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And Now for Some Fun Future

By KIM BELLARD

I feel like I’ve been writing a lot about futures I was pretty worried about, so I’m pleased to have a couple developments to talk about that help remind me that technology is cool and that healthcare can surely use more of it.

First up is a new AI algorithm called FaceAge, as published last week in The Lancet Digital Health by researchers at Mass General Brigham. What it does is to use photographs to determine biological age – as opposed to chronological age. We all know that different people seem to age at different rates – I mean, honestly, how old is Paul Rudd??? – but until now the link between how people look and their health status was intuitive at best.

Moreover, the algorithm can help determine survival outcomes for various types of cancer.

The researchers trained the algorithm on almost 59,000 photos from public databases, then tested against the photos of 6,200 cancer patients taken prior to the start of radiotherapy. Cancer patients appeared to FaceAge some five years older than their chronological age. “We can use artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate a person’s biological age from face pictures, and our study shows that information can be clinically meaningful,” said co-senior and corresponding author Hugo Aerts, PhD, director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) program at Mass General Brigham.

Curiously, the algorithm doesn’t seem to care about whether someone is bald or has grey hair, and may be using more subtle clues, such as muscle tone. It is unclear what difference makeup, lighting, or plastic surgery makes. “So this is something that we are actively investigating and researching,” Dr. Aerts told The Washington Post. “We’re now testing in various datasets [to see] how we can make the algorithm robust against this.”

Moreover, it was trained primarily on white faces, which the researchers acknowledge as a deficiency. “I’d be very worried about whether this tool works equally well for all populations, for example women, older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, those with various disabilities, pregnant women and the like,” Jennifer E. Miller, the co-director of the program for biomedical ethics at Yale University, told The New York Times.  

The researchers believe FaceAge can be used to better estimate survival rates for cancer patients. It turns out that when physicians try to gauge them simply by looking, their guess is essentially like tossing a coin. When paired with FaceAge’s insights, the accuracy can go up to about 80%.

Dr. Aerts says: “This work demonstrates that a photo like a simple selfie contains important information that could help to inform clinical decision-making and care plans for patients and clinicians. How old someone looks compared to their chronological age really matters—individuals with FaceAges that are younger than their chronological ages do significantly better after cancer therapy.”

I’m especially thrilled about this because ten years ago I speculated about using selfies and facial recognition AI to determine if we had conditions that were prematurely aging us, or even we were just getting sick. It appears the Mass General Brigham researchers agree. “This opens the door to a whole new realm of biomarker discovery from photographs, and its potential goes far beyond cancer care or predicting age,” said co-senior author Ray Mak, MD, a faculty member in the AIM program at Mass General Brigham. “As we increasingly think of different chronic diseases as diseases of aging, it becomes even more important to be able to accurately predict an individual’s aging trajectory. I hope we can ultimately use this technology as an early detection system in a variety of applications, within a strong regulatory and ethical framework, to help save lives.”

The researchers acknowledge that much has to be accomplished before it is introduced for commercial purposes, and that strong oversight will be needed to ensure, as Dr. Aerts told WaPo, “these AI technologies are being used in the right way, really only for the benefit of the patients.” As Daniel Belsky, a Columbia University epidemiologist, told The New York Times: “There’s a long way between where we are today and actually using these tools in a clinical setting.”

The second development is even more out there. Let me break down the CalTech News headline: “3D Printing.” OK, you’ve got my attention. “In Vivo.” Color me highly intrigued. “Using Sound.” Mind. Blown.

That’s right. This team of researchers have “developed a method for 3D printing polymers at specific locations deep within living animals.”

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Health Deserves A Vision More Capacious Than Dashboard Metrics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ

Consumer health and wellness is experiencing a flurry of activity. 

The lab testing company Function (motto: “It’s time to own your health”) acquired Ezra, a whole body MRI company promising “the world’s most advanced longevity scan.”   

Oura, maker of the popular smart ring, recently added an integration for continuous glucose measurement as well as the ability to calculate meal nutrition based on a photo. Oura also hired Dr. Ricky Bloomfield as its first Chief Medical Officer; Dr. Bloomfield had previously served as Clinical and Health Informatics Lead at Apple, and is known for his expertise in health data interoperability. 

