Jude Pare and his partner, Diane Tix, live in rural Minnesota until temperatures dip below freezing, when they take refuge in Arizona for the winter. While away, their mail is forwarded. But Pare, 77, said he didn’t receive any warning from his Medicare prescription drug plan that his $0 monthly premium was about to increase.

So he didn’t know he had a bill to pay. After he and Tix returned home to Minnesota in April, they got a letter from Wellcare, the insurer that provided his drug plan, saying his coverage had been terminated after three months of unpaid premiums totaling $28.80. Under Medicare’s rules, he can’t enroll in a plan again until the fall, for coverage beginning in 2027.

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Many of us in health care are deeply concerned about misinformation (and declining trust), so it seems important to underscore that while the American people may not always be as science-based as we might like them to be, they may also not be as anti-science as you may think they are—only a sliver of the public are hard-core refusniks who believe the lies, myths, misinformation or misbeliefs about vaccines. Occasionally, a lie breaks through when it’s amplified by someone influential and by the media. For example, 41% of the American people believed there were death panels in the ACA, but that’s the exception, not the norm.

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As an increasing share of older adults have adopted digital health technologies over the past several years, and with most expressing interest in using them to manage their health care, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has introduced several initiatives to expand the use of digital health technologies in Medicare. Broadly speaking, these technologies include health-related applications (“apps”), online patient portals, and connected devices such as smartphones and wearable devices that can be used to measure or track health data.   

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About this Episode

Episode 11, AI Series: In a conversation focused on the technology underlying AI in health care, Chip is joined by Seema Verma, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and now Executive Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, the second largest electronic health records (EHR) platform in the U.S. Seema shares her insights on the evolution of EHRs and why it’s necessary to redesign these systems to better integrate AI capabilities and improve the quality of care.

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Too sick to work? You may have to prove it. Next year, Medicaid recipients will have to start showing documentation such as a doctor’s note to avoid a new work requirement. KFF Health News correspondent Sam Whitehead broke down the rule and exceptions on WAMU’s Health Hub on July 1.

Study, work, or volunteer: That’s what many people will have to do to keep their Medicaid starting next year, according to new rules issued by the Trump administration. But consumer advocates worry the new requirements will catch many recipients flat-footed.

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For decades, Californians have generally said that immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population and a third of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.

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On June 1, 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule providing states with guidance for implementing Medicaid “community engagement” or Medicaid work requirements as part of the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law. The law requires states to condition Medicaid eligibility for enrollees with coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansion or under certain waivers on meeting these requirements or qualifying for an exclusion, including one related to being “medically frail or otherwise” having “a special medical need.” In defining medical frailty, the rule introduces a two-part test, requiring an enrollee to both have a qualifying condition and demonstrate that the condition impairs their ability to fulfill the community engagement requirement, differing from stakeholders’ expectations. Early on, and as with Nebraska’s early implementation, states believed they would be able to exclude people based on presence of a condition alone and several states planned to exclude all people with HIV.

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One issue will decide Steven Cohen’s vote for Nevada governor this fall: Which candidate can best protect him from getting kicked off Medicaid?

Cohen is a 38-year-old Las Vegas resident with autism and has dual enrollment in Medicaid and Medicare. He said he’s very concerned that he could lose his Medicaid coverage once work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks take effect in January, under congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

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Findings

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People who don’t have a trusted health care provider are more likely than people with one to believe or lean toward believing several common myths about vaccines, a new KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust reveals. Similarly, people who use social media or artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots at least weekly for health information are more likely than those who don’t to endorse these false vaccine claims.

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