Julie Rovner Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ weekly health policy news podcast, "What the Health?" A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book "Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z," now in its third edition.

The Trump administration has conceded in court documents that it used purely political considerations to cancel grant funding previously approved by Congress. But that has provoked a surprisingly muted response from lawmakers, who under the Constitution control the power of the purse.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate summoned former National Institutes of Health and White House official Anthony Fauci to testify — again — about his handling of the covid pandemic. Fauci, however, refused to answer questions, citing the advice of his attorneys.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, Rachel Cohrs Zhang of Bloomberg News, Shefali Luthra of The 19th, and Liz Essley Whyte of The Wall Street Journal.

Panelists

Rachel Cohrs Zhang Bloomberg News

Shefali Luthra The 19th

Liz Essley Whyte The Wall Street Journal

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• Recent court filings shed light on how the Trump administration has used politics to justify its decisions to cancel federal grants. While similar revelations may have been explosive under other presidents, the filings have triggered muted, if any, responses from lawmakers.
• The Trump administration announced this week that it would end the temporary Medicare Part D subsidies, introduced under the Biden administration, that help lower the monthly premiums older Americans pay for drug coverage. While next year’s premiums probably would have increased anyway, the change — which many will notice when they shop for plans later this year, shortly before the midterm elections — may not help Republicans in the voting booth.
• Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) brought Fauci before the committee he chairs to address accusations related to his role in the nation’s covid response as a key adviser to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But little of substance was said, with the hearing quickly devolving into political grandstanding as Fauci asserted his constitutional right not to self-incriminate.
• An FDA advisory panel voted to recommend the agency make it easier for Americans to obtain several previously banned compounds known as peptides — even as FDA staff caution that there’s no evidence they are safe. The panel included members who stand to profit from expanded access to peptides.

Plus, for “extra credit” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week that they think you should read, too: 

Julie Rovner: The Arkansas Times’ “,” by Byron Tate.  

Rachel Cohrs Zhang: Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Trump Administration Demands Hospitals Share Emergency Room Records,” by Amanda Seitz, Maia Rosenfeld, and Darius Tahir.  

Liz Essley Whyte: Stat’s “,” by J. Todd R. Lawrence and Madison A. Kesler.  

Shefali Luthra: The Washington Post’s “,” by Aaron E. Carroll.  

 Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

• The New York Times’ “,” by Tony Romm and Brad Plumer.
• CalMatters’ “,” by Mikhail Zinshteyn.
• The Wall Street Journal’s “,” by Liz Essley Whyte.
• Bloomberg News’ “,” by Rachel Cohrs Zhang.
• Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ “Trump Has Quietly Throttled an Agency Devoted to the Safety of American Healthcare,” by Arthur Allen.
• The Washington Post’s “,” by Lauren Weber.
• Politico’s “,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Ariel Wittenberg.

Credits

Click here to find all our podcasts.

And subscribe to “What the Health? From Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News” on , , , , , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

The Office of Personnel Management posted last month that it will begin routinely collecting identifiable, personal health information on more than 8 million people — despite concerns from privacy advocates and Democrats, who have demanded the agency drop the plan. The notice will go into effect July 24, allowing OPM to begin its collection at any point afterward.

In reaction to privacy concerns raised by insurers and others, OPM now says the identities of enrollees will be “pseudonymized” — meaning names, addresses, and Social Security numbers will be removed — before the agency’s analysts review the massive new health datasets it will soon begin receiving.

Birth years of enrollees will be retained, and the agency’s “technical staff” will receive member IDs that it will scramble into different, unique numbers before releasing them to other staffers, according to the notice.

But the notice also specifies that OPM retains the right to reidentify the records.

Sixty-five insurance companies will be required to routinely send OPM detailed data — including names, addresses, doctor information, diagnoses, prescriptions filled, and payment details — on health care services paid through the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs.

In a change to its original proposal, first reported by Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, the agency says it also wants to peek at records kept by Medicare, the federally funded health insurance for older and disabled Americans, to examine claims from federal employees and retirees, and their families, who depend on both programs.

In its latest notice, OPM argues that the vast trove of data is necessary to ferret out fraud and overpayments in the FEHB and PSHB programs. Those programs cost roughly , with about $50 billion covered by the federal government and $30 billion funded by enrollees. The Trump administration has ramped up efforts, led by Vice President JD Vance, to curtail what it says is rampant fraud and misuse of publicly funded health benefits.

The effort still faces criticism that it doesn’t go far enough to protect the privacy of federal workers and their families.

“Clearly, this administration has not earned our trust with Americans’ sensitive data,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in an emailed statement to Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. “If OPM wants to work in good faith to reduce fraud, they should come to Congress, including to folks like me who are engaged on this issue and represent many federal workers and retirees and their families, and work to build consensus and trust before implementing these sweeping changes.”

The , posted in December, sparked concerns in part because it did not specify what the Trump administration planned to do with the sensitive health information it receives — and did not instruct insurers to redact identifying information.

OPM General Counsel Kurt Dykstra said the detailed records are critical to the administration’s mission of rooting out fraud and could help identify fraud perpetrated not only by medical providers but also by enrollees.

But when pressed for instances of workers, retirees, or their relatives committing such fraud, Dykstra only noted generally that healthcare fraud does occur.

The information could demonstrate “potential anomalies in usage patterns that could be related to the individual, but really also could be related to the provider, the treater, the clinic — whoever it is that’s actually providing the care,” Dykstra told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News in an interview.

Records deemed suspicious by OPM’s data analysts could then be referred to the agency’s Office of the Inspector General for further investigation, which could include “determining who’s involved and what the potential issues are, what the ramifications look like,” Dykstra said.

OPM’s plan to collect and analyze medical records has prompted unease among unions and federal workers, to mass firings and layoffs — in some cases, they say, driven by political retribution — since President Donald Trump took office.

Health privacy lawyers say, too, that while pseudonymizing workers’ details is a step in the right direction, it might not go far enough to protect their privacy.

OPM’s notice mostly complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal law commonly called HIPAA that protects sensitive health data from being shared, said Matt Fisher, a health privacy lawyer. But he noted one exception: The member ID that insurers provide enrollees can be used to identify them.

“The described process arguably comes down to trusting internal controls in OPM to ensure that data is walled off as proposed,” Fisher said in an email. “The ideal would be for only truly de-identified information to be shared in the first place.”

Insurers regularly share information about claims with employers who offer health plans to employees, in efforts to control costs. But since employers themselves are not covered by HIPAA, large datasets are typically de-identified, meaning the insurers remove identifying information such as employees’ names or addresses, to comply with the law.

Employers, too, have been accused of using health information to target employees for dismissals. Most recently, a group of Meta employees filed a lawsuit of using artificial intelligence to target for layoffs those who had taken medical or family leave.

