Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations.
KFF HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES
KFF Health News: In Connecticut, Doctors Now Sue Patients Most Over Medical Bills, Surpassing Hospitals Many hospital systems in Connecticut have stopped suing their patients over unpaid bills, stung by criticism about the harm caused by aggressive collection tactics. But physicians, dentists, ambulance companies, and other health care providers are still taking their patients to court, a Connecticut Mirror-KFF Health News investigation of state legal records shows. Lawsuits by doctors and other nonhospital providers now dominate health care collections in Connecticut, the records show, accounting for more than 80% of cases filed against patients and their families in 2024. (Levey, Golvala and Carlesso, 4/20)
KFF Health News: KFF Health News’ ‘An Arm and a Leg’: The Accidental Architect Of America’s Drug Patent Problem Depending on whom you ask, Alfred Engelberg could be a hero or a villain in the story of American pharmaceuticals. The patent lawyer helped write legislation that led to a dramatic increase in the number of generic drugs on the market. He also contributed to a patent system that gives pharmaceutical companies monopolies on their most lucrative drugs, blocking generic competition and keeping prices high along the way. (Weissmann, 4/20)
KFF Health News: KFF Health News’ ‘On Air’: Journalists Talk Hot Health Topics: Urgent Care Clinics Performing Abortions And Doulas' Pay KFF Health News Michigan correspondent Kate Wells discussed urgent care clinics offering abortions on Apple News Today on April 15. (4/18)
ON CAPITOL HILL
ABC News: RFK Jr. Defends Vaccine Views, Autism Comments During House Committee Hearing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endured another grueling hearing on Capitol Hill focused on his decisions that lawmakers claim have impacted children's health, including his views on vaccines and previous comments about autism. Following the hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Friday, Kennedy ignored questions from reporters on President Donald Trump's new nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Erica Schwartz, and Kennedy's upcoming hearings with Senators next week. (Jones II, 4/17)
PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS
The New York Times: Trump Signs Executive Order To Loosen Restrictions On Psychedelic Drugs President Trump on Saturday signed an executive order seeking to hasten research into the therapeutic benefits of LSD, Ecstasy, psilocybin and other mind-altering drugs by ordering federal agencies to ease restrictions that have long limited the ability of scientists to study them. The measure also provides $50 million for state-level research into ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic made from the root of a Central African shrub that has been drawing interest from researchers for its potential to treat opioid use disorder and other forms of substance abuse. (Jacobs and Daly, 4/17)
Stat: How Trump Is Pushing Psychedelics Reform Through The Health Agencies Notably, the weekend psychedelics push came at the behest of influential podcaster Joe Rogan — who offered him a large audience ahead of the 2024 election — and leaders of the Make America Healthy Again movement, part of the White House’s unorthodox political coalition. (Payne, 4/18)
Fox News: Doctors Split On Trump's Executive Order To Advance Psychedelic Research As President Donald Trump backs efforts to advance psychedelic drugs, doctors are speaking out about how the move could impact mental health treatments. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the research, funding and potential FDA approval of psychedelics like ibogaine, psilocybin, LCD and MDMA, primarily to treat PTSD, depression and addiction. (Rudy, 4/19)
MORE ON THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
Stat: Cautious Optimism Greets Erica Schwartz's CDC Director Nomination As one CDC employee, who asked not to be named, put it on Friday, among staff “the general vibe is guarded but hopeful.” Still, even people who are applauding the choice of Erica Schwartz, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, are worried about whether she’s up for the challenges ahead. Schwartz’s predecessor, Susan Monarez, was fired after a standoff with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine policy. (Branswell, Payne and Cirruzzo, 4/18)
Stat: PBMs Warn Trump’s Proposal To Disclose Drug Prices Is Illegal The Trump administration’s desire to pry open the black box of prescription drug prices is facing stiff opposition from the phalanx of lobbyists representing pharmacy benefit managers and health insurers. In January, the Department of Labor proposed a rule that would mandate PBMs disclose a wide range of drug pricing information to employers and make it easier to be audited. The public had until last week to submit comments. (Herman, 4/20)
