The U.S. medical system is already the costliest in the world, with much poorer outcomes than achieved in peer nations. It’s getting worse.

The Republican Congress, combined with major policies the administration is putting in place, targeted the poor, aged, children, and middle-class Americans, slashing at federal programs on which millions have relied.

These changes will make America even more unhealthy and more unequal in health outcomes that drag down the country and make us less competitive and less happy than other nations.

The effects of the GOP budget bill that passed this summer in the U.S. House and Senate won’t hit the country immediately. But just after the midterm elections in November 2026, patient advocates warn, millions of people should brace themselves for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal cuts and program eliminations.

Proponents of the changes say they will require the poor to be more accountable in qualifying for Medicaid, making beneficiaries prove, for example, that they cannot work. Opponents say they will impose burdensome red tape that will drive millions away from desperately needed medical coverage that is life-changing and life-saving, without any improvement in jobs for Medicaid recipients.

Critics also say that huge numbers of seniors won’t get the federal help they need for nursing home care, with many in that industry saying big numbers of facilities for the aged and debilitated will shutter without U.S. support. The crisis in care for the aged is worsening as facilities confront increasing staffing shortfalls due to administration-ordered immigration crackdowns.

Children will be hit hard, both by the Medicaid cuts and by deep reductions in supplemental nutrition programs for kids. Congress also rolled back important provisions in Obamacare that will make it harder for working folks in the middle class to sign up for and to keep health coverage. Further, the administration’s chain-saw attacks on the federal government also have erased a consumer reform that would have cleaned credit records of medical debt with its long-running harms.

The overall effect of the GOP policy bill will markedly increase the strain on U.S. hospitals, with experts expecting already overcrowded emergency rooms to worsen. Rural hospitals and other medical facilities warn that the GOP bill will force them to close. While experts sounded all kinds of alarms about the GOP moves, party leaders have insisted that the overall steps they took were necessary — to stave off the expiration of huge tax cuts that mainly benefit billionaires and the wealthiest of corporations.

Elections, as the 44th president has often noted, have consequences. The results of the 2024 votes are sending shocks through U.S. health care, and voters may want to consider what’s next in the 2026 midterms.

Cutting Medicaid slams the poor, and more

The medical safety net for the poor, old, sick, disabled, and kids is known nationally as Medicaid. Locally, folks may recognize it by other names, such as DC Medicaid (in the District of Columbia), Medical Assistance or MA in Maryland, and Cardinal Care in Virginia. Whatever its name, it’s about to undergo the biggest cuts in its history.

The GOP — to pay to maintain tax cuts for the rich and wealthy corporations that passed in 2017 and that were due to expire — decided to slash Medicaid by almost $1 trillion. The president and GOP leaders insist, counterfactually, that program recipients will be largely unaffected. They claim this will be so because of moves to end supposedly enormous waste, fraud, and abuse.

They say they are reforming the program to kick out those who can work but choose not to from Medicaid. Party stalwarts have rallied around the idea that Medicaid recipients regularly must verify they are working in some fashion and document often their continued eligibility for federal assistance.

Critics say this approach has been tested in pilots. States found it cost more to administer than it saved, studies have shown. Researchers note that millions of Medicaid recipients who can work already do. The “able-bodied” recipients who aren’t active in the workforce? Studies show their numbers are small and researchers who track them have found they aren’t working, “due to retirement, inability to find work, or other reason[s] …Those who were not working were statistically more likely to be older women who left the workforce to care for aging parents or children,” the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) reported.

Researchers also have found that Medicaid recipients who work often do so in episodic ways, getting cash and without paperwork that others routinely get. Many of them lack computers to scan and upload pay stubs or other work documents.