Pseudonymizing details such as names or addresses would go only so far to protect privacy, since medical conditions in particular can make it very easy to identify certain employees, said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for data privacy.

“The richer the data, the more likely it is going to be identifying,” Hall said.

“In this case, you may be the only person in a region that has that particular kind of medical procedure, condition, or even prescription,” he said. “All of those things can be extremely identifying, even when you remove or obfuscate or pseudonymize direct identifiers.”

Most federal retirees decide to continue with FEHB plans and enroll in Medicare once they turn 65, which provides more comprehensive coverage and allows family members to remain enrolled in FEHB plans, said John Hatton, the staff vice president for policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association.

OPM wants to analyze medical records for those dual enrollees as well. The agency is asking for all of their cost and service use records from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Still, Hatton said, OPM’s latest notice provides more details about how the agency says it will use the sensitive health information it receives and safeguard it.

“It’s a big improvement over the last notice, which was very lacking in detail and explanation for why they wanted all the medical claims data and how they’re going to protect the privacy of the data,” Hatton said.

“We’d be open to seeing even more security around the privacy of the data so there really is a clear wall,” he added.

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

Now she worries the cost of those drugs could rise — not because of price increases, but because of a tax system revamp put on the ballot by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature and backed by the Republican governor.

Prescription drugs and doctor visits are currently exempt from taxes in the state. But in August, Missouri voters will weigh in on a proposed constitutional amendment to give the legislature the power to replace the state’s income tax with expanded sales taxes, including on goods and services currently exempt.

“Politicians want Missourians to trust them when they say not to worry about our medications and healthcare being up for grabs,” Ortbals said at a June press event organized by Progress MO, a progressive advocacy group.

“I have spent enough time in Jefferson City to know better,” said Ortbals, who works for a Democratic state legislator but was speaking in her personal capacity. “I have watched them speak about protecting life while making lifesaving healthcare less accessible.”

Taxes on healthcare are unusual in the United States but not unprecedented. Most states over-the-counter drugs. Illinois, Missouri’s neighbor, prescription drugs. Delaware, Hawai‘i, New Mexico, and Washington all on services by physicians, dentists, out-of-hospital nursing providers, and medical laboratories.

Critics of the amendment to eliminate income tax in Missouri say it’d be difficult to make up the lost revenue without also imposing taxes on healthcare. Nearly two-thirds of the state’s general revenue budget comes from income taxes, about $8.7 billion in 2026. Failing to make up that revenue could lead to steep cuts in state services.

The proposed tax cut comes at an already precarious time for the state budget. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe in spending in this year’s budget over concerns of lagging revenues. The state legislature has passed a since 2022, including . Federal covid aid has propped up the budget in recent years, but the that the surplus is dwindling. And the state is projected to in federal Medicaid funding over 10 years due to cuts from President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Proponents of the Missouri income tax proposal, such as of the Show-Me Institute, a conservative think tank, say the cut would in the state, both of which have been flat in recent years. He doubts healthcare would be among the things subject to sales tax. But even if it were, he said, it could be done in ways that wouldn’t target lower-income residents. New Jersey, for example, (excluding reconstructive surgeries), which tend to be performed on wealthier people.

In a statement to Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News, Kehoe spokesperson Gabby Picard said the governor “will never support extending sales taxes on agriculture, healthcare, or real estate,” noting that the legislature would have to decide what to exempt if the ballot measure passes.

Federal law already prohibits states from imposing taxes on many healthcare services covered by government programs such as Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors, and Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities, Picard wrote. More than were insured through those two programs in 2024.

But Jay Hardenbrook, advocacy director for AARP Missouri, argued that raising taxes on healthcare, real estate, and agriculture is the for the amendment, considering the legislature doesn’t need special permission to cut income taxes. He cautioned that because the amendment opens the door to new taxes on anything, it could unleash a “weird feeding frenzy” with special-interest groups lobbying for exemptions.

“Let’s say we do protect prescription drugs from a tax increase; does that mean that the cost of food goes up?” Hardenbrook said.

And if the Missouri measure passes and the legislature exempts healthcare and real estate from new taxes, Hardenbrook worries about cuts to state-funded services like home and community-based care.

“When I talk about taxes going up, and the price of every good and services going up, that’s the best-case scenario,” Hardenbrook said. “The worst-case scenario is that the income tax just goes away, and we just don’t have the money to do the things that we need to do.”

have no income tax, and Washington taxes only capital gains, but of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank, said the way Missouri is going about its elimination is nearly unprecedented. Only Alaska has repealed a broad-based personal income tax that had previously accounted for a significant portion of the state budget, Davis said.

“The situation in Alaska was they struck oil, and they had this gusher of economic activity and tax revenue that resulted from that,” Davis said. “Missouri has not struck oil.”

A 2012 tax cut in Kansas that reduced income taxes for individuals and eliminated them for some types of businesses created a large budget hole, prompting lawmakers there to the cuts five years later.

Tsapelas of the Show-Me Institute said Missouri’s income tax elimination wouldn’t happen overnight but would instead be more akin to in the state: phased in and tied to revenue targets that would shield the state from massive budget gaps.

“It’s not as doom and gloom as some people are worried about,” Tsapelas said.

But Ortbals, the healthcare advocate, said too many Missourians are already delaying medical care because of costs.

“I want a Missouri where young people can afford to stay, where families can afford to grow, where chronic illness does not become financial ruin,” Ortbals said.

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

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.

“I don’t know how I would defend this procedure at all,” said one of the study’s authors, Teppo Järvinen, an orthopedist and the head of the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics. “What has been shown dramatically is that patients who have this procedure have more pain — they do worse. All the scores pointed in the same direction.”

Järvinen , published in April in the New England Journal of Medicine, was the first to show the surgery left many patients worse off. Though the study was small, the results were compelling, he said, because his team picked the patients “most likely to benefit.”

The study does not apply to cartilage tears incurred from an acute pain-causing injury. It included subjects middle-aged or older who were experiencing knee pain and whose MRIs showed cartilage tears.

Evidence has been accumulating steadily for over a decade that arthroscopic knee surgery to shave torn, degenerative cartilage does not help more than physical therapy. Arthroscopic rates in Finland have dropped 90%, Järvinen said. They have been falling in the U.S., too, but at a far slower rate.

One in the U.S., which counted over 2 million meniscus surgeries from 2010 to 2020, found the number decreased by about 4% each year. Most procedures were performed on women and patients in their 50s.

In the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program, the number of procedures has declined steadily in recent years, from about 169,000 in 2014 to 91,000 in 2024, shows. These figures do not include beneficiaries in Medicare Advantage, private insurance plans that cover more than half of Medicare enrollees.

