In This Edition:
- KFF HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES
- 1. HHS’ Healthy Food Agenda Puts Hospitals on Notice About Patients’ Meals
- 2. She Survived 2 Shootings. Research Helps Explain Why Her Pain Persists Years Later.
- 3. Journalists Share Latest on Baby Formula Safety, Estrogen Patches, and Postcancer Costs
- STATE WATCH
- 7. Proposed Trump Administration Rule Would Prevent Trans People From Taking Refuge At Homeless Shelters
- HEALTH INDUSTRY
- 8. After Merger, New Hampshire’s Exeter Hospital Struggles To Maintain Standard Of Care, Patients Say
- EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS
- 10. Viewpoints: Are The ‘Blue Zones’ A Fraud?; Oversight Is Necessary For FDA’s Fast-Track Of Psychedelics
From KFF Health News:
KFF HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES1. HHS’ Healthy Food Agenda Puts Hospitals on Notice About Patients’ Meals The backlash was immediate after the Trump administration served notice that hospitals and nursing homes should limit sugary drinks and dietary supplements in favor of what the Department of Health and Human Services terms “real food.” (Stephanie Armour, 5/4)
2. She Survived 2 Shootings. Research Helps Explain Why Her Pain Persists Years Later. Witnessing a shooting, hearing gunfire, losing someone, or living in a violent area can leave people with chronic pain and stress long afterward. (Alma Beauvais, The Trace, 5/4)
3. Journalists Share Latest on Baby Formula Safety, Estrogen Patches, and Postcancer Costs KFF Health News journalists made the rounds on national and local media recently to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances. (5/2)
Here’s today’s health policy haiku:
HARDLY A SUBSTITUTE
Chatbot therapy:
Talking to screens, but we’re still
losing connection.
– Siri Palreddy
If you have a health policy haiku to share, please Contact Usand let us know if we can include your name. Haikus follow the format of 5-7-5 syllables. We give extra brownie points if you link back to an original story.
Opinions expressed in haikus and cartoons are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions of KFF Health News or KFF.
Summaries Of The News:
REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH4. Mifepristone Makers Ask High Court To Restore Mail Access To Abortion Pill
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, sided with Louisiana that dispensing the drug via telehealth threatens the safety of pregnant women and the sovereignty of the state, which bans abortion in nearly all instances. The ruling also halts access to mifepristone for non-abortion purposes, such as easing miscarriages, Politico reports.
Politico: Drugmakers File Emergency Appeal To Restore Abortion Pill Access Two companies that make the abortion drug mifepristone asked the Supreme Court on Saturday to hit pause on Friday’s lower court ruling that cut off telemedicine access to the pills nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal. The emergency appeals ask the high court to temporarily restore a federal policy that allows the pills to be prescribed online and delivered by mail, arguing that failing to do so would cause “immediate chaos” and leave patients around the country in limbo. (Ollstein, 5/2)
AP: What To Know About The Ruling Blocking The Mailing Of Abortion Pill Mifepristone Friday’s ruling affects all states, even those without abortion restrictions. “This is a huge access issue for patients that haven’t got providers close by, or providers close by who are willing to prescribe,” said Josh Thorburn, owner of Eddie’s Pharmacy in Los Angeles. (Schoenbaum and Mulvihill, 5/2)
Missouri Independent: Hawley Puts Missouri At Center Of National Fight Over Abortion Pill U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley has opened a new front in the fight about medication abortion, pushing legislation to revoke federal approval of mifepristone, urging the Justice Department to investigate its manufacturer and helping launch a national political group aimed at reshaping abortion debates after a string of losses on the ballot. The push has made Missouri a central arena in the national fight over mifepristone. (Spoerre, 5/4)
More reproductive health news —
Chicago Tribune: Gov. JB Pritzker, Democrats Holding Off On Abortion Rights Amendment Embarking on a second term about six months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down the federal right to abortion, Gov. JB Pritzker declared in his January 2023 inaugural address that the new realities facing those seeking the procedure “demand that we establish a constitutional protection for reproductive rights in Illinois.” In the four legislative sessions since, however, Pritzker and the Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly have taken no visible steps toward realizing that goal. (Petrella, 5/3)
