At a recent Nevada legislative committee hearing, lawmakers faced off with members of the governor’s administration over how to fill gaping holes in the state’s upcoming budget. At issue: whether opioid settlement money — paid by health care companies that were sued for fueling the opioid crisis and meant to help states abate addiction —…
Last fall, before being named the senior U.S. health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the Trump administration would liberate Americans from the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of vitamins, dietary supplements, and other substances — ending the federal agency’s “war on public health,” as he put it. In fact, the FDA can’t even require that supplements…
By ALEX AZAR Presidential transitions are always a time of great change, but few leaders have ushered in a shift as sweeping as the rewiring of one-seventh of the U.S. economy. President Trump has the opportunity to do just that by doubling down on the health transformation achievements of his first term. A key to success is…
How best can you design an outcomes based agreement (OBA)? What are the key factors to consider? Project IDEATE is a “cross-disciplinary collaboration between National Health Service (NHS) Wales, industry and academia” with the aim to develop and refine OBA models. What were the key factors IDEATE considered for an OBA? Feasibility: Identify parameters to…
Lynda Brown-Ganzert is CEO of RxPx. The company is the 2022 merger of the company she founded, Curatio, which was a support system for rare disease patients, with RxMx, a complementary service that helped clinicians manage patients on treatment or clinical trials. Lynda says that somehow I inspired the merger! (Although I don’t remember it,…
HELENA, Mont. — Despite concerns about what Congress and the Trump administration might have planned for Medicaid, Montana’s Republican-led legislature and GOP governor appear ready to keep the state’s Medicaid expansion program in place beyond its scheduled end date this summer. State lawmakers don’t have the luxury of waiting until the federal picture sharpens. They…
Republicans in Congress have suggested big cuts to Medicaid. But what exactly is it? Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities, is integral to the U.S. health care system. It keeps hospitals and other providers afloat, provides a key source of federal funds to states, and helps provide health…
Few voters likely expected President Donald Trump in the first weeks of his administration to slash billions of dollars from the nation’s premier federal cancer research agency. But funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health were presaged in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a conservative plan for governing that Trump said he knew nothing…
KFF Health News editor-at-large for public health Céline Gounder discussed the possibility of a bird flu pandemic on WAMU’s “1A” on Feb. 20. Gounder also discussed the potential of an off-label drug being studied to help some autistic kids improve their ability to speak on CBS News’ “CBS Evening News” on Feb. 17. Click here…
A paper by Proudman et al. (2024) finds that doing so would be extremely expensive. Including all preclinical, clinical and post-approval R&D activities, total annual costs to maintain the average lifecycle level of 49.4 approved drugs across all disease areas during the 2018–22 period was estimated to be $139.6 billion. Including only pre-launch costs, total…