Prior studies of scans have found that in people over 50, the result of wear and tear and often not painful.

“Nothing supports the idea that a patient’s pain comes from the meniscus,” Järvinen said.

Robert Brophy, director of the Orthopaedic Clinical Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, said that “evidence is growing for judicious use of this surgery in this population.” But, he noted, “many patients do benefit.”

All the same, he acknowledged that current practice among his peers is “all over the map.” For example, that surgery for meniscus tears in the Medicare population is far more common in the South than in the Northeast.

A massive study committee of orthopedic societies in Europe and the U.S. last June released a noting that “degenerative meniscus lesions can be treated with comparable results with either non-operative (including physical therapy) or surgical approach.” It recommended a trial of physical therapy before surgery but still endorsed the operation.

A concerted campaign by orthopedic specialty societies called the has been ongoing for years. The group advocates for protecting and maintaining long-term knee health through nonsurgical treatments, surgical repair, and other therapies.

One inherent issue in all medical specialties is that appropriate treatment is often in the eye of the physician beholder, meaning that specialists create the guidelines for when a treatment is in order. And financial considerations may influence that decision, Järvinen said.  

In the U.S., physician payments are decided by the , or RUC, a committee of the American Medical Association composed largely of specialists. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his advisers have reportedly wresting control of that committee from the association, though it’s not clear how that could be done, since the AMA owns the billing codes used to calculate patients’ charges.

Arthroscopic takes 30 to 60 minutes in the operating room, and the patients spend a few hours recovering in a surgery center or in a hospital outpatient department. Medicare allots on average $2,159 to $3,875 for the procedure, depending on where it is performed; patients pay 20% of the fee as coinsurance. There may be additional costs, for example, if more than one doctor is involved in the procedure. Commercial insurers average well more than twice that, said Marcus Dorstel, a senior vice president at the data analytics firm Turquoise Health, adding that the amount providers charge for the procedure varies widely. Those charges do not include the fees of the surgeons and the anesthesiologist.

Treating chronic knee pain has a variegated history.

Fifty years ago, the treatment for cartilage tears, from acute injury or from wear and tear, was to remove the entire piece of cartilage. At that time, doctors did not consider it a shock absorber but a useless, vestigial piece of tissue like the appendix.

Today, the first-line therapy for a painful knee with degenerative tears is physical therapy and, for some people, weight loss. Then there is arthroscopic surgery, depending on the view of the surgeon about its utility.

There is also a menu of injections: Steroids have proved scientifically valuable in the short term. And injections of stem cells and plasma-rich protein are widely offered but are controversial — and not covered by most insurance — because studies have been at best inconclusive about their benefit.

And as orthopedists are backing away from shaving off meniscus tears, they are highlighting a newer procedure — sewing the torn cartilage back into a whole. But that is typically an option for patients under 50 with acute injuries and clean tears, and it is unclear exactly which patients might benefit.

When all else fails, there’s a different surgery that’s also a big moneymaker for hospitals and doctors: knee replacement.

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

“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 . It was set to begin distributing benefits July 1.

If Haggett, 67, a systems administrator who lives in Auburn, Washington, needs help with daily activities as she ages — bathing, dressing, grocery shopping, managing medications — she’ll be able to use the benefit she has accrued through WA Cares, as the program is known.

About 3.7 million workers participated last year, paying an additional 0.58% in payroll taxes. Those who contribute for 10 years will qualify for a lifetime benefit of $36,500. The amount will rise with inflation: A 36-year-old now earning about $50,000 a year who contributes $291 a year for a decade will have if she needs assistance at age 75.

Both the WA Cares mandatory premiums and eventual benefits are modest. But for older adults and people with disabilities, they can help pay for a variety of services: home care, transportation, adult day programs, home modifications like ramps and grab bars, compensation for family members who assist them, or assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Haggett had looked into private long-term care insurance to cover those needs, but she balked. “It’s crazy expensive,” she said. And since premiums can rise, and frequently have, “you’re basically saying, I’ll pay whatever, whenever.”

Haggett knows that WA Cares can’t cover all her long-term care costs. In fact, because she was already in her 60s when payroll deductions began in 2023, and because she is planning to retire in two years, she’ll receive only half the lifetime benefit.

But “if I required care and it would protect my wife from having to spend our savings, $18,250 is not meaningless,” she said.

Washington has been working toward implementing WA Cares for a decade; the program has survived two statewide votes aimed at overturning or weakening it. Now, other states will be paying attention.

‘Most People Have Nothing’

An estimated 70% of Americans will need long-term care at some point in their lives, but “they haven’t planned for it or saved for it,” said Cathleen MacCaul, advocacy director for AARP Washington State, which supported the legislation that created WA Cares.

“People are under the misconception that Medicare will pay for this,” MacCaul said. In fact, while Medicare pays for healthcare, it rarely covers long-term care, either at home or in facilities.

Medicaid does cover long-term care, but it involves such strict limits on income and assets that “most middle-class people are left out, or they have to impoverish themselves” by spending nearly all their assets to qualify, said Richard Frank, director of the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institution. Those who are eligible often face lengthy waiting lists for care at home.

“Long-term care is the largest area of unprotected health risk in the United States,” Frank said. “Most people have nothing.”

Previous efforts to establish public long-term care protections have foundered. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act included , a legacy of Sen. Ted Kennedy that would have created a voluntary long-term care insurance program. The Obama administration eventually deemed it unworkable, and “it never saw the light of day,” Frank said.

The private market has also contracted. Most of the largest companies selling long-term care insurance — Genworth, John Hancock, MetLife — have exited the market. The return on their investments plummeted when interest rates fell after the Great Recession, and the number of insured people who abandoned their policies — a profitable development for insurers — was far below projections.

“The psychology of the industry was: Holy smokes, we’re losing money! We’re getting out,” said Claude Thau, who directs the annual Milliman Long-Term Care Insurance Survey. As the losses mounted and premiums spiked, consumers such as Haggett stopped buying policies. Moreover, Thau estimated, 1 in 6 applicants are unable to get coverage for health reasons.

Thus, fewer than 35,000 Americans bought stand-alone policies in 2024, compared with about 235,000 in 2010, according to a , a trade association. The average 60-year-old purchaser would, at age 80, receive a projected maximum benefit of $369 a day, Milliman reported. But the average annual premium on new stand-alone policies in 2024 — $3,265 — can seem daunting to someone close to retirement.

As the purchase of stand-alone policies has dropped, insurance companies have turned to policies bundling some long-term care benefits with life insurance or annuities. Those sales figures are climbing. Still, the association notes, only 3% of Americans age 50 or older have any long-term care insurance.

‘A Five-Alarm Fire’

That has prompted a recent spate of proposals to find public ways to protect Americans from ruinous costs that can continue for years. “This is a five-alarm fire,” said sent in May by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and 16 fellow Senate Democrats to their colleagues.

