Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names. ‘The Federal Government’s Loss Is the County’s Gain’ I wanted to thank Rachana Pradhan and Katheryn Houghton for their coverage of the loss of staff at the National Institutes of Health…
Bluestem Health, a clinic that serves low-income and uninsured patients in Lincoln, Nebraska, has lost money for the last two years. And CEO Brad Meyer fears times will soon get worse for the clinic and its 21,000 patients. That’s because Nebraska is set to become the first state to require certain Medicaid enrollees to work…
Suki is one of the original Ambient scribing, now Ambient intelligence, companies. They’re selling both to providers and to other partners using their tech in their tools and services (think telehealth, other EHR providers like Athena, and more). Kevin Wang is the Chief Medical Officer, and he told me about the evolution of ambient documentation,…
It is not bringing down US prices, but delaying launches in Europe. Reuters reports: Drug launches in EU markets fell by some 35% in the 10 months since Trump’s executive order, compared with the previous 10 months…Delaying launches at lower EU prices could help secure higher U.S. prices for longer. You can read the full…
Last August, as part of the federal government’s crackdown on people in the country illegally, the Trump administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees with orders to determine whether they were ineligible based on immigration status. But seven months later, findings from five states shared with KFF Health News show…
States are paying contractors such as Deloitte, Accenture, and Optum millions of dollars to help them comply with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a law that will strip safety-net health and food benefits from millions. State governments rely on such companies to design and operate computer systems that assess whether low-income people qualify…
By GANESH ASAITHAMBI In an episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), Barney Stinson introduces a fictional word: possimpible. The possimpible combines “possible” and “impossible” and describes the extraordinary achievements by people who refuse to accept conventional limits. In modern healthcare, the possimpible is no longer a joke; it has quietly become…
An NBER working paper by Barwick, Xia and Xia (2026) provides the answer: In 2010, China accounted for less than 8% of global clinical trials; by 2020, it had surpassed the US in annual registered clinical trial volume…We provide strong evidence that China’s rise was primarily driven by the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform,…
In 2013, a scientist at Abbott Laboratories saw study results with potentially big implications for the company’s profits and the lives of some of the world’s most fragile people: preterm infants. The upshot, she wrote in an email: Babies fed rival Mead Johnson Nutrition’s acidified liquid human milk fortifier — a nutritional supplement used in…
Last summer, Lorena Alvarado Hill received a series of unexpected medical bills. A teacher’s aide in Melbourne, Florida, Hill is a single mom who works shifts at J.Crew on the weekends to send her daughter to college. Hill and her mother, who lives with her, had been enrolled in an insurance plan through HealthFirst. Hill…