The House this week voted 341-88 to pass a three-bill minibus for fiscal year 2026 that includes funding for key health programs and other bipartisan healthcare provisions and extensions. The bill includes extensions of AHA-supported priorities, such as the Medicare-dependent hospital and low-volume adjustment programs for one year, telehealth flexibilities for two years, and hospital-at-home flexibilities for five years. It also delays payment reductions for clinical laboratory services by one year and eliminates Medicaid disproportionate share hospital cuts until FY 2028. The bill also funds key rural health, healthcare workforce, maternal and child health and behavioral health programs. The Senate will consider the funding package next week.
An artificial intelligence-based tool can predict the medical trajectories of individual premature newborns from blood samples collected soon after they are born, a Stanford Medicine-led study has shown.
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. physicians with an active license is over age 65. This has spurred a small minority of hospitals to enact policies to assess these caregivers' fitness, with the aim of reducing lapses that harm patients.
The U.S. has finalized its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, one year after President Donald Trump announced America was ending its 78-year-old commitment, federal officials said Thursday. But it's hardly a clean break. The U.S. owes more than $130 million to the global health agency, according to WHO. And Trump administration officials acknowledge that they haven't finished working out some issues, such as lost access to data from other countries that could give America an early warning of a new pandemic.
Bipartisan House lawmakers on a key health committee want to know: Why are health insurance CEOs' salaries so high while their customers struggle to pay for care? Lawmakers posed the question to five health insurance CEOs testifying before the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee on healthcare affordability Thursday. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) asked one of the CEOs, David Joyner of CVS Health, why the company spent $41 million to compensate Joyner and a colleague in 2024. Democratic California Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán piled on to the criticism of the CEOs' salaries, noting that they receive stock options or performance bonuses, which could incentivize them to prioritize company performance and shareholders over patients.
New York City may be experiencing some of its coldest weather of the winter, with sub-zero temperatures biting fingers and nipping cheeks, but that hasn't prevented thousands of nurses from taking to the picket line for what is the largest nurses strike in the city's history. Almost 15,000 nurses who work for three separate hospital systems have been on strike since 12 January, holding out for increased staffing, better safety in hospitals, and improved healthcare benefits. The New York State Nurses Association has pointed to the giant pay packages that hospital CEOs have received, at a time when nurses say there are too few of them to adequately care for patients.