The letter, more a statement of purpose than a specific legislative plan, proposed a “home care guarantee” for Medicare beneficiaries, among other efforts. Proponents expect to issue a more detailed report in the fall and to introduce a bill early next year.

A also proposed providing subsidized long-term care at home through Medicare, with beneficiaries making contributions according to their ability to pay. Like most of these programs, it would kick in when people need help with activities related to daily living or require supervision because of cognitive decline. The authors estimate that 8.2 million Americans will be eligible, far more than those who qualify for home-based care under Medicaid.

In the House, Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from New York, and Rep. John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan, have to create a catastrophic-insurance program for older people with disabilities. It would require them to pay for care out-of-pocket or with private insurance for the first several years before they would receive a monthly federal benefit.

Enacting federal initiatives in the current political climate seems unlikely, proponents acknowledge. The Trump administration’s plan to cut billions of dollars from Medicaid “has moved the needle backward on the accessibility of long-term care,” said Taylor Harvey, a spokesperson for the Senate Finance Committee.

So “are looking at what Washington is doing with a lot of interest,” said Norma Coe, who is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania and is tracking long-term care programs. Legislators have introduced bills in Illinois, Hawai‘i, and West Virginia; other states have task forces studying the issue.

“Long-term care is one of those conversations around every dinner table,” said Bea Rector, assistant secretary for the Department of Social and Health Services’ Home and Community Living Administration.

“Families step in,” she explained. Sometimes they can continue providing care, “but sometimes more formal care has to be put in place. That’s when people see the value of programs like this.”

Steven Russakoff knows the challenges of elder care, having provided years of support for his father, who died two years ago, and for his mother, who is now living in a nursing facility. “It’s brutal, it’s exhausting, and it’s extraordinarily expensive,” he said. The family has liquidated virtually all his parents’ assets to pay for their care.

Russakoff, who is 56 and lives in Shoreline, Washington, initially disliked WA Cares. He could handle the additional deductions (about $250 a year) from his paycheck as a director of university dining services, but he felt forced into a program he couldn’t use if he left the state to retire.

But WA Cares has already been amended several times and for many participants who move away, making him a convert. “It’s a good idea,” Russakoff concluded. “A necessary evil.”

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

So he didn’t know he had a bill to pay. After he and Tix returned home to Minnesota in April, they got a letter from Wellcare, the insurer that provided his drug plan, saying his coverage had been terminated after three months of unpaid premiums totaling $28.80. Under Medicare’s rules, he can’t enroll in a plan again until the fall, for coverage beginning in 2027.

Pare takes Xarelto, a blood thinner that reduces his risk of strokes, blood clots, and pulmonary embolism. “He could bleed to death without it,” Tix said. A 90-day supply of the drug costs about $1,800 using a coupon from GoodRx, a discount drug website, she said.

Pare is among tens of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries who were on Wellcare’s Value Script drug plan who will likely go without prescription drug coverage for the rest of the year because they didn’t pay premiums for three months.

Next year, thousands more people in 32 states and Washington, D.C., who are enrolled in zero-premium drug plans from Wellcare and other insurance companies may find themselves in the same situation if their premiums go up and they don’t realize it, according to a Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News analysis of drug plan data. Premiums and other changes for 2027 will be unveiled in September.

Going without medication can be life-threatening, especially for Medicare beneficiaries. take one or more prescription drugs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost half live with four or more chronic health conditions that can cause functional or cognitive impairments.

Congress added prescription drug coverage to Medicare in 2003. But the coverage is administered by commercial insurance companies, which compete fiercely with one another for the business of about enrolled in drug plans.

Zero-dollar or very low monthly premiums have helped make Wellcare’s Value Script the bestselling stand-alone prescription drug plan in Medicare, with nearly 6 million customers across the U.S., according to government data. But in 26 states and Washington, D.C., some Value Script members who didn’t have to pay a premium last year were caught off guard by increases in 2026.

After a two-month grace period — which Wellcare extended to three — Medicare drug plans can drop customers who don’t pay their premiums, no matter how small the amount. Some members who lost their coverage in Nevada, for example, owed as little as $8.10 for three months, according to a Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News analysis of Medicare drug plan data.

Wellcare terminated coverage for about 140,000 Value Script beneficiaries in April, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it and feared reprisals at work for doing so. About 40,000 of the people who were dropped may be able to enroll in new coverage immediately because they have low incomes and receive financial assistance through a program Medicare calls “.”

Multiple state officials said they had heard the same disenrollment figures, including Nevada’s insurance commissioner, Ned Gaines, who chairs the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ senior issues task force; Rebecca Gouty, director of the State Health Insurance Assistance Program in West Virginia; and Tim Smolen, director of Washington state’s Statewide Health Insurance Benefits Advisors. The West Virginia and Washington initiatives are part of the federally funded , or SHIP, which provides free, unbiased help navigating Medicare.

Surprise Bills

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees Medicare drug plans, declined to provide the number of Value Script members who lost coverage due to unpaid premiums. “The agency does not publicly provide plan-specific disenrollment figures or state-level breakdowns related to the non-payment of premiums,” Christopher Krepich, a spokesperson, said in a written statement to Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

Centene Corp., Wellcare’s parent company, also declined to provide disenrollment numbers.

“We recognize how disruptive a loss of coverage can be and are committed to helping members understand their options,” said Sarah Baiocchi, senior vice president for specialty and prescription drug plans at Centene. She acknowledged that “some members in our Value Script plan experienced a premium for the first time, or for the first time in several years.”

Baiocchi said all Value Script members received a CMS-required annual notice of changes in September, before the premium increases took effect.

A sent to members in two states and Washington, D.C., is 21 pages long. The new premium is mentioned on pages 3 and 8, along with changes to out-of-pocket costs and how to find updates on covered drugs and network pharmacies.

The company also informed members about 2026 premium changes through phone calls, text messages, regular mail, or email, Baiocchi said.

People who are dropped are not able to reenroll or join another drug plan until the start of the open enrollment period this fall for coverage beginning Jan. 1, unless they qualify for an exception, Krepich said. And because they will have gone without coverage for at least 63 days, they could be hit with a permanent that increases every year for the rest of their lives.

“Medicare should be doing something about this so that we can go ahead and get coverage now,” said Wayne Bennett, 74, who lives in Durham, North Carolina.

In May, he found out that Wellcare had canceled his Value Script plan because he hadn’t paid his $3.60 monthly premiums. He takes nine prescription drugs to treat his blood pressure, glaucoma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other health problems. He filled most of his prescriptions — including several at no cost — before he lost coverage. He doesn’t know what he’ll have to pay when his supply runs out.