The Washington Post: Where U.S. Science Has Been Hit Hardest After Trump’s First Year Every night, Katherine Burns wakes up in a sweat. It feels like the world is closing in on her. Burns, 47, runs a laboratory at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine focused on endometriosis, a stigmatized, poorly understood gynecologic disease. She’s not just intrigued by the complex interplay of the immune system and hormones that drive endometriosis but is one of the millions of American women who have it, suffering years of misdiagnosis, blackout levels of pain and infertility. She’s haunted by a terrifying prospect: the end of her research. (Johnson, Sidhom and Svrluga, 4/19)
The New York Times: New PEPFAR Data Show Worrying Declines In Testing And Treatment For H.I.V. The United States-funded H.I.V. program that is credited with saving 26 million lives worldwide suffered big blows to its impact after the Trump administration’s abrupt stop and restart of its activities last year, according to the first tranche of data from the program since 2024. Overall, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, treated about as many people in the last quarter of 2025 as in the same period in 2024, according to a report released on Friday by the State Department. (Mandavilli, 4/17)
GUN VIOLENCE AND MENTAL HEALTH
The New York Times: Haunted By ‘Dark Thoughts,’ Louisiana Father Kills 8 Children Eight children were killed and two other people were gravely wounded in a shooting spree that spanned at least three locations in Shreveport, La., and ended with the gunman shot dead after a police chase on Sunday morning, the authorities said. The gunman, Shamar Elkins, 31, had mental health problems and had recently expressed suicidal thoughts, family members said in interviews. (Medina, Morales and Diaz, 4/19)
OUTBREAKS AND HEALTH THREATS
CIDRAP: CDC Reports 4 Flu Deaths In Kids As Flu Activity Ebbs, But Rotavirus Levels High Across US Flu activity continues to decline across the country, but the season remains classified as high-severity for children, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting four new deaths in children in today’s FluView update, down from 12 the week before. Flu has claimed a total of 143 child deaths this season, compared with 296 for all of last season. Roughly 85% of pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children not fully vaccinated against flu. (Bergeson, 4/17)
San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Measles Case Highlights Risk For Babies Too Young For Vaccine The San Francisco infant who was diagnosed with measles this week highlights an especially at-risk group: babies who are too young to get the measles vaccine, and who travel to areas where measles is circulating. The case, announced by the public health department Wednesday, is the first measles case in San Francisco since 2019, and comes as California and the nation are seeing a troubling resurgence of the highly infectious disease. (Ho, 4/18)
CIDRAP: Report Details Tetanus In 4 Unvaccinated US Kids, Including Refusal Of Post-Exposure Prevention None of four US children diagnosed as having tetanus in 2024 had completed a recommended primary tetanus toxoid–containing vaccine (TTCV) series, and none received TTCV or preventive tetanus immunoglobulin (TIG) between their exposure and symptom onset. (Van Beusekom, 4/17)
CIDRAP: Extensively Drug-Resistant Shigella On The Rise In US, CDC Warns Historically, shigellosis cases in the United States have primarily been seen in young children in daycare settings and in people who’ve traveled to countries with poor sanitation. Infections with Shigella, a gut pathogen that causes diarrhea and vomiting, have also been fairly easy to treat. But the profile of who’s most at risk of shigellosis is changing, and the infections is becoming much harder to treat, according to a report published last week in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the flagship publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (Dall, 4/17)
CIDRAP: Study Links Long COVID In Kids To Worse Grades, Attention, And Social Life Children and adolescents with long COVID are significantly more likely to experience worsening grades, difficulty concentrating, and having limited fun with friends, according to a new study published in Academic Pediatrics. The findings, drawn from the National Institutes of Health–funded Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) observational pediatric cohort, suggest that the impacts of long COVID in kids and adolescents extend beyond physical symptoms and may disrupt key aspects of learning and social development. (Bergeson, 4/17)
CIDRAP: Dengue May Pose Similar Risk Of Guillain-Barre As Flu, Campylobacter The risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) after confirmed dengue infection is similar to that after infection with established viral or bacterial triggers such as influenza or Campylobacter jejuni, per a letter to the editor published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Van Beusekom, 4/17)
MEDICARE
Modern Healthcare: Medicare Wage Index Lawsuit Escalates Urban Hospital Pay Fight Urban hospitals claim they were shortchanged by the federal government and the legal fight over Medicare pay is pitting them against their rural peers. Seventy urban hospitals sued the Health and Human Services Department earlier this month, alleging the government owes them millions of dollars after the agency changed how it calculates Medicare payments for hospitals based on local labor costs, which are reflected in the Medicare wage index. The lawsuit stems from longstanding Medicare payment discrepancies between urban and rural hospitals tied to how much hospitals pay staff. (Kacik, 4/17)
