Marie Noon takes eight medications a day. One keeps her heart rate from spiking to avoid a stroke. One prevents debilitating headaches. Another ensures she doesn’t retain excess fluid.

More than a decade ago, Noon said, she was diagnosed with adult-onset Still’s disease, a rare type of inflammatory arthritis that can cause rashes, debilitating pain, and fevers. The disease upended her life.

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BELZONI, Miss. — Harmony Ball-Stribling’s path to pregnancy had been turbulent, from an endometriosis diagnosis to an arduous in vitro fertilization process and sky-high blood pressure. But as her due date approached in the summer of 2021, her health improved and those storm clouds seemed to scatter.

“It was just too perfect,” said her mother, Shenelle Ball-Green, of those calm, hot weeks.

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Alice Thornton has spent more than two decades treating people living with HIV in Lexington, Kentucky.

Her team tends to “cringe” anytime they hear about patients having to fill out lots of paperwork, like when applying for Social Security Disability payments, because it can be a difficult, burdensome process.

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Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Congress has no clear path to passing its annual spending bills, with the issue of Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood again threatening to gum up the works. Meanwhile, senators this week screened President Donald Trump’s newest health nominees: Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Sean Kaufman to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. But Schwartz undermined some senators’ confidence by claiming ignorance about a number of Trump administration funding cuts, and Kaufman faced fiery questions over a deleted social media post about the hepatitis B vaccine.
• The confirmation hearing for Todd Blanche as attorney general also trod into health territory, with Blanche saying he would review potentially using the 19th-century Comstock Act to block distribution of medication abortion drugs by mail. Such a move could block not only mifepristone but also misoprostol, which is the second abortion medication in the two-drug regimen — and is also used for non-abortion purposes. Trump promised on the campaign trail not to invoke the Comstock Act.
• In politics, Maine Democrats are cautiously eying the abortion stances of a replacement Senate candidate, hoping to pin the rollback of abortion rights on Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent. And Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is calling for an investigation into whether Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. violated a federal law aimed at preventing electioneering by officials when he made recent calls to persuade some candidates to drop out of congressional races.
• And the gastrointestinal infection cyclosporiasis is sickening more Americans and drawing attention to the Trump administration’s actions undermining food safety surveillance programs. The cyclospora parasite was once subject to mandatory reporting but has since been made voluntary, challenging efforts to track the source and contain the outbreak.

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As the Trump administration’s January deadline looms for states to enforce new Medicaid work requirements, some state lawmakers are turning the tables by pushing to publicly name the largest companies that have employees enrolled in the government program covering low-income and disabled people.

California lawmakers seek to revive an expired law that would require the state to identify companies that employ 100 or more people and have employees enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. Nevada has had a similar law in place since 2017, though a proposal for one in Oregon stalled when its legislative session ended in March.

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Thousands of Americans who undergo a common knee surgery might be making their problems worse rather than better.

Researchers who followed patients for 10 years after they received either the actual procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery to trim degenerative cartilage tears, or merely “sham surgery” — a skin incision — for knee pain, found that the surgery provided little or no benefit and was, in fact, associated with accelerated osteoarthritis and higher rates of reoperation. That generally meant a total knee replacement.

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About this Episode

Episode 12, AI Series: Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare, joins Chip to discuss who really benefits as AI moves into health care’s back office. A quiet arms race is underway — providers deploying AI to code, bill, and capture revenue and insurers deploying it right back to review, deny, and hold the line. The open question is whether any of this lowers what the country actually spends or just speeds up the fight over the dollar. Pearson brings a rare vantage: PHTI runs rigorous, independent evaluations of health technology — from a now-famous assessment that found digital diabetes tools didn’t lower the total cost of care, to its own examination of the administrative AI arms race in prior authorization and medical billing. She and Chip dig into whether AI can deliver better care and real savings, or simply more activity — and how incentives and policy decide which way it breaks.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana is taking aim at California’s Medicaid program for providing housing assistance, food, and other social services to high-need, low-income patients who tend to rack up big healthcare costs and, he argued, strain taxpayer funds.

The Republican blasted California during back-to-back political attacks in May, saying the heavily Democratic state is committing “outrageous fraud” and “stealing” by spending state and federal Medicaid money meant for basic medical treatment on unconventional services such as housing and nutrition assistance, gym memberships, and even tribal prayers and, he claimed, exorcisms.

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Seasonal work. Inconsistent hours. Frequent moves. Cash payments and informal jobs. For farmworkers who rely on Medicaid, these common employment patterns could put their health coverage at risk.

It’s a heightened concern for the estimated million-plus farmworkers who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, as new work requirements kick in for the federal-state healthcare program that serves low-income and disabled Americans.

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Kelly Haggett figures that a mandatory surcharge added to Washington state’s payroll tax cost her about $500 last year. But she doesn’t really mind.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 of my annoyance with taxes in general, this one is about a 2,” she said. “I see the benefits.”

The small surcharge on wages provides the funding for Washington Cares, the nation’s first state-operated program for long-term care insurance. It was set to begin distributing benefits July 1.

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