Gouty, the West Virginia program head, said many Medicare beneficiaries arrange for their monthly drug plan premium to be automatically deducted from their Social Security benefits, and that many likely thought that choice remained in place until they changed it.

“They didn’t realize that when the plan was a zero premium in 2025, that stopped the Social Security premium deduction and they would have had to reelect it for 2026,” Gouty said.

In other words, even if they mistakenly thought the premium was still zero, Medicare beneficiaries would have needed to somehow allow Social Security to make deductions — something the agency doesn’t do — or set up a payment plan through their bank or credit card in case payment was necessary.

“That sounds goofy,” Tix said.

Centene’s Baiocchi blamed the Social Security Administration for the problem: “We believe this was a key driver of non-payment disenrollments and subsequent complaints.”

Spokespeople for the agency referred questions about the matter to CMS.

Krepich said legal requirements for drug plan enrollment and disenrollment limit what CMS can do to help beneficiaries who lose coverage for not paying their premiums.

‘Pretty Upset’

Now that Pare has no prescription drug coverage, his doctor replaced his blood thinner medication with a much less expensive drug that should be just as effective. Pare paid $111 for four other medications that used to be free under his Value Script plan. He hasn’t had to refill four more prescriptions yet and doesn’t know what they will cost, Tix said.

If Wellcare members knew about the premium increases, they could have set up direct billing or an automatic payment plan early this year before the payment grace period ended April 1. But they would have been able to fill prescriptions during the grace period, so if they didn’t see Wellcare’s notices, they likely assumed there was no problem with their coverage.

Bennett, the North Carolina man, said Wellcare used to send him text messages with health tips and reminders when it was time to pick up a prescription. He didn’t know his premium had increased from $0 to $3.60 until it was too late.

“I was pretty upset,” he said, when he called the company. “The premium wasn’t that much, and I was ready to pay it right off the bat. I had my credit card out ready to make the payment.”

The customer service representative wouldn’t let him pay because his coverage had been canceled, Bennett said.

Hoping to restore it, Bennett called , a Durham nonprofit that advises Medicare beneficiaries and is one of more than 2,200 SHIP sites across the country. He was told he must wait until January to restart his drug coverage, said the group’s executive director, Gina Upchurch.

He doesn’t qualify for the “Extra Help” low-income subsidy or meet other CMS criteria for a , which would allow him to change drug plans during the year. CMS typically allows midyear switches for beneficiaries who, for example, move out of their plan’s service area, experience a natural disaster, or get help paying for drugs from a .

Senior PharmAssist was able to help one of its participants join another drug plan after she lost Value Script coverage because she is in North Carolina’s pharmacy assistance program for people with HIV/AIDS and has limited income, Upchurch said.

A further exception allows any Medicare beneficiary to enroll at any time in a drug plan that has earned five stars, the top grade in Medicare’s performance ratings. However, there are no five-star Medicare drug plans available to the general public. Only two insurers offer five-star plans, and only for retirees from certain employers. Their combined enrollment is about 8,700 as of June 1, according to the insurers.

But Upchurch, with more than two decades of Medicare expertise, doesn’t blame beneficiaries for not paying attention or for assuming Wellcare’s messages were bogus. Older adults are particularly vulnerable to identity theft and other scams and are often advised to ignore junk mail and calls from telemarketers.

Since Value Script members such as Bennett continued to get their prescriptions filled during the payment grace period, “why wouldn’t they think this was a scam?” Upchurch asked. “They are constantly bombarded by people selling them something that’s illegitimate or trying to scam them.”

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By the end of the month, she was in a hospital bed.

Hvatum, a part-time computer science professor, has a weakened immune system due to a rare condition known as primary immunodeficiency, which makes it difficult for her body to fight infections. Prior to her 2005 diagnosis, she had four bouts of shingles, a painful rash caused by a virus.

For more than a decade she relied on an expensive medicine to treat her chronic condition — and relied on her insurance to pay for it.

Then the denial letters came.

The Medical Service

To give her weakened immune system a boost, she relies on Hizentra, which is made up of antibodies collected from donated blood plasma.

At her home, near St. Louis, Hvatum can administer the complex medicine herself. She uses a large syringe to draw the medicine from a vial and loads the syringe into a plastic apparatus that looks like a toy Nerf gun. She cranks a blue plastic dial that triggers a steady drip of the medicine, and it snakes through plastic tubing until it enters her leg through a needle.

The Bill

$8,141.94: The full charges for a 28-day supply of Hizentra without insurance coverage.

After her Medicare Advantage plan through Humana denied payment for the drug in January, she missed several weekly doses.

The Billing Problem: Prior Authorization

Hvatum got tangled up in the controversial process known as prior authorization, which often requires patients or their medical team to get an insurance company’s approval before obtaining medicines or treatment. 

At the start of the year, after Hvatum switched Medicare Advantage plans, she received a letter saying that Humana, her new carrier, had denied her “prior authorization prescription request” for Hizentra. The authorization from her previous insurer didn’t carry over. 

Without the medicine, Hvatum developed a urinary tract infection that sent her to the emergency room on Jan. 30. Though it is a common infection, her doctor advised her to go there because people with her condition can get sick and deteriorate quickly, she said. 

That ER visit turned into an overnight hospital stay. That turned into hospital charges of more than $18,000, and again her insurance denied payment, saying this time that she wasn’t sick enough to require hospital care.

Hvatum’s experience with prior authorization is not unique.

Medicare Advantage plans reviewed nearly 53 million prior authorization requests in 2024, . That’s equivalent to nearly two reviews for every person enrolled in the program.

It’s common for Medicare Advantage plans to deny payment for care — which helps them make a profit, said Carrie Graham, director of the Medicare Policy Initiative at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

The government pays a monthly sum to Medicare Advantage insurers to cover care for each member. “They make a profit if the care that person receives in that year is less than the amount they receive,” Graham said.

More than half of eligible Medicare beneficiaries choose Medicare Advantage insurance coverage. In 2026, roughly 35 million selected one of these private policies offered by insurance companies.

Humana is a dominant player in the space. Nearly half of all Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide are covered by UnitedHealth Group or Humana, according to KFF.

The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson prompted renewed scrutiny of prior authorization. Last summer, months after his death, the nation’s largest insurers, including Humana, signed a pledge that outlined a handful of commitments to ease the burden on patients.

For example, insurers vowed to reduce the number of services that would require prior authorization approval. They also promised to reduce delays by honoring existing prior authorizations for a 90-day period when patients switched plans.

That’s not what happened in Hvatum’s case.

Humana said this pledge to honor existing approvals comes with limitations. “These commitments are for medical services only and do not apply to prescription medications,” spokesperson Mark Taylor said.  

