A weaker Biosecure nears passage

The House yesterday passed a defense budget bill that includes the Biosecure Act. That all but ensures that Congress will pass restrictions on U.S. biotechs doing business with certain Chinese companies on which they've come to rely.

The bill would be a hardship for the biotech industry, but it's a far cry from what was originally proposed in late 2023 and caused a ruckus last year.

Read more for a breakdown of the step-wise way in which the bill was made more industry-friendly over the past two years.

aca

Congress will likely debate the ACA into next year

The Senate will vote today on dueling ACA bills from Democrats and Republicans, both of which are partisan and neither of which is likely to pass.

Senate Democrats want to extend for three years the enhanced tax credits that they put in place during the pandemic. The bill offered by Senate Republicans would convert those subsidies into funding for health savings accounts for enrollees with high-deductible "bronze" plans. The prefunded HSAs could be used to pay for a portion of deductibles, which Republicans say are as much of a barrier to care as premiums.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are struggling to agree among themselves on their alternative to Democrats' proposal to extend the credits. House Republican leaders said they will hold a vote on a package of health care bills next week, which is expected to include drug middlemen reforms and site neutral payments for hospitals, but that package will not include the ACA subsidies.

"There are still some areas we don't have full agreement on, and we're going to keep working on those," House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said. "We've committed to work on those early next year."

chronic disease

Ljubljana

That's the city in first lady Melania Trump's homeland of Slovenia where Andrew Joseph went to report on the prevention of chronic disease.

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elevated the issue of chronic diseases to never-before-seen political salience in an effort to improve the nation's health and turn around its stagnating life expectancy.

That's old hat in Slovenia. Read more about how the central European country has improved the health of its citizens without spending more money, and what the United States could learn from its experience.

research

When shifting funding away from elite universities is considered DEI

The MOSAIC program jibes with Trump administration priorities. It supports researchers at the start of their careers, and it shifts federal research funding from private institutions to public ones, and from the coasts to other parts of the country.

But the administration ended it anyway, Anil Oza and J. Emory Parker report, because it was associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Asked about the MOSAIC program's elimination and STAT's findings, the NIH said it is "shifting its portfolio to maximize the impact of federal taxpayer dollars and ensure proper oversight of this funding in support of gold-standard science rather than politicized DEI ideology."

It's the fifth installment of STAT's 10-part series on the Trump administration's impact on the research enterprise. Read more.

generic drugs

Skinny labels

The U.S. solicitor general has urged the Supreme Court to review a tactic generic drugmakers use to avoid patent infringements, Ed Silverman reports.

The term of art is skinny labeling, which refers to a process in which a generic drug company seeks regulatory approval for one of a brand drug's multiple approved uses.

The practice has been used for decades, but the Supreme Court cast doubt on its legality two years ago when justices declined to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that questioned it. This second case is seen as a test for whether skinny labeling can survive. Read more.

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