NC Newsline: Attempts To Lower The Rate Of Black Maternal Deaths In NC Face New Challenges The path leading to the track at a Durham middle school on Saturday was marked with signs bearing the names of Black women who died from pregnancy-related causes. (Bonner, 5/3)
MedPage Today: Most Infection-Related Maternal Mortality Is Preventable, Study Says Infection remains a top cause of maternal mortality with most infection-related maternal deaths being preventable, a descriptive study of Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) data found. (Robertson, 5/3)
MedPage Today: Racial Differences Persist For Menopause Hormone Therapy Prescriptions Rates of menopause hormone therapy significantly differed by racial group, a retrospective cohort study found. Non-Hispanic white patients had the highest utilization of menopause hormone therapy at 10.8% while Black patients had the lowest rate at 5.4%, reported Nikita Chigullapally, an MD candidate at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana, Illinois, in a presentation at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) annual meeting. (Robertson, 5/3)
KFF Health News: Journalists Share Latest On Baby Formula Safety, Estrogen Patches, And Postcancer Costs Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the results of the FDA’s largest baby formula safety test on CBS News 24/7’s The Daily Report on April 29. She also discussed how women seeking treatment for menopause symptoms are facing a shortage of estrogen patches on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on April 27. (5/2)
MEDICAID5. Nebraska Starts Enforcing Medicaid Work Rules; 25K May Lose Plans
It’s the first state to roll out the requirements, and critics blasted Nebraska leaders for doing so eight months before the deadline. As NBC News reported, new Medicaid enrollees will need to submit proof that they’ve worked the required number of hours or that they qualify for an exemption. People already on Medicaid will have until at least the end of July to do the same.
NBC News: Nebraska Rolls Out Medicaid Work Requirements, Putting Thousands At Risk Of Losing Coverage Nebraska on Friday became the first state to implement Medicaid work requirements, eight months ahead of the federal deadline mandated in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” The move is expected to strip coverage from around 25,000 residents who qualified for the program under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, according to the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group. An estimated 72,000 Nebraskans will be subject to the policy, which applies to “able-bodied” adults ages 19 to 64. (Lovelace Jr., 5/1)
Politico: Some Red States Expanded Medicaid Against Their Will. Now They’re Trying To Shrink It With Work Rules Voters in seven states bucked their conservative leaders to expand Medicaid at the ballot box. Now officials in six of them are deploying tactics to make the upcoming implementation of work requirements especially strict, which could dramatically reduce the number of people covered. (Ollstein, 5/3)
Modern Healthcare: How Providers Are Pushing Medicaid To Cover Hospital-At-Home Health systems aiming to scale hospital-at-home programs are using health equity as a rallying point in their efforts to convince more state Medicaid programs to pay for the care. Providers argue states that don’t pay for in-home acute care are denying poor patients the same care options offered to patients covered by private insurance and Medicare. They also say states could be missing opportunities to identify social determinants of health that can negatively affect patient outcomes and drive up Medicaid spending. (Eastabrook, 5/1)
On SNAP benefits —
AP: Why 4.3 Million People No Longer Receive Food Stamps Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins this week attributed a multimillion-person drop in the number of participants receiving food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to the tamping down of fraud and an improved economy. But experts discount those factors, saying the primary driver of the decrease was more likely new legislation that changed how the program runs. (Goldin, 5/1)
In other news from Capitol Hill —
Fierce Healthcare: Senators Move To Extend Cost-Based Payments For Rural Hospitals The bipartisan reauthorization would add five more years to the Rural Community Hospital Demonstration, a payment model for “tweener” rural hospitals. (Muoio, 5/1)
Military.com: Bipartisan Bill Targets Fraud Schemes Exploiting Veterans U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Ted Budd (R-NC) on Thursday introduced the Veterans Protection from Fraud Act of 2026, a bipartisan proposal aimed at increasing criminal penalties for individuals who deliberately target veterans in fraud schemes. The bill would impose a sentencing enhancement of up to 10 years in prison for defendants convicted of fraud offenses that intentionally target veterans. Lawmakers say the measure is designed to deter increasingly common scams that exploit veterans’ benefits, financial stability, and trust in government institutions. (Fuller, 5/1)