Humana declined to comment on the specifics of Hvatum’s case, even though she agreed to waive her privacy rights, giving the insurer permission to comment.

While acknowledging that the prior authorization process can be deeply frustrating for patients, Humana said it “builds important checks and balances into the healthcare system by verifying that treatments and care delivery are in the best interest of patient safety and quality of care, while safeguarding taxpayer dollars.”

In July 2025, it would remove one-third of prior authorization requirements for outpatient services.

“We are committed to making the process faster and more seamless for patients and providers,” Humana said in a statement Taylor provided to Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

The Resolution

Hvatum appealed, and Humana in late January reversed its initial payment denial for Hizentra, enabling her to afford her medicine again.

But the approval came with a catch: It expires at the end of the year, after which she would need to obtain approval all over again.

Hvatum has since switched to a different drug — and she might not stick around for any more medical-bill fights like this one. She and her husband are considering a move to Norway, a place with universal healthcare. He is a citizen there, which could give her a path to public health coverage.

The industry’s promises to change are too little, too late for Hvatum. 

By her account, she has done her part. Running is her outlet, maybe an obsession, and it keeps her healthy. Scores of medals and trophies are tucked about her home. Some sit on a white wicker end table, next to family photos, candles, and framed St. Louis Cardinals memorabilia. Above a large bay window in the kitchen, medals hang from ribbons of all colors, made to look almost like custom window drapery.

“I have done everything I possibly can to be healthy,” Hvatum said, sitting at her dining room table in her running gear. Her printed T-shirt read, “If found on ground, please drag across the finish line.”

The Takeaway

Data shows patients should appeal prior authorizations, because those who do often get their denials reversed, Graham said. In fact, 81% of Medicare Advantage appeals were partially or fully overturned in 2024, according to KFF.

Relatively few people appeal, because “it’s an exhausting process,” Graham said. It puts the onus on patients — and doctors get frustrated, too.

It’s not just Medicare Advantage plans that subject enrollees to prior authorization approvals. It’s prevalent in other types of coverage, and it has prompted blowback from the public. Graham believes the public outcry instigated the industry’s pledge to change.

Hvatum is well versed in filing appeals. She submitted another appeal to Humana after the insurer denied payment for her January hospital stay. Humana again reversed its denial of payment in her case.

Hvatum blames Humana for her January trip to the hospital. Had Humana approved her Hizentra, she said, she could have avoided hospital care altogether.

In March, she had a stroke. Humana denied coverage of that hospital stay, too.

Humana determined that it was not reasonable for the physician who admitted Hvatum to think she would need to stay at least two nights, the threshold for approval. “You had a small stroke,” Humana’s denial letter stated.

Hvatum noted the letter was dated March 25, two days after she was hospitalized. Humana reversed its denial two weeks after Hvatum appealed.

“They love to send you the denials fast,” Hvatum said. “Approvals take longer.”

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Elevance Health, which covers about 2 million people on Medicare, sent the money to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services via wire transfer on May 27, court records show. Government lawyers disclosed the payment in a June 22 court filing.

In an email to CMS staff, Elevance described the money as a “remittance of the total overpayment amount” estimated by government audits, court records show. Company spokesperson Leslie Porras told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News in a statement that Elevance Health “continues to engage in constructive dialogue” with CMS. “We remain optimistic that a resolution can be reached and value our longstanding relationship with CMS,” she said.

The payment was made in response to a , in which the agency threatened to halt enrollments in Elevance Medicare Advantage plans unless the company corrected what CMS called “substantial and persistent noncompliance” with federal regulations that require health plans to submit accurate billing data and return any overpayments when they are discovered.

It appears to be the first time CMS has successfully pressured a Medicare Advantage health plan to pay back tens of millions of dollars in alleged overpayments — even though agency officials have known for years that many health plans have overbilled the program, according to audits by government staff.

“I’ve never heard of something like this before,” said David Lipschutz, an attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit public interest law firm. “Usually plans seem to tie everything up and try to delay any repayment of anything for years.”

David Meyers, an associate professor at the Brown University School of Public Health, called the payment “substantial” and “a step in the right direction” toward holding the industry accountable.

“It’s a big win for CMS to get that much,” he said.

More than , about 55% of people on Medicare, have signed up for the private Advantage health insurance plans, which offer extra benefits, such as hearing aids and dental coverage, that traditional Medicare doesn’t cover.

Joining the plans may also prove cheaper for patients than purchasing a supplemental insurance policy that covers gaps in traditional Medicare.

Whether Medicare Advantage is a good deal for taxpayers is hotly debated, however.

The health plans have been the target of dozens of and government investigations alleging they often exaggerate how sick patients are to improperly boost their payments, claims the industry disputes. Medicare pays health plans higher rates for sicker patients but requires that the plans bill only for conditions that are properly documented in a patient’s medical records.

Researchers also have concluded that Medicare overpays the health plans by billions of dollars every year because of medical coding flaws that generate higher bills than are justified.

The whistleblower suits, mostly filed by former employees of healthcare companies, have long served as the primary tool for clawing back alleged overpayments. In January, Kaiser Permanente to settle Justice Department allegations that it billed the government for medical conditions patients didn’t have, the largest such penalty to date. In a on its website, the company said it settled the case “to avoid the delay, uncertainty, and cost of prolonged litigation.”

By contrast, CMS’ efforts to prevent Medicare Advantage plans from overcharging have largely foundered.

In 2014, for instance, CMS backed off a proposed regulation that would have cracked down on overbilling amid an “uproar” of opposition from the industry. And even when CMS audits uncovered tens of millions of dollars in overpayments, agency officials of that amount.

The CMS threat to bar Elevance from enrolling new members may open a new approach.

“The payment Elevance is making here is not trivial,” said Matthew Fiedler, a health policy researcher at the Brookings Institution.

But he noted that it represents a very small fraction of the total the company receives from Medicare. He said that making a big dent in the overpayment problem would require CMS to collect “many similar payments” — from “every” Medicare Advantage insurer.

“I don’t think there’s a clear reason to believe that at this stage,” Fiedler said.

Richard Kronick, a former federal health policy official and a professor at the University of California-San Diego, agreed that the payment reflects a small portion of the company’s revenue. But he said it was “still a sizable check to write.”

Kronick said the action reflects “perhaps a bit of muscle flexing” by CMS to tighten up enforcement.

CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s not clear from court records whether the payment will end the CMS threat to ban Elevance from signing up new members.

If so, it might prove to be a relative bargain. In with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that its “current best estimate” of the “potential exposure” in the case was approximately $935 million.

Elevance has been at odds with the federal government over its billing practices since 2020, when the Justice Department filed a against the company, then known as Anthem. That case is pending.