The reform also ignores another big reality of Medicare recipients: Many are aged, debilitated (mentally and physically), sick, and kids. The cruelty of the GOP Medicaid crackdown is this: By creating big, demanding, and continued eligibility requirements, the least able in the U.S. will suffer the most. They will neither apply nor receive help they qualify for and need. Again, as the CAP has reported:

“Research indicates that paperwork requirements such as those in the bill — particularly for Medicaid — don’t increase employment rates and often increase overhead costs. A group of researchers evaluated the first year of paperwork reporting requirements in Arkansas and found that there was a significant loss of Medicaid coverage in the initial six months among eligible people and no significant change in employment. Georgia also implemented a trial program, called Pathways, that included paperwork requirements, and state caseworkers found the monthly verification of employment overly burdensome. To date, taxpayers have spent more than $86 million on Pathways only to have 6,500 participants enrolled in the first 18 months of the program—75% fewer enrollees than the state had estimated would participate in year one.”

Nursing homes and seniors will be hit hard

The coronavirus pandemic provided the nation with a grim insight into the fragile, faltering, expensive care for the aged and debilitated in nursing homes. In their spending and policy bill, Republicans have significantly worsened the prospects for these facilities, which researchers have found more than half of Americans will need at some point in their lives.

Nursing home care is costly, with an average cost running $8,000-$9,000 per month in 2023. As the AARP, the nation’s largest advocacy group for older Americans, has reported:

“Medicaid is the largest payer of nursing home care costs in the U.S., covering most of the nursing home bill for more than 6 in 10 residents, according to an analysis by KFF, a nonprofit focused on health policy research and polling. Plenty of uncertainty remains around how changes set out in the new law will affect nursing home residents. How state governments, which jointly fund Medicaid with the federal government, will respond to the legislation is also still largely unknown, but it will be influential. ‘What we do know is that there’s going to be a big loss of federal funding and states are going to have to make decisions on whether they fill the gaps or cut benefits and services in order to balance their own budgets,’ says Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy manager at KFF researching Medicaid and America’s uninsured. ‘It’s highly likely that every state will react differently.’”

This likely means that bigger, more affluent states have more resources to help their nursing homes, while those in need in poorer, smaller states will suffer. The geographic inequity will compound existing problems with unequal health outcomes among states. (Hint: voters in many GOP “red states” will bear crushing consequences of giving tax breaks to the wealthiest individuals and corporations).

There’s more to the harms the GOP bill will inflict, especially on the elderly. A key, evidence-based, common-sense finding about nursing homes by researchers during the pandemic was this: Residents fare better when the quality and quantity of their caregivers is higher. It costs money, though, for facilities to hire and keep the appropriate staffing of nurses and aides.

The Biden Administration angered the owners and operators of nursing homes by proposing new, tougher staffing standards. Republicans delayed for years the implementation of those measures to improve the access to and quality of nursing home care.

As the AARP noted:

“In 2024, the Biden administration finalized new minimum federal staffing standards for the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes — the first of their kind. The standards require a registered nurse on-site at all times, plus a minimum of 3.48 hours of direct nursing care per resident per day – at least 0.55 hours from a registered nurse and 2.45 hours from a nurse’s aide … The staffing rule was slated to go in full effect for almost all nursing home facilities by May 2029 through a staggered implementation plan. But the new law postpones implementation until October 2034 … This means most nursing home residents are unlikely to receive adequate care before then. Less than 1 in 5 facilities met all three of the direct nursing care staffing standards in the final months of 2023, according to KFF. And not much progress has been made since then, says KFF’s Chidambaram.”

Homes had struggled, researchers found during pandemic-era studies, with hiring vital aides. Their hours were long, their workloads heavy, often unpleasant, and unrewarding. They often earned minimum wage — and facilities still groused about their cost, while ignoring the important role they played in residents’ lives and care.

If federal and state support for nursing homes plunges, how will facilities find and retain staff? And will they push for costly staffing increases with regulators taking a foot off the rules requiring them to do so?

For those who hope to care for sick and disabled loved ones at home or with help from community-based programs, the Republican bill is creating fear and worry, as the New York Times reported, explaining:

“Medicaid is best known as a program for low-income people, but it is also a key vehicle by which disabled Americans of varying income levels receive health care that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive … about 4.5 million Americans who depend specifically on its home- and community-based care services, which often come through specialized programs known as waivers. That 4.5 million includes many older Americans who are on Medicare too but can’t get the home care they need through that. But it also includes many working-age adults, and about 14% of the total are 18 or younger, according to the health research group KFF. Now many of these Americans, and their families, fear the services could be at risk because of the [giant Medicaid cuts ahead.] … Federal law deems most home- and community-based services as optional, so they are often targeted when states have to tighten their belts. When temporary, Great Recession increases in Medicaid funding expired in the early 2010s, for example, every state reduced home care by limiting enrollment or lowering spending on existing recipients.”