Politico: Republicans See High-Risk Plans As The Future Of Health Insurance Hundreds of thousands of Americans have switched to health insurance that covers a lot less of their care this year. Republicans hope a lot more will follow them. The shift since January was driven by GOP lawmakers’ decision at the end of December to reduce the help the government provides to people who don’t get insurance through work, but instead buy it in the Obamacare marketplace. The reduction in those subsidies sent Obamacare customers searching for plans that cost less. (Hooper, 5/3)
ADMINISTRATION NEWS6. Foreign Doctors Can Again Get Visas Allowing Them To Practice In US
Some hospitals were forced to put physicians on administrative leave after a policy put in place by the Department of Homeland Security in January froze decisions on visa extensions, work permits, and green cards for citizens of 39 countries, The New York Times reported.
The New York Times: Doctors From Countries Under Travel Ban Now Allowed to Stay in U.S. Foreign doctors will be able to receive visas allowing them to practice in the United States, after the Trump administration quietly changed a policy to exempt them from a travel ban. A Department of Homeland Security policy stemming from a travel ban that was put in place in January had frozen decisions on visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries. As The New York Times reported last month, some physicians were subsequently placed on administrative leave by hospitals, and many others faced the imminent threat of being forced to stop working. (Jordan, 5/3)
Stat: Immigration Changes Are Driving Foreign Researchers To Leave The U.S. — Or Not Come To Begin With The budding scientist had left India for the U.S. for her Ph.D., because as she saw it, no other country offered the same opportunities for researchers. Set to finish her doctorate this summer, she also had a postdoctoral fellowship lined up in America. Now those plans have changed. (Joseph, 5/4)
The Washington Post: Internal ICE Records Reveal Widespread Use Of Force In Detention Centers The reports detail how guards have increasingly used chemical agents and physical tactics on detainees, including groups demanding adequate water, food and medical care. (MacMillan, Ba Tran, Cornejo and Melgar, 5/4)
Mississippi Today: The Population Of This Giant Mississippi ICE Facility Has Plummeted In 3 Weeks. ICE Says That’s Normal. The number of detainees at Mississippi’s Adams County Correctional Center appears to have nosedived in the past few weeks, leaving several housing units vacant. (Joshi, 5/1)
More Trump administration updates —
Politico: The New Surgeon General Nominee Has A MAHA Problem Leaders in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement are outraged over President Donald Trump’s surgeon general nominee switch. Since Trump announced on Thursday that Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News medical contributor, would replace Casey Means, a close ally of the health secretary, as the president’s pick for the nation’s “top doctor,” they’ve rushed to social media to share why they believe Trump’s decision is short sighted. (Friedman, 5/2)
KFF Health News: HHS’ Healthy Food Agenda Puts Hospitals On Notice About Patients’ Meals Complaints about hospital food are certainly not new, and Jell-O and fruit juice are often the butt of related jokes. But the Trump administration has recently upped the ante. It is urging the public to report hospitals and nursing homes that serve sugary drinks, nutrition shakes, or meals that it says don’t meet dietary guidelines established last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with officials vowing to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding if violations occur. (Armour, 5/4)
The New York Times: A Long, Strange Trip: How The G.O.P. Came To Embrace Psychedelic Drugs Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA. Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” (Jacobs, 5/3)
Also —
The Washington Post: Diagnosed With Colon Cancer At 36, She Spent Her Last Years Helping Others With The Disease The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Asal Sayas worked in the White House and Senate, lobbied for AIDS research and became a tireless champion for people with cancer. (Smith, 5/2)
STATE WATCH7. Proposed Trump Administration Rule Would Prevent Trans People From Taking Refuge At Homeless Shelters
A rule unveiled last week would require federally funded shelters to board people based on their birth sex. The proposal now goes through a 60-day comment period. The 19th reports that an estimated 40% of the nation’s homeless youth population identifies as LGBTQ+.