Court filings in that case disclosed the company’s payment to CMS. In an email made part of the court file, a company official confirmed it had sent the wire transfer in the amount of $342,209,085.30 on May 27 and said the payment was related to the threatened enrollment ban. The company also stated that it was challenging the CMS enforcement action and called it “unprecedented.”

In defending against the Justice Department suit, Elevance has denied wrongdoing and argued that CMS knew about its billing practices for years and took no action.

Meyers, the Brown University professor, said CMS’ success in collecting payment from Elevance may encourage more enforcement.

“It remains to be seen whether this is a sea change,” he said.

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Even the bill’s backers say securing passage this year is a long shot. But the effort is one more opportunity for Democrats to highlight voters’ frustration about healthcare costs leading into the November election.

Polls show Americans are very concerned about affordability, with finding fewer than half of Americans say they can consistently afford healthcare.

Wyden’s bill would focus on what many consider a critical pocketbook issue in traditional Medicare: There’s no limit on what a beneficiary could pay in cost sharing.

“Everyone else in the health insurance neighborhood has one — employer coverage, the Affordable Care Act, all of them have a cap,” the Oregon Democrat told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. “There’s no good, common-sense reason why the flagship health program doesn’t have the same protection.”

Critics of a cap, meanwhile, are likely to pounce on the cost to the federal budget, which could be significant.

Wyden, already making the battle lines clear, added, “I suspect it will come up on the floor of the Senate that Democrats want to give a fair shake to people on traditional Medicare and Republicans want to help billionaires.”

Policy, Political Dynamics at Work

The underlying issue is the 20% share of have to pay for medical services after they’ve met any deductibles. Without a ceiling or upper limit, an expensive condition such as cancer or a long hospital stay could result in beneficiaries paying thousands of dollars in costs.

That concern leads enrolled in traditional Medicare to purchase separate insurance, often called Medigap. (Others get such coverage through job-based retiree plans.)

Medigap insurance plans have seen rapid premium increases and can cost thousands of dollars a year, especially for couples. That price tag can be unaffordable for some beneficiaries, who may instead turn to private-sector Medicare Advantage plans offered by commercial insurers, or go without.

The Wyden proposal would set a $5,000 cap in traditional Medicare. Any amounts paid by a Medigap plan or a retiree health plan toward beneficiaries’ care would count toward that cap. It also includes other provisions to help older people with lower incomes, including eliminating an asset test to qualify for special programs that help reduce costs.

Medicare would pick up any amounts over that $5,000 limit, which is lower than the one Congress set for the rival Advantage plans — , although insurers can set smaller amounts.

Setting a cap in the traditional program, proponents argue, would help level the playing field between traditional Medicare and Advantage plans, which often cost consumers far less than traditional Medicare with a Medigap supplement. Premiums for these policies would probably be lower, they say, because the insurers’ financial exposure would be limited.

The Medicare Advantage program has historically had strong support from Republicans, who like its private-sector aspect and note that it can potentially do more to control costs, such as by using specific networks of doctors and hospitals, or requiring preapproval for some services, which the traditional program cannot do.

The plans also offer enrollees additional benefits, such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, and prescription drug coverage, and have now attracted more than .

Along with that growth, however, has also come increased scrutiny over concerns about denials of patient services and the to the traditional program. Recently, some health systems have , citing concerns about tardy payments or prior authorization requirements, while insurers where they offer Advantage coverage.

The bill has not yet been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, so there is no official estimate of increased costs to taxpayers for Medicare. Still, it would raise those costs — at a time when other health programs are being cut, the Medicare trust fund is scheduled to of funding in 2033, and the .

That is likely to draw sharp rebukes from fiscal hawks and other conservatives who question whether billions in tax dollars should be used to pick up costs that would otherwise be paid by enrollees or by the supplemental insurance plans many purchase to do so. They are likely to note that beneficiaries could also choose to join private sector Advantage plans, which eliminate the need for supplementary insurance coverage such as Medigap.

Key Questions: Who Benefits? Who Pays?

A cap’s cost to taxpayers, while not officially scored yet, is likely to be significant, although adding one could also save individual consumers money. A recent study from Brown University gives some clues.

A $5,000 cap could save enrollees , the study says, both in direct savings and reductions in their Medigap supplemental premiums. Just over 11% of traditional Medicare beneficiaries, about 3.2 million, would directly benefit from such a cap if it was implemented in 2028, said the study, which did not receive outside funding.

Over the next 10 years, it estimates, just over 52% of all traditional beneficiaries would exceed the $5,000 cap at least once.

Still, lead author Andrew Ryan, a professor at Brown’s School of Public Health, said analysts estimated such a cap “could cost over $50 billion annually, which is a lot of money” to add to the federal balance sheet.

Critics are likely to focus on the cap’s expense and the number of people who might benefit.

“How many people are hitting a level of cost they can’t afford on Medicare? “asked Jackson Hammond, a senior policy analyst with the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank influential with the GOP.

Any cap “is generally going to increase expenses for the program without adding a lot of benefits to enrollees,” said Hammond, who spoke with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News before the legislation was introduced.

Supporters, though, have a different view.

Certainly, with “any policy that’s going to cost money, there will be an argument over where the money is coming from,” said Brian Keyser, a research associate at the liberal Center for American Progress who also spoke with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News before the Wyden measure was introduced.

Keyser co-authored that suggested lawmakers could pay for changes in traditional Medicare, such as an out-of-pocket cap, if they reduced the amount the government pays Medicare Advantage insurers, pointing to government estimates that Advantage would cost the government $76 billion more this year than if the same number of people were in the traditional program.

Finding a way to add a cap “is right and fair because without it, people who become seriously ill can spend their life savings on cost-sharing Medicare,” Keyser said.

Such an idea, however, on and off for years. Knowing that, the bill’s backers acknowledge that passage is unlikely — but they say they’re playing the long game for now.

“We’re going to push for it in the next Congress, when we believe we will be in the majority,” Wyden said.

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But this year, because of a new Medicare program, Curry has traveled a little more often.

In February, during one trip, he was told unexpectedly that he needed preapproval for the procedure. Then he went again a month or so later to get the injection, for a total of 10 hours on the road. His clinic wanted him to come in a third time, which they had never asked of him before. That appointment was “just to fill out a piece of paper to tell them how you feel again,” Curry said, so he hasn’t gone.

In January, Oklahoma became one of six states to begin a pilot program testing the use of preapprovals in traditional Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older or with disabilities. Medicare had previously eschewed the practice — also known as prior authorization — which requires patients or someone on their medical team to seek insurance approval before proceeding with certain procedures, tests, and prescriptions.

Epidurals like Curry’s are among 13 medical services subject to the new program because the Trump administration says they’re prone to fraud or misuse. Powered by artificial intelligence, the program — called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model, or WISeR — is intended to save the federal government money and protect patients from potentially unsafe or unneeded care.

