The Senate HELP Committee has jurisdiction over NIH. GOP members of the committee represent AK, AL, IN, FL, KS, KY, LA, ME, MO, OH, and SC. Research universities and hospitals in those states need to be extra loud.

Democrats are calling on Trump officials to “restore full operations at NIH,” warning that it’s threatening medical research. “Without quick corrective action, the consequences of further disruption could be disastrous,” @raskin.house.gov @vanhollen.senate.gov and Sen. Alsobrooks write.

Cancer researchers said grants were on hold. Health briefings were abruptly canceled. The CDC’s famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report didn’t publish as scheduled. Our look at the sweeping consequences of the Trump admin’s “pause” of health communications. with @lenasun.bsky.social + pals

Check out the first episode of this PBS NewsHour series on the social safety net. I’m always eager to see this kind of important information shared with the public. I’m glad I could contribute my perspective (my comments begin around 2:49 mins) www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

1/ @vinisingh.bsky.social and I have heavily updated our NBER working paper, now titled "Rationing by Race": www.nber.org/papers/w30380 The paper is about how system stressors - here #hospital capacity shocks - lead to *consequential* #rationing of resources by race rather than need.

This letter to CMS from AcademyHealth about the data access debacle is quite good I think academyhealth.org/sites/defaul...

Lots of other issues to address too: (1) unclear if you can use Stata or R without it being cost-prohibitive (current use a "credits" system which can get blown through quickly); (2) looks like you can't use GitHub; (3) user-defined packages in or Stata may be cumbersome/impossible to implement. Etc

"Researchers incensed over CMS data access change" (accurate), with quotes from @asacarny.bsky.social and @aschwartz.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

If you're an R shop like ours, with lots of TAF data and projects, it looks like the annual fees could be over $200K (e.g. 5 projects *$13K + 10 analyst seats*$15K). It also upends 5 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create an efficient software/hardware infrastructure to manage TAF.

Additional issues: 1) ridiculous cost to have additional users peek at data. so a strong incentive for PIs to never touch data at all 2) hard for institutions to set up data infrastructure for folks, e.g. make harmonized files many projects can reuse

At a time when we should be democratizing access to data, CMS appears to be moving in the opposite direction. This policy change will have a disproportionate impact on students and researchers at less well-resourced institutions.

This policy change from CMS will do much to degrade the quality and timeliness of health policy research in the US. While I understand the security concerns that motivated it, there has to be a middle ground that will efficiently balance security and access.

Does carving-in behavioral health lead to better outcomes for Medicaid enrollees? Our new paper published in JAMA Health Forum leverages a staggered rollout of integration, finding mostly null effects. Financial integration: perhaps necessary, but not sufficient. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...