Meanwhile, Oura competitor Whoop, maker of a smart band, just announced the latest versions of its device, with the ability to monitor blood pressure, ECG, and to assess what it describes as a measure of biological age, which it calls “Whoop Age.” Whoop now says it seeks to “unlock human performance and healthspan,” enticing users with the pitch, “Get a complete picture of your health.”

Towards a Personal Health Operating System (OS)

Notice a pattern yet? 

What unites these approaches and so many others, as the industry newsletter Fitt Insider (FI) recently observed, is they reflect an attempt to generate a “personal health OS,” intended to “give individuals agency over their well-being,” and more generally, wrest control back from a health system that’s often perceived (especially by young adults) as somewhere between useless and obstructive.

Citing a recent Edelman survey, FI reports,

 …nearly half of young adults believe well-informed people can be as knowledgeable as doctors, two-thirds see lived experience as expertise, and 61% view institutions as barriers to care.

Fed up with reactive care, many already collect data across wearables, lifestyle apps, DTC diagnostics, and more, but most are siloed. Rolling up, Function is architecting a unified platform capable of generating clinically relevant insights from raw inputs.

FI points to the proliferation of companies like Bright OS, Gyroscope, and Guava Health focused on “day-to-day data management,” as well as startups like Superpower (“Delivering concierge-level metrics minus the PCP”) and Mito Health (a “pocket-sized AI doctor” that “generates comprehensive digital health profiles by merging labs, medical records, family history, lifestyle info, and more.”)

AI seems poised to play an increasingly central role in many of these companies. 

FI speculates,

A step further, end-to-end LLMs could close the loop, linking cause and effect, turning insights into actions, syncing with PCPs, and laying the foundation for an AI-powered medical future.

This is a good time to take a deep breath – as well as a closer, more critical look at this vision of consumer-empowered, data-fortified health.

A Powerful Vision

Unquestionably, there’s a lot to embrace here, including in particular:

  • The opportunity for individuals to gather more and richer health data from a greater variety of sources, including in particular wearables;
  • The increased possibility of relevant insights (a key deficiency of early “Quantified Self” efforts) from these data.
  • The explicit centralization of your health data around you (Superpower’s tagline is “Health Data, In One Place”), a long-promised but often frustratingly elusive healthcare goal in practice. Today, still, (still!), so many patients find themselves having to beg and plead for efficient access to their own health information, data that health systems tend to view as a competitive advantage and aren’t eager to let go.

A tech-enabled approach to health where you have more abundant data about you, that are explicitly in your control, and which could lead to healthier behaviors represents the sort of progress that deserves to be celebrated.

At the same time, when I look at many of these approaches to health, I see two broad categories of concerns.

Concern One: Plural of Fragile Data May Not Be Insight

The first, perhaps more concrete worry, is that, to paraphrase comedian Dennis Miller, “two of [crap] is [crap],” and simply the collection of a lot of data, much of which may be fragile, isn’t sure to translate into brilliant insight, even if the magical power of AI is fervently invoked.

In an especially incisive “Ground Truths” blog post focused on “The business of promoting longevity and healthspan,” Dr. Eric Topol writes that “getting hundreds of biomarker results and imaging tests in an individual greatly increases the likelihood of false-positive results,” a concerning possibility.

I’ve discussed the challenge of false positives here, and get into some of the details around Bayes Theorem (which informs the assessment) here. The OG reference in this space may be this 2006 paper by Zak Kohane and colleagues, in which they introduce the term “incidentalome.”

To be fair, at least some of the proponents of extensive testing recognize the challenge of false positives but feel that the opportunity to collect dense data on individuals over time enables important inflections to be observed, a point Dr. Peter Attia explicitly emphasizes in Outlive; I discuss his “risk-management” mindset here.

Similarly, Nathan Price, a professor at the Buck Institute and the CSO of Thorne, has argued that close inspection (assisted by AI) of rich individual data could identify (for example) opportunities for supplement intervention.  These interventions may not make much of a difference on the population level (hence the paucity of persuasive clinical trial data for supplements, as Dr. Topol notes in his latest book, Super Agers – my WSJ review here), but could in selected individuals. (I also discuss Price here, here).

Proponents of the “personal health OS” also might emphasize the presence of tailwinds – the likelihood of improved predictions as measurement technologies continue to get better, denser data become available, and the AI tools become ever-more capable.  Perhaps we’re not quite at the point of realizing the future we imagine, advocates might argue, but we’re close enough to start to see what it might look like.

