“Wonder Twin powers… activate!” This may be what Elon Musk’s 3-year-old twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis have been taught to say, but I wouldn’t know about that. I first heard this phrase when I was about 3 years old, watching “Super Friends” – a cartoon series about crime-fighting heroes that included the Wonder Twins Jayna and Zan. After the extraterrestrial brother and sister bumped fists, Jayna could shape shift into an animal and Zan could form any type of water. Plus, they had a pet monkey Gleek who was super helpful fighting crime. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I explain how the Wonder Twins and other Super Friends would be really helpful right now for health policy.
Tricking Superman into robbing a bank is the storyline in my favorite Super Friends episode, and this week’s news is all about money too:
- Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus Co-Chairs Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced the Health Tech Investment Act, which would establish a Medicare reimbursement pathway for FDA-cleared AI-enabled software and devices. Designed to expand patient access to screening, diagnostic, and treatment solutions, the proposal acknowledges that while physicians increasingly see clinical value in AI, particularly in radiology, the absence of a clear payment pathway has slowed adoption.
- In its April 2025 meeting, MedPAC reviewed payment policies for SaaS and newly covered prescription digital therapeutics.
- A new report from the Peterson Center on Healthcare finds that remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools can be effective when used for short durations and for select conditions, but offer limited benefits, and often no cost savings, for others, such as diabetes. The report calls on CMS and insurers to create condition-specific reimbursement codes and impose limits on monitoring durations to avoid unnecessary long-term billing.
“My dream machine is programmed to seek out the sleeping minds of our archenemies… and subject them to our will. We will control their dreams, making our dreams come true.” Lex Luthor, the leader of the Legion of Doom, explains this to his cabinet of supervillains in a great episode of Super Friends. I suspect this is similar to what the tech-focused staffers are telling HHS Secretary Kennedy, and that’s why a leaked draft budget shows that there is a new HHS office for the Chief Technology Officer that would include both an “office of chief information” and the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (the old Office of National Coordinator for Health IT). The dream machine would get all the data possible from federal health programs through electronic medical record oversight and the FDA’s drug and device approval processes to make the Secretary’s dream to eliminate chronic diseases come true. I hope they really do have a dream machine, because the cuts in the budget proposal (ASTP would be funded with $9 million, compared to the $66 million appropriated in the 2023 budget) means they won’t have the personnel to execute the plan. Maybe people aren’t necessary—that’s the future world imagined by the Super Friends episode where the supermachine “G.E.E.C.” automates everything, including self-driving cars, making humans relatively useless. As Wonder Woman says: “It is not natural for people to be idle all the time. It could lead to trouble.”
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