GoozNews

The Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing next Thursday on the nomination of Dr. Heidi Overton to lead the Food and Drug Administration. I’m reprinting (see below) an article from today’s KFF Health News that sheds light on the agency’s failure to demand completion of studies it ordered when the drugs are approved based on limited safety and efficacy data, usually from a single clinical trial. This problem has existed for years.

When the Census Bureau reported today that the uninsured population remained steady at its all-time low of 8% of the adult population in 2025, I immediately thought of this visual metaphor to describe the news: The picture is of one Wile E. Coyote, whose imminent fall into the canyon of despair always came at the hands of the Acme Manufacturing Co., which, to continue the metaphor, stands for the malfunctioning products of the Trump regime and an obsequious Congress.

Voters repeatedly tell pollsters the economy and health care are their top worries this election season. They are being pummeled by rapid increases in what they have to pay for food, fuel, hospital services, health insurance premiums, drugs and more. Inflation has eroded paychecks and left workers scrambling to keep pace.

America’s health care system faces three related crises, each predating the wrecking ball wielded by the second Donald Trump administration and its subservient GOP-controlled Congress. It costs too much. It doesn’t provide equal access. And it delivers inferior outcomes. Things have only gotten worse under the current GOP’s reign of terror and error.

While I’m away on an August break, I will occasionally post stories from KFF Health News. See you in September. By Phil Galewitz Tammy Chalala, a retired dietitian in New York, was thrilled with the results of her cataract surgeries, which left her with close to 20/20 vision.She said she paid nearly $4,000 out-of-pocket for her two surgeries last year because she opted to have her doctor use a laser to assist with the procedure.

As I predicted earlier this week, the growing financial pressure on hospitals has brought job growth in the sector — and with it the nation — to a crashing halt. The nation’s 5,000-plus hospitals lost 400 jobs last month, the first monthly decline since December of 2021.

All of the health care sector’s major economic indicators are headed in the wrong direction. Major hospital chains last week began reporting a substantial rise in their uncompensated care costs after millions of people dropped health insurance. The Republican Party’s refusal to retain the Biden administration’s expansion of ACA subsidies has already forced at least three million people into the ranks of the uninsured.

The news is unremittingly bad when it comes to federal funding for U.S. science in general and medical science in particular. The Trump regime’s attempt to impose political controls over research funding will affect every branch of government that relies on grants to outsiders for properly researched information to guide their decision-making.

In years past, journalists covering any Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meeting would invariably add this boilerplate sentence to their stories: “The FDA almost always follows the advice of its advisory committees.” That axiom will be put to the test after the agency’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee yesterday approved four untested peptides for manufacturing and sale.

The Swiss air quality company IQAir yesterday called Chicago, the city where I live, the most polluted in the world. Judging from the haze outside my home office window this morning, not much has changed. The Chicago Tribune reported today that PM2.5 pollution (the most dangerous since small particulate matter from wildfires, internal combustion vehicles and industrial pollution easily enters the lungs and bloodstream) tripled the city’s previous high, which was already deemed hazardous to health.