Yet early reviews from Oklahoma and the other pilot states — Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Washington — suggest WISeR’s rollout has not been smooth. Patients, doctors, and other healthcare professionals who spoke with Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News say the effort has created confusion, errors, long wait times, and stress. Some described the rollout as “horrendous” and say people enrolled in Medicare in the pilot states are now getting ensnared in the same red tape as those with private insurance.

One key concern is that it all happened too hastily. WISeR was and launched in mid-January.

That was “quicker than normal” for the federal government, said Todd Baker, who recently stepped down as CEO of the Ohio State Medical Association. Doctors “just sort of had to figure it out,” added Jeb Shepard, director of policy at the Washington State Medical Association.

Government contractors have also acknowledged the rapid pace. “We’ve had an aggressive rollout from the time of being notified to going live,” said Jeremy Friese, CEO of Humata Health, the vendor for Oklahoma. Tech executives servicing other states have said they were still adding features to their products in the spring.

Abe Sutton, director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is administering the program, didn’t comment on the rollout schedule. But he said in a statement that the goal of these reforms is to ensure that prior authorization is efficient, fast, and streamlined.

“The model aims to reduce inappropriate care without delaying appropriate care,” he said.

Mehmet Oz, the leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, that they were “rolling out some prior authorization on abused practices.”

“The purpose of these is not to deny care,” Oz continued. “It’s to make sure you get the care you need and deserve, not the care some unscrupulous doctor wants to use on you.”

Medicare has struggled in recent years with suspected fraud associated with particular services. The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general spending on skin substitutes, for example, had surged nearly 700% over two years, raising “major concerns about fraud, waste, and abuse.” Skin substitutes are among the currently subject to review under WISeR.

The program also imposes prior authorization requirements for kyphoplasty, a surgery for spinal fractures, which a report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission .

Sutton acknowledged, however, that “the percentage of providers committing waste, fraud, and abuse is small.”

Consumers and clinicians largely detest prior authorization. Even as federal health officials test the process for Medicare, the Trump administration is for those with private insurance. According to a conducted in January, 69% of insured adults consider prior authorization a burden for care.

Through WISeR, doctors and their staff log in to online portals to submit medical records that justify the procedures. Using artificial intelligence, the systems quickly approve applications that meet the program’s criteria, Friese, Humata’s chief executive, told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News. He said there is an “immediate yes” in 88% of cases for which clinical data supports an approval.

CMS has touted the process as one in which decisions are returned within 72 hours. After that, clinicians receive a “universal tracking number,” which allows them to schedule the procedure and get paid. In practice, however, participants say the process is anything but easy.

The University of Washington’s medical system alone had nearly 100 patients waiting earlier this year for epidural injections due to WISeR-related delays, from the office of U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) that drew on hospital association data. “Now, patients are subject to delays or denials which did not exist prior to the WISeR Model,” the report said.

Curry, the Oklahoma cattle farmer, said he might go to Kansas for future treatments to avoid the approval process. Dorota Gribbin, a New Jersey-based physical medicine and rehabilitation physician, said that by the time authorization came for one of her patients who needed a back pain procedure, the patient had gone to the hospital for more expensive care.

Jennifer Valle, a precertification and insurance supervisor at Clinical Radiology of Oklahoma, said when it comes to kyphoplasties, there has been a lot of “nitpicking” from reviewers. Other times, information her practice provides to CMS gets overlooked, she said, and reviewers ask for imaging that’s already in the file.

Claims with no problems are supposed to be paid within 15 days, said James Webb, a musculoskeletal radiologist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who has also been frustrated by the prior approval and reimbursement process for kyphoplasties. “Six- to eight-week delays is what we’ve been seeing,” he said.

“It’s been horrendous,” said Jerry Sobel, a Phoenix-area pain management doctor. “Right from the beginning, there seemed to be no organization.” Sobel said that as of May, he hadn’t gotten paid by Medicare for nine epidurals.

“We continuously monitor operations and work closely with stakeholders to address questions and improve the provider experience,” said Sundar Subramanian, the CEO of Zyter, which has the contract for Arizona.

During an April webinar, another Zyter executive acknowledged a large backlog in payments stretching to January. Those backlogs “are currently being resolved,” Medicare’s Sutton said, without providing further detail.

When asked about other issues — including what doctors suspect are AI-driven errors — Medicare’s Sutton said the agency appreciates “feedback on provider experience.” It will be used “to help providers better understand WISeR processes,” he said.

Although CMS vendors say humans make the final decisions on approvals, doctors and their staffs believe artificial intelligence is playing a large role in the process and that denials are sometimes the result of AI hallucinations that garble or make up information.

One Arizona doctor, who wasn’t authorized by his practice to speak, recalled a denial saying his patient wasn’t eligible for procedures in the thoracic region, or mid-back. The patient needed an injection to the neck. Webb, the Oklahoma radiologist, documented four times that a patient lacked numbness, and yet his WISeR application was still denied, citing numbness, which, in the reviewer’s interpretation, would rule out the spinal surgery procedure.

Friese, Humata’s CEO, said he hasn’t heard about any AI hallucinations.

The process is also raising government costs. With more rejections, more appeals are being filed with Medicare’s administrative contractors. The government pays the contractors to handle the appeals, and Medicare’s Sutton acknowledged that the agency has “accounted for potential changes in the volume of Medicare appeals because of the WISeR program and its associated costs.”

Eighty-four percent of commercial insurers already use AI tools, according to a survey released in 2025 by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, though they have consistently said AI isn’t used to deny prior authorization requests.

Its use in Medicare risks introducing friction and frustration into the program — and piling costs onto its beneficiaries. Prior authorization saves money for insurers partly by making patients pay a price in wait times and inconvenience, said Miranda Yaver, a University of Pittsburgh health policy researcher studying the technique.

“People will end up getting ensnared in a lot of red tape, having to be on hold, and getting rerouted,” she said. She often wonders whether prior authorization simply shifts costs to patients and doctors, rather than saving them.

Some doctors involved in Medicare’s prior authorization experiment believe it will inevitably expand beyond a few services officials in Washington consider fraud-prone.

“Everybody knows that if this pilot project works, it will be prior auth for basically all procedures,” said Mary Clarke, a family practice physician in Stillwater, Oklahoma. “If they can show that they can save money, then that’s going to be extrapolated and rolled out to other procedures and multiple other things in other states.”

When asked whether CMS is considering expansion of its prior authorization pilot, Sutton said in his statement that there are “currently no changes” considered for the list of services subject to the WISeR program, “but CMS continues to assess whether any changes are warranted.”

Do you have an experience with prior authorization you’d like to share? to tell Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News your story.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Southern correspondent Lauren Sausser contributed to this report.

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