Modern Healthcare: What Medicare’s Joint Replacement Model Expansion Means For Providers The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to revive and broaden a Medicare joint replacement bundled payment model that has saved more than $100 million. CMS proposed implementing an expanded version of the decade-old Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Model, dubbed CJR-X, beginning Oct. 1, 2027, in a draft regulation published last Friday. (Early, 4/17)
HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY
Modern Healthcare: Baptist Health To Acquire Two Arkansas Community Hospitals Baptist Health has entered into definitive agreements to acquire two community hospitals in its home state of Arkansas. The Little Rock-based system plans to acquire Magnolia Regional Medical Center and South Arkansas Regional Hospital in El Dorado. Financial details and terms were not disclosed for either transaction. (DeSilva, 4/17)
Modern Healthcare: Aetna-Radiology Partners No Surprises Act Lawsuit Dismissed Aetna’s lawsuit accusing Radiology Partners of gaming the No Surprises Act to win higher reimbursements will not advance, a federal court ruled. The CVS Health subsidiary alleged that Austin, Texas-based Radiology Partners chose not to join insurance networks in order to use No Surprises Act’s independent dispute resolution process, or IDR, to generate payments greater than network rates. Aetna filed its case in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in 2024. Radiology Partners denied these claims. (DeSilva, 4/17)
MedPage Today: Physicians Beat AI Scribes On Clinical Note Quality, Study Shows Clinical notes generated by artificial intelligence (AI) scored lower on quality than those prepared by humans, a cross-sectional evaluation of five simulated primary care cases showed. (Henderson, 4/17)
PHARMACEUTICALS
The New York Times: New Treatment Lets 3 Transplant Patients Halt Anti-Rejection Drugs Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh reported on Friday that they had trained the immune systems of a few patients to accept liver transplants without the drugs needed to avoid organ rejection. Three of eight patients have now been off the drugs for at least three years, perhaps an early step toward a new approach to transplantation that experts in the field have long hoped for. The study was published in Nature Communications. (Kolata, 4/17)
NBC News: Pancreatic Cancer MRNA Vaccine Shows Lasting Results In An Early Trial Donna Gustafson had a harder time than usual shaking off the jet lag from her 22-hour journey from Florida to Australia. Two days into her trip, her skin took on the yellow hue of jaundice. Gustafson, who is now 72 and lives in Delray Beach, Florida, went to the emergency room for fluids, thinking she was dehydrated. In a surreal moment, the Australian doctors instead told Gustafson that she had pancreatic cancer. “They were very adamant about it,” Gustafson said. “This is absolutely pancreatic cancer.” (Sullivan, Kopf and Thompson, 4/18)
The Wall Street Journal: A Long Elusive Lung Cancer Target May Finally Be Yielding To New Drugs Doctors may be getting closer to having a potent weapon against a genetic driver of lung cancer that has long lacked any targeted treatment options. Researchers on Sunday presented early results of clinical trials of two experimental drugs targeting a gene called KRAS, one of the most common and challenging drivers of human cancers. Each drug takes aim at a different KRAS mutation that drives lung cancer, which kills more people worldwide each year than any other form of the disease. (Martinez, 4/19)
The New York Times: Batch Of Anti-Anxiety Drug Xanax Recalled, F.D.A. Says A single batch of the widely prescribed anti-anxiety drug Xanax has been recalled, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The drug’s distributor, Viatris, said it was recalling one lot containing 51 bottles of 3 milligram extended release tablets because of concerns that they might not dissolve in the body as expected. This can affect how much of the drug is released and absorbed over time, making the effects less predictable. The pills were sold nationwide under the brand name Xanax XR. (Bajaj, 4/16)
The New York Times: Activists Tear-Gassed At Failed Raid Of Beagle Research Facility Hundreds of animal rights activists in Wisconsin were thwarted by the police and private security guards as they tried to steal thousands of beagles from a facility that breeds them for sale to research labs and for experiments done on site. Officers and guards fired tear gas and rubber bullets on the estimated 1,000 protesters, witnesses said, to keep them from entering the facility, Ridglan Farms, a state-licensed dog breeder. Ridglan breeds beagles for biomedical research aimed at improving veterinary medicine. The company has denied that it abuses animals. (Benner and Glascock, 4/18)
Stat: A Controversy Over Research Monkeys Highlights Ambiguity Over Health Standards A leading animal rights group is accusing Pfizer of running afoul of its own standards in the handling of research monkeys, jeopardizing both the welfare of the animals and the integrity of scientific research. But the case also appears to highlight a lack of guidelines for assessing the health of monkeys before they are shipped for medical research. (Silverman, 4/20)
