in high-deductible health plans compared with those enrolled in non–high-deductib...

jamanetwork.com

One of the best parts about this career is that your colleagues become your good friends.

Special session announced at #ARM25 "Special Session: Insurer and Provider Consolidation in U.S. Healthcare" with @rgidwani.bsky.social, Amir Dan Rubin, Cheryl Damberg, and Cory Capps. Register here for a discount: buff.ly/VC0PIYT

NSF just slashed its graduate research fellowships by 51%. This prestigious program has trained & nurtured at least 42 scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates. We're destroying it, at exactly the time we claim to worry about our "sputnik moment" with China bsky.app/profile/davi...

Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈@davidimiller.bsky.social · last yr.

This 51% cut to graduate fellowships is a bloodbath. And it's one of the first public indications of just how much NSF thinks its STEM education budget (the EDU directorate funds the GRFP) might be slashed by Congress. (Prior, we only knew that new EDU awards were being evaluated but not issued)

AHRQ is gutted. It is worthwhile to download anything important – codebooks, data, SAS code, tech specs – asap. "Its latest budget... amounts to about 0.04% of HHS spending. If you’re going to spend $5 trillion a year on health care, it would be nice to know what the best use of that money is"

What’s Lost: Trump Whacks Tiny Agency That Works To Make the Nation's Health Care Safer - KFF Health News

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality helped improve health care safety in a country where thousands die of medical errors each year. It was effectively dissolved Tuesday.

kffhealthnews.org

Hi folks, in these crazy times, some good news -- the Univ. of CO School of Medicine is hiring for an Assistant Professor in the Div. Geriatrics. Looking for: a health economist with interest in aging . You'd work closely with the incredible @lhnicholas.bsky.social Apply here by Apr 15!

For all the CMS data homies, finally, some action on VRDC. CMS has reviewed public comment and is asking for more, specific feedback from researchers. Please take some time to respond to the questions posed here. It looks like CMS really is considering the feedback we all provided the last round.

New research shows 7% of U.S. adults have been exposed to a mass shooting event. 12% of those adults had exposure to a mass shooting at a K-12 school. This suggests that the proportion of U.S. kids exposed to a mass shooting even is much higher.

For everyone truly concerned about waste/fraud/abuse, a reminder that the Dept of Defense is the largest source of spending for the fed gov't, far outpacing Medicaid, SNAP, SS, etc. The DoD has failed 7 audits in a row. That means it has never passed an audit. thehill.com/policy/defen...

AFTER news broke of the 1st child in America dying from measles, RFK Jr's FDA cancelled the meeting to decide on next season's flu vaccines. Cue more people dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Eric Feigl-Ding@drericding.bsky.social · 2y ago

BREAKING—RFK Jr’s FDA suddenly cancels meeting to update next season’s flu vaccines, with zero explanations. Any delays will jeopardize next year’s vaccine supply chain. God help us all.

Despite the importance of primary care in early detection and creating a usual source of care, even the most generous estimates peg primary care spending at only 10% of overall health care spending. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Measuring Primary Care Spending in the US by State

This case series identifies states’ estimates of primary care spending and recommends steps policymakers can take toward standardizing these estimates.

jamanetwork.com