By the way, nursing homes and those in home care have been hard hit by staffing problems related to the administration’s fear-creating immigration crackdowns, as the New York Times reported, noting:

”Immigrants make up about 28% of the workforce directly providing that care, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data from KFF, a health policy research group. In comparison, foreign-born workers account for about 19% of the entire U.S. civilian labor force. Katie Smith Sloan, the president of LeadingAge, an association representing nonprofit aging services providers, said the Trump administration’s immigration policies were already starting to disrupt facilities across the country as providers moved to terminate some caregivers in recent weeks. She said some employees had stopped showing up at work out of fear for themselves and their families.

Spiking costs for health coverage

Republicans are pushing hard to promote their success with their budget and policy bill. Yet besides piling up enormous tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, the bill will explode the nation’s deficit by trillions of dollars. Regular folks will bear the brunt of paying for Congress’s debt spree, while also experiencing the blow of handling a major cost hike in a fundamental part of their personal budgets: the cost of health insurance.

Republicans historically have bitterly opposed any government role in health care, including the cost of insurance to deal with it. This led them for decades to oppose Medicare, Medicaid, and to wage 15 years of extreme battles against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare.

Obamacare, as imperfect as it may be, has grown increasingly popular. Its 24 million enrollees in 2025 set a record, as the rates of the uninsured in this country also have plunged to new lows. Patients have embraced crucial components of the ACA, including how it keeps insurers from barring coverage over pre-existing conditions and allows parents to keep older children on their plans. Patients have understood that Obamacare also kept younger, healthier people in its plans, meaning that sicker, older folk would not be isolated and forced into unaffordable policies. Having coverage has meant that patients benefit from lower costs for medical care, as insurers negotiated better prices with providers for their customers. Insurance, of course, plays a basic role in spreading bankrupting costs among a larger group, rather than having them fall just on one person.

The previous administration, as part of its battle against the economic damages of the pandemic and then to increase employment under an infrastructure act, enhanced federal support for those seeking Obamacare coverage on public exchanges. But that aid has expired.

Consumers will be slammed quickly by the GOP’s eliminating ACA subsidies and outreach and support efforts, the Wall Street Journal reported:

“Insurers are seeking hefty 2026 rate increases for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, the coverage known as Obamacare. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants a 27% hike, while its sister Blue Cross plan in Texas is asking for 21%. The largest ACA plans in Washington state, Georgia and Rhode Island are all looking for premiums to surge more than 20%. The companies say the big increases are needed because of higher health care costs and changing federal policy, including cuts to subsidies that help consumers pay for plans. The higher premiums would come after years of enrollment growth and mostly single-digit rate increases in the Obamacare market, where individuals and families buy insurance for themselves.”

Republicans not only declined to extend the ACA support, they cut off funds for public outreach for Obamacare (informing the public about its availability and explaining various offerings in states), and they have added more eligibility hurdles for ACA policies. As an online posting by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported of the new ACA requirements:

“Enrollees will need to update information around their income, immigration status, and other details every year, or risk losing coverage. Plans are no longer automatically renewed. Individuals will have to manually re-enroll every year during open enrollment. Last year, 10 million people were automatically re-enrolled. The open enrollment period has been shortened by a month—now ending Dec. 15, rather than Jan. 15. For the current plan year, 40% of people signed up after Dec. 15. New enrollees—including those who enroll outside of open enrollment due to a life event or income change—will need to prove eligibility before they can receive subsidies that help offset the cost of their monthly premium. This is a change from the current policy, which allows applicants to get up to 90 days of premium assistance during the application process.”