STATE WATCH
ProPublica: Texas Medical Board Disciplines Doctors In Porsha Ngumezi And Nevaeh Crain Cases The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors ProPublica previously investigated whose patients died after receiving delayed or inappropriate pregnancy care under the state’s strict abortion ban. Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death. (Surana and Presser, 4/17)
NBC News: Son Of 2nd Patient Who Died After Seeing Florida Surgeon Speaks Out After his mother’s surgery, Weyman Dorsett worried something was wrong. His unease grew as he watched an ICU doctor check his mother’s medical charts.“I’ll never forget and it’ll never leave my mind, the look on that doctor’s face as he was reading through the files,” Dorsett, 53, said. “He was just shaking his head, like, ‘what in the living hell is going on?’” (Lavietes, 4/17)
Stat: Transgender Adults Ensnared In Youth Gender-Affirming Care Bans For Nikolas Indigo, the road to freedom was lined with warnings against a life of sin. Neither the road nor the message was a metaphor. Along nearly 250 miles of highway from Savannah to Atlanta, billboards preached: “turn from sin,” “Jesus is the way,” “repent.” It’s a common pilgrimage for transgender people, who often need to travel for affirming procedures. Indigo, 25, made appointments with four different surgeons before he was finally able to get masculinizing chest surgery in Atlanta in September. Despite Savannah’s reputation for being young, hip, and at least a little queer, few local physicians perform the basic procedure. (Gaffney, 4/20)
LIFESTYLE AND HEALTH
AP: 100 Times Stronger Than Fentanyl, Carfentanil Seizures Surge Nearly two decades after drug addiction sent him to rehab as a teenager, 36-year-old Michael Nalewaja had settled into a quiet life in Alaska where he worked as an electrician. That all came crashing down days before Thanksgiving 2025, when he and a mutual friend unknowingly took a lethal cocktail of fentanyl and carfentanil they may have mistaken for cocaine. (Golden and Mustian, 4/18)
The Washington Post: Audio Consumption Can Be Just As Addictive As Screen Time At Franklin High School in Portland, Oregon, students are required to seal their phones in special pouches at the beginning of the school day. But headphones and earbuds don’t fit in the pouches. “Technically, AirPods and stuff aren’t allowed, but people use them a lot anyway, especially because they can hide them with their hair,” says junior Easton Atlansky, 17, who has noticed many students using AirPods or headphones between classes. (Singer, 4/19)
AP: People Chasing Healthy Skin Glow Are Trying Beef Tallow And Salmon Sperm Bryan Vander Dussen spent years as a dairy farmer before shifting to selling farm-raised beef. In the past year, he and his wife have been making another transition: Cooking up recipes in their kitchen that turn organ fat from his animals into tallow balm that buyers are eager to slather on their skin. One tricky bit: Coming up with formulas that don’t smell like pot roast. (Diab, Taxin and Walling, 4/18)
GLOBAL WATCH
AP: HiPP Recalls Baby Food Jars In Austria After Rat Poison Found In Samples Baby food brand HiPP is recalling some of its baby food jars after samples in Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic tested positive for rat poison, officials said Sunday. Authorities believe the tampering occurred in 190-gram (6.7-ounce) jars of baby food made with carrots and potatoes for 5-month-olds that were sold from SPAR supermarkets in Austria. The first sample tested positive on Saturday. “This recall is not due to any product or quality defect on our part. The jars left our HiPP facility in perfect condition,” HiPP said in a statement. “The recall is related to a criminal act currently under investigation by the authorities.” (4/20)
Bloomberg: South Korea Targets Syringe Hoarding As War Rattles Supply South Korea’s health regulators are stepping in to curb syringe hoarding as supply chain disruptions tied to the Middle East conflict threaten the availability of essential medical supplies. While overall syringe production remains steady at about 4.5 million units a day — slightly above 2025 averages — hospitals report dwindling inventories, and online platforms show rising prices and empty virtual shelves, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. (Shin, 4/20)
The New York Times: 4 Drug Lab Investigators Die in Car Crash in Mexico Four government investigators, two from the United States and two from Mexico, were killed early Sunday in a car accident in the northern state of Chihuahua while viewing newly discovered drug labs, a spokesman for the State Attorney General’s Office said. The Mexican victims included the director of the state’s investigative agency and an officer, state officials said. They were returning from an operation to seize and destroy two clandestine methamphetamine laboratories deep in the state’s mountainous terrain. No details were immediately released about the American officials. (Villegas, 4/19)
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