Week of May 12–16, 2025

General Mental Health

• When Congress passed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, the law was supposed to prevent private insurance companies from instituting unequal coverage for mental health and physical health services. It fell short, as multiple federal reports indicated that insurance companies routinely exploited loopholes to avoid paying rates for mental health services that were commensurate with those for other health care. The Department of Health and Human Services and two other federal agencies attempted to sew up these loopholes in 2024. Read more here.
• More than half of Americans say their mental health became important to them in the last five years, a new survey found. Conducted in April by Rula Health, a virtual behavioral health company, the survey reached more than 2,000 U.S. adults and aimed to understand the current state of mental health. Read more here.

Suicide

• Suicide was the top cause of death for medical residents and fellows, though the rate was significantly lower than age- and gender-matched rates in the general population, according to a cross-sectional study. From 2015 to 2021, 161 of over 370,000 residents and fellows died during training, with the top cause of death being suicide (29.2%), followed by neoplastic diseases (17.4%), other medical and surgical diseases (13.7%), accidents (13.7%), and accidental poisoning (13%), reported Nicholas Yaghmour, MPP, of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in Chicago, and colleagues. Read more here.

The Opioid Crisis

• There were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024 than the year before — the largest one-year decline ever recorded. An estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses last year, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. That’s down 27% from the 110,000 in 2023. The CDC has been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The previous largest one-year drop was 4% in 2018, according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics. Read more here.

Transgender Rights

• About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Donald Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans. However, support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youth. Read more here.

Medicaid

• House Energy & Commerce Committee members finished a marathon markup session for their reconciliation bill, which among other provisions included an estimated $715 billion in cuts to Medicaid and other health programs over a 10-year period. Read more here.
• Congressional Republicans are poised to make massive spending cuts to the Medicaid program that provides health insurance to millions of Americans — in part by enacting federal work requirements that they claim won’t affect the most vulnerable recipients. However, data analysis shows that poor middle-aged and older women would be among the most impacted. Read more here.
• House Republicans opted against some of the most dramatic changes they had been considering for Medicaid, the joint federal-state program covering nearly 80 million Americans. However, they are plowing forward with other major initiatives that could leave millions without coverage as the GOP starts laying out key provisions of its party-line domestic policy mega bill. Read more here.
• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) blasted Republican efforts to reduce Medicaid funding, saying potential cuts would “destroy health care as we know it.” Read more here.

Federal Policy

• The Trump administration’s purge of the health department is cutting so deep that it has incapacitated congressionally mandated programs and triggered legal challenges. The administration insists the cuts are a lawful “streamlining” of a “bloated” agency, but federal workers, Democratic lawmakers, state officials, and independent legal experts say keeping offices afloat in name only – with minimal or no staff – is an unconstitutional power grab. Read more here.
• In line with the president’s Jan. 31 executive order, the HHS will be pulling 10 or more regulations for every new one that is introduced, and the total cost of all new regulations in the current fiscal year will be “significantly less than zero.” Included among those are formal regulations, guidance documents, memoranda, policy statements, and other directives. Concurrently, RFK Jr. also filed a notice in the Federal Register ordering four informal guidance documents be rescinded immediately. Read more here.