Most Americans get their health insurance coverage via their jobs. And costs for this will spike starting next year, analysts say. Employers have resisted passing on rising medical care costs but will be less inclined to do so in 2026, as they have seen these increases: 4.5% in 2024, 6% this year, and an anticipated 8% next year. Companies complain that providers are experiencing such uncertainty — due in a big way to effects of the GOP big bill — combined with increasing demand, notably for expensive weight-loss medications, that they must act. Patients previously have seen such pass-throughs include not only premium hikes but also spikes in deductibles, the sums they must pay out-of-pocket before their coverage kicks in.

The total average premium for employer-provided health coverage for a family of four hit more than $25,000 in 2024, with workers paying a $6,000 share of that average, analysts say. That price has become increasingly unaffordable, especially for lower- and middle-class and poor workers, who skip coverage or take on such high deductibles that they essentially forgo care because they can’t pay out-of-pocket, upfront medical costs.

Policy experts fear that GOP slashes to federal health care programs will lead to nightmarish problems for hospitals, especially in rural areas. Medical facilities fear they will need to provide more uncompensated care, while seeing their revenues and profit margins decrease. Government cuts in Medicaid and other programs will cause an estimated 300 rural hospitals, which already were struggling to get by, to shut. This will force the sick or injured in rural areas to travel long distances for treatment, an especially pricey prospect for those requiring emergency care and air ambulance services. As patients struggle with health coverage (Medicaid and Obamacare) and uninsured rates spike, those ill and injured who cannot skip care will head to already overcrowded emergency rooms for expensive treatment. Further, along with other cuts in federal medical programs, the GOP slashed the “provider tax,” which Time magazine has reported on:

“Our health care system is like a chain of dominoes. ERs, hospitals, and nursing homes are all connected, and the provider tax is one of the critical links holding it all together. It’s a tool used by 47 states to fund Medicaid, the program that provides health care coverage for millions of Americans, both children and seniors. Hospitals pay into this tax. States use it to unlock Medicaid dollars. Those combined funds then flow back into the system, helping keep ERs staffed, hospital beds available, and nursing homes running. Most people aren’t aware of the provider tax, but it’s why your local hospital can treat you and your family, whether you have private insurance or none at all. [The GOP cut] to this tax might look and sound like a simple budget trim. In reality, it’s a wrecking ball. It will slash federal funding, leaving hospitals and nursing homes scrambling.”

A rollback on easing pain of medical debt

Before this year, reformers were taking positive steps to deal with medical debt, one of the great shames of the U.S. health care system. Republicans have undone one of these compassionate measures as they took a chainsaw to the federal government in the first six months of this presidential term.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and onetime presidential best “bro,” made the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) one of his earliest targets in his months of DOGE-ing, slashing departments and agencies.

Musk and other billionaires, the Washington Post reported, had beefs with the CFPB exercising its broad oversight of the nation’s financial systems to protect consumers from tech companies. Specifically, Musk’s “X” and other tech platforms increasingly have pushed into digital credit, money exchange, and other traditional banking operations. CFPB had sought to regulate such activities rigorously.

DOGE staff quickly thrust themselves into the agency, burrowing into its software and operations. Musk halted the agency’s work. Leaders and staffers quit. A presidential ally was appointed the new CFPB chief.

Amid the turmoil in Washington, D.C., a case filed by medical debt collectors was making its way through the court of a Texas federal judge. The case challenged the authority of the CFPB to restrict credit agencies from detailing consumers’ medical debt. As the Washington Post reported:

“An estimated one-fifth of U.S. households have medical debt on their credit reports, a burden that makes it more expensive for them to buy homes or finance new cars and, in some cases, more difficult to obtain jobs. A recent court decision has now kept that system in place. A Biden-era rule, announced last summer but never put into effect, sought to forbid credit reporting agencies, including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, from using medical debts over $500 on the detailed credit history reports that lenders use to judge creditworthiness. Amid opposition from industry groups and the Trump administration, a federal judge then struck down the rule [in July].

“The rule was opposed by debt collectors, who argued it would have encouraged financial delinquency, as well as banks and other lenders that use credit reports … U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan, who oversees Texas’ Eastern District, concluded in a July 11 ruling that the CFPB’s medical-debt ban would have gone beyond the agency’s authority under the law.”

