“He is going DOWN!” No, that is not what Senate HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy said about HHS Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after his confirmation hearing yesterday. Good guess, though. Instead, this is what a still-annoyingly-gorgeous Reese Witherspoon says to Will Ferrell in a new, and reportedly really bad rom-com called You’re Cordially Invited. I could use a really bad rom-com right now, but will stick to movies that do not involve wrestling a very fake-looking alligator in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Pause here for a few news items that will make you want to watch are really bad rom-com:
- The Trump administration has indefinitely cancelled the meetings for HITAC, a federal advisory group on health IT issues, according to an internal memo sent on January 29 that was obtained by STAT. The HITAC committee was established by the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act of 2016 to allow industry experts to recommend policies to the government about health data exchange and innovative tech, like health AI.
- UnitedHealth Group reported that last year’s Change Healthcare cyberattack exposed the data of 190M people, significantly surpassing previous estimates and making it the largest healthcare data breach ever reported.
- HHS Inspector General Christi Grimm, who has been with the HHS OIG office for 25 years, was fired on Friday, January 24, via a 2-sentence email, along with over a dozen other inspectors general of federal agencies. The firings appear to violate a federal law that requires presidents to provide Congress 30-day notice to fire any inspectors general confirmed by the Senate.
“I brought you flours.” Will Ferrell says this to his Harvard-law-dropout-turned-baker love interest (get it? flours for a baker?) after auditing her business because he plays an IRS agent in Stranger Than Fiction. First, please note how appropriate that movie title is for these times. Second, maybe watch this one. It is one of my all-time-favorite movies – clever, witty, has love and hope in it – with the greatest actors: Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Queen Latifah. And the message is that strange things happen in real life. Yesterday, a strange thing happened during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing: the HHS Secretary nominee said he would expand the use of AI tech and telehealth if confirmed! He is best known for his anti-vax and upset-the-establishment mission, but he seems to also realize that modernizing the healthcare system with innovative solutions could help. He said an AI nurse is indistinguishable from a human being “that has diagnostics as good as an doctor.” I don’t know if that’s really the takeaway he meant to impart, but he at least seems to be grasping that innovative tech can be a game-changer for healthcare. And it is these little nuggets that may save RFK Jr.’s nomination despite strong opposition. It is a surprising twist, like some of the clever dialogue in Stranger Than Fiction: “Ten seconds ago you said you wouldn’t help me.” “It’s been a very revealing ten seconds, Harold.”
Thank you to everyone who congratulated Maverick Health Policy about its addition of three senior policy advisers to our team: Christine Bechtel, Nathan Buttrey, and Marci Nielsen. Stay tuned for another exciting announcement next week about our growing team. https://www.maverickhealthpolicy.com/about/