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Tracy DeTomasi, Callisto

Callisto is a non-profit tech company that helps survivors of sexual violence identify repeat offenders. The company was started a few years back by Jess Ladd and Tracy DeTomasi took over as CEO a few years back, It focuses on college campuses where 90% of assaults are perpetrated by repeat offenders, who on average commit 6 offenses. And 90% of assaults are not reported, Callisto is working providing an anonymous solution with Tracey also giving a demo of how it works. This is a  tough conversation about a difficult topic.–Matthew Holt

Seriously, Aon, you think weight loss drugs save money?

By AL LEWIS

Last month Aon, the major benefits consulting firm, released a “study” claiming:

A significant opportunity to reduce healthcare costs for employers and enhance overall workforce health through a comprehensive obesity management program that includes GLP-1 medications.

This, of course, is the opposite of what most researchers have shown.  And in the immortal words of the great philosophers Dire Straits: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” We’ll shortly see who’s wrong (um, meaning about weight loss drugs) when we dive into the study in a minute. But first, let’s review Aon’s previous analyses. 

A brief history of Aon

Aon claimed that Accolade saved 8%, but it looks like they must coincidentally have been absent both on the day that the biostatistics professor explained how control groups work, and also on the day the fifth-grade math teacher explained how averages work. 

Then, they claimed that Lyra – which is a mental health company – achieved the following non-mental improvements in the set of patients who had at least one mental health encounter with one of their “220,000 high-quality providers”:

§  A 30% reduction in non-mental health-related ER visits

§  A 30% reduction in generic drug spending

§  A 20% reduction in specialty drug spending

Thanks in part to starting the y-axis at $4000 to improve the optics, Aon also revealed that Lyra achieved a very high “efficiency ratio”:

A graph of a number of people AI-generated content may be incorrect.

I can’t object to that finding because – despite three decades in this field, about 100 articles/interviews/quotes/citations including the Wall Street Journal, two trade-bestselling books and one Harvard Business School case study – I still don’t know what an “efficiency ratio” is, other than that has nothing to do with comparing participants to non-participants in a mental health study. Apparently an “efficiency ratio” in healthcare measures how quickly a hospital turns over its inventory. So Aon’s use of the term recalls the immortal words of the great philosopher Bob Uecker: “Juuussst a bit outside.”

When publicly and privately asked to explain any of these things, Aon clammed up. That was likely wise on their part.

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When Star Ratings Backfire: How CMS Could Better Support Health In Medicare Advantage

By EMMANUEL ANIMASHAUN

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Star Ratings system represents a cornerstone of quality assessment in Medicare Advantage (MA), designed to empower consumers with transparent information while rewarding plans that deliver superior care. Yet recent developments, particularly the seismic downgrading of Humana’s ratings reveal an unintended consequence: a system created to measure and incentivize quality may now be actively undermining it.

The Humana Case: Symptom of a Broader Problem

In 2025, Humana’s Medicare Advantage star ratings collapsed, with only 25% of members remaining in four-star or higher plans, down from 94%. This wasn’t due to declining clinical performance but resulted from CMS’s “Tukey outlier deletion” statistical adjustment implemented with minimal industry consultation. The change raised performance thresholds, causing Humana to lose billions in Quality Bonus Payments and $4 billion in market value. Humana’s legal challenge, arguing that CMS violated the Administrative Procedure Act through non-transparent processes, was denied. Other insurers including UnitedHealthcare and Centene also share concerns about methodological rigidity and that the rating system may have diverged from its purpose of improving patient care.

Perhaps more striking are the cases of Elevance and SCAN, which further illustrate how rigid metrics can distort assessments of actual care quality. In March 2023, both insurers were penalized after allegedly missing a single CMS “secret shopper” phone call, a call they claim was never received. The downgrade cost them tens of millions in Quality Bonus Payments and triggered legal challenges. As SCAN’s CEO wrote, the sanction came despite strong clinical performance and patient outcomes. A federal judge later ruled in favor of SCAN in June 2024, prompting CMS to recalculate the Star Ratings across all Medicare Advantage plans. This episode underscores a key concern: when measurement hinges on unverifiable administrative moments, it may end up punishing rather than promoting quality.