With the agency downsized and taking a 180-degree turn from what had been the practice in the past administration, the judge’s ruling “effectively scraps” the plan to erase medical debt from credit records. Mostly. As the newspaper reported, 14 states have passed laws similar to the CFPB rule and a 15th state is considering a measure. The federal judge did not take up the state laws and they remain unchanged and in force.

The newspaper reported this, too: “What also stays unchanged: If your medical debts are below $500, they shouldn’t affect your credit score. But if you have unpaid debts above that level, it could take a hit. The major credit-reporting bureaus imposed that $500 threshold in 2023 following a scathing CFPB report that found medical debt doesn’t predict credit-worthiness as well as other forms of debt.”

Researchers’ analyses of recent U.S. Census surveys have found that “14 million people (6% of adults) in the U.S. owe over $1,000 in medical debt and about 3 million people (1% of adults) owe medical debt of more than $10,000.” Medical debt has gained increasing public attention and scrutiny. The nonprofit, independent KFF Health News, which estimated that 15 million consumers were affected, reported when the previous administration announced the credit reporting rules that:

“The regulations fulfill a pledge by the Biden administration to address the scourge of health care debt, a problem that touches an estimated 100 million Americans, forcing many to make sacrifices such as limiting food, clothing, and other essentials. Credit reporting, a threat that has been wielded by medical providers and debt collectors to get patients to pay their bills, is the most common collection tactic used by hospitals, a KFF Health News analysis found. The impact can be devastating, especially for those with large health care debts. There is growing evidence, for example, that credit scores depressed by medical debt can threaten people’s access to housing and drive homelessness. People with low credit scores can also have trouble getting a loan or can be forced to borrow at higher interest rates.”

The Washington Post reported its data analysis found this about medical debts: “[They] are a major reason credit scores are lower across the American Southeast, especially in states where Medicaid wasn’t expanded. Without insurance, lower-income Americans bear a much larger burden of health care costs, which often translate into higher debt.”

Forgetting the existence of inequities

The Republicans in Congress and the current administration have launched a great erasure, aiming to reverse realities from just months ago.

They have turned on their head, for example, the best-intentioned efforts to deal at long last with the significant inequities that harmed the lives and health of women, people of color, and LGBTQ folk. (These disparities were detailed in an earlier newsletter of mine, which can be viewed by clicking here).

They have used their power to assail what they call wasteful and “woke” medical and scientific research — without ever providing a definition of exactly what this is. They claim the mere mention of gender, race, or the like discriminates against the majority, this in an increasingly changing and diverse nation.

The assault on medical-scientific research, combined with funding cutoffs purportedly punishing higher educational institutions for failing to prevent anti-Semitism, has been sweeping. The administration has unilaterally stopped so much federal funding that Wired magazine headlined a recent article How Trump Killed Cancer Research, and the New York Times described the budget slashing at agencies like the National Institutes of Health as The Gutting of America’s Medical Research.

Lawsuits have put the courts in the position of deciding the fate of thousands of projects that had been one of the hallmarks of U.S. global leadership — this country’s advanced studies to improve human health.

Instead, the administration, without congressional assent and with dubious executive authority, has halted billions of dollars in funding for thousands of studies. Clinical trials stopped. Lab animals faced rapid demise. The New York Times described the shambolic way in which administration officials chose and closed efforts at the NIH that some experts had invested lifetimes in:

“[S]ince late February, the government has publicly announced the cancellation of 1,389 NIH awards. The agency scoured grants for key words and phrases like transgender, misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, and equity, ending those focused on certain topics or populations, according to a current NIH program officer, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. Studies focused on sexual and gender minority groups were among the first on the chopping block …

“The cuts spread to grants on health equity and racial and ethnic groups. Affected projects sought to improve access to mental health care for Latino, low-income and rural communities; to reduce maternal mortality among black women; and to prevent gun violence in Asian American communities.”

