When healthcare met politics with time running out: 3 new developments

December is shaping up to be one of those months in which healthcare collides with politics on multiple fronts and in conspicuous fashion. Three examples: 

1. The director of the National Institutes of Health and his principal deputy are touting their success at ‘curing’ the agency of its self-inflicted DEI disability. (Or can they say ‘handicap’ again?) 

NIH’s former devotion to the “diversity/equity/inclusion” movement ended when President Trump took office in January 2025, states Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, and Matthew Memoli, MD, MS, in the U.S. edition of the historically conservative British outlet The Spectator (which bills itself as the world’s oldest magazine). 

• “At the NIH, we dismantled the DEI apparatus and refocused the NIH on its age-old mission,” they write in a piece posted Dec. 11. “We oversaw a large-scale effort by all parts of NIH to eliminate DEI from its processes, including eliminating loyalty oaths and other DEI statements, removing DEI from performance reviews, hiring and promotion, and purging DEI from all facets of scientific review, notices of funding opportunity (NOFO) and grant decision-making.”
  
  
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• “The NIH will not fund research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, nor will we fund studies exploring broad, poorly defined concepts such as racial microaggressions or implicit bias. Such work diverts resources away from projects that advance the health and longevity of all Americans, including minority populations.”
  
  
  • Read the rest. 

2. One of America’s most popular conservative news outlets lets RFK Jr. have it. 

The editorial board of the New York Post isn’t mincing words. (Not that it ever does.) “RFK Jr.’s lunatic war on vaccines puts kids at risk,”  bellows the tabloid’s leadership, which the Trump administration can usually count on for verbal cover from mainstream-media carping. 

• “There’s zero reason for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to change recommendations, except to further RFK’s obsessive agenda to reduce the number of vaccines for tots—based on his feverish belief that the jabs are dangerous,” the board contends. “The White House is, at the very least, giving him a long leash to carry out his anti-vax campaign.”  
  
  
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• “Terrifying young parents by suggesting, based on debunked nonsense, that vaxxing their kids could ruin their health forever when the opposite is true isn’t just mind-bogglingly irresponsible—it’s downright cruel,” they write. “And that is exactly what the public health bureaucracy under RFK Jr. is doing every time it casts doubt on vaccines that are proven safe. The ugly truth: The only end result will be more sick and dead kids.”
  
  

3. From the other end of the political spectrum comes a prediction that Republicans in Congress will fumble the healthcare football ahead of New Year’s Day.

That would be consequential—and painfully so—for all stakeholders since Jan. 1 is when health-insurance premiums are set to skyrocket due to the expiration of Obamacare subsidies. “House Republicans are getting ready to vote on healthcare this week,” reports the left-leaning MS Now, formerly MSNBC. “Their proposal isn’t likely to go anywhere.”

• “There’s perhaps no single policy measure that would have a more dramatic impact on affordability in the year ahead than doing something about the expiration of these subsidies,” House Republican Kevin Kiley of California tells the outlet Dec. 15. MS Now notes Kiley had his district divvied up by Democrat-led redistricting this year. “If we go home without addressing that, that is a huge problem,” Kiley adds. 
  
  
• Politically, however, the vote could also hand Democrats ammunition ahead of the midterms—“offering a clear list of Republicans who declined to act before premiums soared,” MS Now reports.

Also worthwhile: 

• These moms are thankful for SSRIs during pregnancy. Now the drugs are an FDA flashpoint. (KFF Health News)
  
  
• Tech use and adoption keep surging among older adults (AARP)
  
  
• Atorvastatin recall may affect hundreds of thousands of patients—and reflects FDA’s troubles inspecting medicines manufactured overseas (The Conversation via Yahoo News)

From HealthExec’s sibling news outlets:

• American College of Radiology criticizes prominent study pushing for new approach to breast cancer screening (Radiology Business)
  
  
• New recalls announced for troubled heart devices—FDA previously urged customers to seek alternatives (Cardiovascular Business)