How Quality Measurement Can Undermine Actual Quality

The Star Ratings system aggregates over 40 metrics across preventive care, medication adherence, member experience, and customer service. However, it disproportionately rewards process compliance and documentation over health outcomes. Plans can excel by optimizing coding, maximizing documentation, or boosting survey participation without delivering better care. This misalignment diverts resources from genuine health innovations. Research from an NBER working paper even found that better-rated plans aren’t statistically better at keeping patients alive than lower-rated ones, raising fundamental questions about whether the system measures what truly matters for patient health.

Even more concerning is that MA contracts with higher proportions of dually eligible, disabled, or racially diverse members consistently score lower, not because they provide inferior care, but because the scoring system inadequately adjusts for social risk factors. A JAMA Health Forum study highlighted how plans serving more Black beneficiaries had lower star ratings even when controlling for other factors. This structural bias effectively penalizes plans doing the challenging work of serving populations with complex needs, creating a perverse disincentive to focus on health equity.

The uncertainty from frequent changes in star rating computation could also pose severe implications for strategic planning for companies. When a company like Humana loses billions due to a technical recalibration, it sends a troubling message: long-term investments in quality improvement may not yield returns if measurement methodologies change unpredictably. This volatility makes strategic planning difficult and discourages sustained investment in quality initiatives.

The Real-World Impact on Patients

These methodological shortcomings do not just affect health plans’ bottom lines; they have tangible consequences for Medicare beneficiaries. When plans lose Quality Bonus Payments (QBPs), they often must scale back valuable supplemental benefits like transportation assistance, dental coverage, or in-home support services, or increase plan premiums, as Avalere Health suggests. McKinsey estimates CMS rating changes could cost plans over $800 million in bonuses, reducing resources available for such benefits.

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Medicaid Budget Cuts: Hospitals will bear the burden, we will pay the price

By LINDA RIDDELL & THOMAS WILSON

Recent discussions over Medicaid budget cuts invite us to look more deeply into the house-of-cards that, when it collapses, will hit the states and low-income households hardest. But we will all be harmed.

Some states get 80% of their Medicaid funding from the federal government, as a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Medicaid Insures Millions of Americans. How the Health Program Works, in Charts” pointed out. Even states relying less on federal funds will be hard pressed to shift their resources to replace the federal share. The ripple effects are clear: states are likely to reduce Medicaid enrollment, forcing low-income people to skip care or find free care, and hospitals will shift resources to cover care they are not paid for. Dollars cut from Medicaid do not vanish; they simply shift to different corners of the healthcare system. Ouch!

A Deep Dive into the Facts

Fact 1. Low-Income Households Already Spend More of Their Income on Health Care: Recent Consumer Expenditure Survey data reveals that the lowest 20% of households—roughly corresponding to those enrolled in Medicaid—saw the share of their income spent on healthcare (red in Figure below) rise from 8% in 2005 to 11% in 2023. In contrast, the highest-income 20% devoted only 2% in 2005, rising to about 4% of their income to healthcare in 2023.

Fact 2. Necessities Consume a Majority of Low-Income Households’ Income: Low-income households spend about 57% of their income on essentials like food and housing (blue in figure). This leaves little to nothing for other expenses. These families have an almost inelastic budget where any additional expense, even one as critical as medical care, forces painful trade-offs. In contrast, high-income households have from 38% to 53% of their income (purple in figure) left over after meeting all basic and other costs.

Fact 3. Affordable Care Act Led to Reduced Uninsured ED Visits: In 2016 — two years after Affordable Care Act provisions took effect —  many states expanded Medicaid, and all introduced health insurance exchanges. These changes brought emergency department visits by uninsured patients down by half—from 16% to 8%.

Fact 4. Uncompromising Obligations at Hospitals: Under the U.S. Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals must treat and stabilize every patient who arrives, regardless of their ability to pay. With around 70% of all hospital admissions arriving via the ED, a surge in uncompensated care in the ED will directly affect admission rate, the hospital’s core function.

Examining the Key Inferences

Inference 1. Rising Uninsured Populations: Cutting Medicaid budgets is likely to lead to states shrinking enrollment and boosting the number of uninsured individuals.

Inference 2. A Resurgence in Uninsured ED Visits: If Medicaid budget cuts reduce enrollment, the previously achieved reductions in uninsured ED visits could return to the high rates seen before the ACA.

Inference 3. Hospitals Caught in the Crossfire: Budget cuts will force hospitals to provide more uncompensated ED care. The response is likely to be reducing staff, the hospital’s largest cost center  — a move that directly affects the quality and timeliness of both primary and specialty services. Washington state offers a cautionary tale, where hospital leaders predict longer wait times and lower service levels due to state budget cuts.