The 19th: Trump HUD Proposal Would Let Homeless Shelters Ban Trans People The Trump administration’s push to exclude transgender Americans is moving to the nation’s homeless shelters. On Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) introduced a proposed rule that requires federally funded shelters to house prospective tenants based on their birth sex alone. (Sosin, 5/1)
The New York Times: Trump Backed Forced Treatment For Homeless People. Utah Shows The Challenges. State lawmakers declined to back a Trump-inspired plan to move 1,300 homeless people to a campus on the edge of Salt Lake City, but supporters are trying to keep the plan’s spirit alive. (DeParle, 5/4)
More health news from across the U.S. —
Fresh Take Florida: Florida Lawmakers Move To License An Alternative Medicine Abolished Decades Ago A bill awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature creates a state board of Naturopathic Medicine to assist the Department of Health in overseeing naturopathic doctors in the state. Opponents say naturopathy is not supported by science. (Maguire, 5/3)
San Francisco Chronicle: Invasive Mosquitoes Could Surge As Bay Area Season Starts Early The Bay Area could be in for an earlier and longer mosquito season this spring and summer — even as officials race to contain the potential explosion of a new invasive mosquito species that is already spreading in parts of the East and South Bay. A mild winter, warm stretches of weather in February and March, and a rainy spring this year have created an ideal habitat for mosquito breeding, which means more mosquito production and more chances for the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile, the main disease of concern in California. (Ho, 5/3)
KFF Health News: She Survived 2 Shootings. Research Helps Explain Why Her Pain Persists Years Later In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a high school freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, was struck in the stomach by a round from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a schoolmate. Two students were killed during the attack, including her best friend, and two others were injured. When she graduated from high school, she enrolled at Brown University, the scene of another shooting in December 2025, while she was studying for finals in her dorm room. (Beauvais, 5/4)
CNN: Death Cafes Take The Sting Out Of The Inevitable End After a potluck supper, a short guided meditation and a quick lesson in resistance singing, a couple dozen people made their way to a quiet room at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. As a choir warmed up downstairs, they gathered – some strangers, some friends – to discuss a topic that’s normally off-limits: death. (Christensen, 5/1)
The Washington Post: During CPR Lesson, Teacher Has A Cardiac Arrest — And Students Save Him “The students actually do learn from me,” said Karl Arps, who has been an EMT instructor at Fox Valley Technical College for 19 years. (Page, 5/4)
On social media and mental health —
AP: Trial Could Change Meta Apps And Algorithms As New Mexico Seeks Safeguards On Child Safety New Mexico state prosecutors are seeking fundamental changes to Meta’s social media apps and algorithms to safeguard children in the second phase of a landmark trial on allegations that platforms such as Instagram have created a public safety hazard. Opening statements are scheduled Monday in the three-week bench trial to decide whether the platforms of Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, pose a public nuisance under state law. (Lee, 5/4)
The New York Times: School Cellphone Ban Study Finds Mixed Results Cellphone bans got devices out of students’ hands, according to the first large study. But behavior and academics have not improved, at least so far. (Goldstein, 5/4)
HEALTH INDUSTRY8. After Merger, New Hampshire’s Exeter Hospital Struggles To Maintain Standard Of Care, Patients Say
Exeter Health Resources in 2023 merged with Beth Israel Lahey Health, which had pledged to maintain and expand access to clinical