Broad Impacts Beyond the Numbers

The health system must pick up the $880 billion slack, not by magically creating money but by shifting resources from other programs.  The healthcare system has its priorities set by the budget scramble–not by the community’s health needs. Health disparities between the rich and poor will widen, and progress made on having more people insured will reverse.

Staff cuts will lengthen wait times and decrease service quality, not to mention they will burn more people out of their health service jobs. The ripple effects of Medicaid cuts will eventually touch all who seek medical care and pay for health insurance.

A Call for Political and Community Action

Now, more than ever, it is time for political stakeholders to recognize that the real cost of Medicaid cuts is borne not just by states but also by communities. Stakeholders, policymakers, community leaders, and the general public must stand up for their own interest in having a sustainable health care funding approach.

Toward a More Equitable Future

The case against Medicaid budget cuts is not merely about dollars and cents—it is about the future of our healthcare system and the health of millions of Americans. Cutting Medicaid benefits may create short-term savings on paper, but it undermines the health infrastructure that serves everyone.

A thoughtful and balanced approach would protect vulnerable populations while ensuring hospitals remain viable centers of care, especially for rural areas. In rural communities, the health sector creates 14% of jobs; rural hospitals are generally the largest employer and since they serve more Medicaid and Medicare patients, they will be the hardest hit by these budget cuts.

The shift in where healthcare dollars are spent could change every layer of healthcare delivery—from the ED’s ever-growing responsibility to inpatient admissions to primary care’s dwindling resources. It is a call for all of us to rethink how healthcare is funded and to stand in solidarity with those at risk of being left without medical care.

Looking Ahead

Beyond the immediate fiscal challenges, this issue invites a broader discussion on healthcare reform. How can we restructure funding to improve efficiencies? Could community health cooperatives or expanded telehealth services help lessen adverse effects?  These questions deserve robust debate and decisive action.

In these turbulent times, every stakeholder—from local communities to federal policymakers— needs to find solutions that prioritize human health over short-term budget tactics. The stakes are high, and the choices made today will shape healthcare access and quality for decades to come.

Linda Riddell, MS is a population health scientist specializing in poverty and is the founder of Gettin’ By, a training tool helping teachers, doctors, case managers, and others work more effectively with students, patients and clients who are experiencing poverty. Thomas Wilson, PhD, DrPH is an epidemiologist focused on real-world issues and board chair of the non-profit Population Health Impact Institute 

A Proud Republican Who Faced Off A Party Leader. . .and Won!

By MIKE MAGEE

This past week, Trump’s posting of himself as The Pope surfaced once again David French’s classic Christmas, 2024, New York Times column titled “Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?”

As I wrote at the time, “French and his wife and three children have experienced the cruelty first hand since he openly expressed his opposition to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That resulted in threats to his entire family by white supremacists who especially targeted his adopted Ethiopian daughter. Ultimately, he was “cancelled” by his own denomination, the small (approximately 400,000 members), Calvinist “Presbyterian Church of America”.

Over the past week, American politicians of every stripe have debated what exactly was Trump’s motive in debasing the Papacy as Pope Francis was being laid to rest. Three main theories have emerged. 

1.      As a malignant narcissist, Trump could not bear the fact that Pope Francis was stealing his limelight.

2.      Trump was appealing to conservative Christian Evangelicals who are strongly opposed to the Papacy on theological grounds.

3.      Trump was appealing to conservative Catholics like New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino who says, “… we respect Trump more than the socialist Pope.” 

Of course, there likely are elements of truth in each of these. But I prefer to fall back on my New York City high school training and believe that this is the product of a dull witted school yard bully who thought this was funny. 

This is not to say he has the courage to claim ownership. (Obviously this doesn’t get posted without his approval.) No. He lies to your face, saying:

“I had nothing to do with it, Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.” 

With his blessing, the image was posted at 10:29 PM on May 02, 2025 on his Truth Social account.

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Medicaid Should be Abolished. But Not Like This!

By MATTHEW HOLT

A long time ago in a different country, there was a landslide election from a population looking for change. And change they got. Americans had been campaigning for national health care since 1917. There had been failures in 1933 and 1946 and 1961. But in 1965 they got it. Sort of.

But a weird thing happened in the Congress. Out of the political sausage making came a plan that “Cared” for those over 65. While another plan came out that “Aid”ed the poor. (Stole that from the wonderful Adimika Arthur). Weirder still, the Medicare program was and is a Federally-funded program. The Medicaid program was a state-administered program, even though it was at least half funded by the Feds. 

That meant that Medicaid was always vulnerable to the whims of states. Of course many states already had demonstrated dismal records in how they treated their poorer and minority populations in the past (think slavery, Jim Crow, KKK, separate schools, drinking fountains, buses…you get the idea).

So while Medicare became the savior program for anyone who made it to 65, and later for those who were disabled or had kidney disease, Medicaid was a program for poor people that then got treated poorly. (Stole that from Jonathan Cohn). And right now in 2025 it is under severe threat yet again.

Before we get to that threat, it’s worth looking at the program. Medicaid has evolved and now covers most nursing home care (for “poor” seniors), care for the disabled, and even pays Medicare Part B premiums for people too poor to pay their own.  It also covers health insurance for poor people under 65 and in those states that accepted ACA Medicaid expansion, that’s a considerable number. Of course these are people under an imaginary line that makes them too poor to buy on the exchanges set up by the ACA. And usually Medicaid includes the CHIP program, an insurance program that covers poor children set up under Clinton in 1997.

This chart from the venerable KFF shows that while 75% of people on Medicaid are, poor, under 65, and not classified as disabled, 50% of the money goes to those who are not.

This all results in a bizarro world in which there is one Federal government program for people over 65 and the disabled, and then an entirely different state-based one, which spends 1/2 of its money on people who are over 65 and disabled and who are also in the Federal program. This is plain stupid and always has been.

Of course there is more to it than that.

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Welcome to the (U.S. Science) Apocalypse

By KIM BELLARD

I’m starting to feel like I’m beating a dead horse, having already written a couple times recently about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science, but the hits just keep on coming. Last Friday, for example, not only did the Administration’s proposed 2026 budget slash National Science Foundation (NSF) funding by over 50%, but Nature reported that the NSF was ceasing not only making new grants but also paying out on existing grants.

Then this week, at an event called “Choose Europe for Science,” European leaders announced a 500 million euro ($566 million) program to attract scientists. It wasn’t specifically targeted at U.S. scientists, but the context was pretty clear.

Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called the proposed budget cuts “a crisis, just a catastrophe for U.S. science.” Even if Congress doesn’t go along with such draconian cuts and grant approval resumes, Dr. Parikh warns: “That’s created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already.” 

One NSF staffer fears: “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point.”

Nature obtained an internal NSF April 30 email that told staff members “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice.” Researchers can continue to spend money they’ve already received but new money for those existing or for new grants are frozen “until further notice.” Staff members had already been told to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.”

NPR reports that some 344 previously approved grants were terminated as a result, as they “were not aligned with agency priorities.” One staffer told Nature that the policy had the potential for “Orwellian overreach,” and another warned: “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Yet another staffer told Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones that the freeze is “a slow-moving apocalypse…In effect, every NSF grant right now is canceled.”

No wonder that NSF’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last week, simply saying: “I believe I have done all I can.” 

If you think, oh, who cares? We still have plenty of innovative private companies investing in research, so who needs the government to fund research, then you might want to consider this: new research from American University estimates that even a 25% drop in federal support for R&D would reduce the U.S. GDP by 3.8% in the long term. And these aren’t one-time hits. “It is going to be a decline forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study’s authors. “The U.S. economy is going to be smaller.”  

If you don’t believe AU, then maybe you’ll believe the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which estimates that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II. “If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study, told The New York Times. “The rates of return are just really high.”

It’s no wonder, then, that European leaders see an opportunity.

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League Connect Digital Summit is WEDNESDAY

It’s Matthew Holt and I am looking forward to MC-ing the #LeagueConnectDigitalSummit THIS Wednesday May 7.

This one-day virtual event brings together leaders across health care, tech, and consumer experience to explore what it really takes to deliver personalized, digital-first, AI-powered care. I’ll be guiding the day’s key transitions and themes. There’s also strategy & implementation tracks with the likes of Google, Highmark Health, Accenture, Amwell, Deloitte, SCAN, Gainwell Technologies Health, and startups like SimpliFed, Healthily, Linus Health and so many more.

Join me and League for a FREE day of conversations, connection, and actionable insights that move health care forward. 

Oh, yes and Moneyball, The Blind Side and Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis is the keynote.

Register here