The GOP’s big bill also sneaked in yet another provision that advocates say will be detrimental to communities of color, especially. The bill killed a program that helped students pay for graduate education, notably in medicine (and in law). As USA Today explained:

“Major changes are coming to higher education in the United States after President Donald Trump signed his major domestic policy bill into law. Among them is an end to Grad PLUS loans, a program that helps people pay for medical school and law school. Since Congress created the loans, direct from the federal government, in 2006, they have covered the full cost of attending graduate and professional school for nearly 2 million students. Beginning July 1, 2026, that won’t be an option anymore. Trump’s tax and spending law will eliminate the Grad PLUS program for new borrowers (students who take out loans before that date will be grandfathered in for up to three years). The measure imposes new borrowing caps – $50,000 annually and $200,000 overall – on the amount of federal direct loans students can take out for degrees in law and medicine. And it limits their repayment options after they graduate.”

Educators fear that the lack of money, especially without federal loan programs, will prevent less affluent students from going to medical school. The nation already faces a big shortfall of doctors and has scrambled to find enough physicians of color to serve black and brown communities, as well as poorer exurban and rural areas.

As USA Today reported:

“About half of all medical students rely on the Grad PLUS program, borrowing more than $1 billion annually, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Graduates of osteopathic schools, the vast majority of which take on Grad PLUS loans, often go on to serve rural areas or become primary care providers.”

Here are some recent health- or medical-related news articles that might interest you:

§ Doctors are making a stark diagnosis about one of the nation’s largest health systems. They’re just saying no to signing up to work with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with 4 in 10 physicians of the 2,000 M.D.s declining job offers from the VA in the first quarter of the year, ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news site has reported. That’s bad news for those who rely on the VA for care, as part of one of this nation’s sacred promises to those who served the country and put their lives at stake. The VA, like many medical institutions, has struggled to find and keep doctors. ProPublica reported that job candidates have reason to be wary of the VA, with the current administration under Secretary Doug Collins threatening that the department had to slash 70,000 positions. That caused alarm among veterans’ advocates, who decried the VA cuts — part of sweeping reductions across federal agencies — as imperiling the quality, safety, and access to medical care for vets and their loved ones. The department saw an exodus of concerned staffers, such that Collins has said the VA workforce reductions will go down to 30,000 by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. That has not assuaged doctors’ concerns about the stability and long-term prospects with the VA, which already has a shortfall of hundreds of physicians and nurses.

§ The go-go era may be going or gone for Medicare Advantage plans, health policies for seniors in the so-called private insurer version of the decades-old federal program, the Wall Street Journal has reported. As a result of insurers needing to keep investors and Wall Street happy, big firms with Advantage plans are cutting back, including ending coverage for hundreds of thousands of patients. As the newspaper reported: “Many seniors enjoy the perks that come with Medicare Advantage. But those extras—like dental coverage and free gym memberships—are being scaled back. Insurers are cutting benefits and exiting from unprofitable markets, and Wall Street is cheering them on. Once rewarded by investors for rapid expansion in the lucrative privatized Medicare program, companies are now being applauded for showing restraint amid rising medical costs and lower government payments.” UnitedHealth, an industry giant, has been hard hit and is responding with major cuts, the newspaper reported, adding “Insurers say they aren’t pulling back by choice. For years, Medicare Advantage was the golden goose—delivering relatively high margins and steady growth. That spurred a flood of increasingly generous plans aimed at winning seniors and market share. Now that strategy is unraveling, as Wall Street grows wary of just how unpredictable profits in government programs have become. Medicare Advantage, long championed by Republicans as a cost-saving alternative to traditional Medicare, was supposed to save taxpayers money. But as allegations mounted that insurers were being overpaid, bipartisan scrutiny of the program intensified and the Biden administration moved to rein in costs. The timing couldn’t have been worse for investors: Lower payments collided with soaring medical expenses, creating a perfect storm of lower revenue, higher costs and shrinking profits.”

§ Climate change has hit hard the health and well-being of a famous summer spot for celebrities and vacationers, the New York Times has reported, noting that vegan eating has become a seasonal surprise — and a must — on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s because denizens of the Massachusetts isle, known for its rustic appeal, have seen a spike in tick populations, notably an onslaught of the grape seed-sized lone star variant. A single bite from the pest can trigger “alpha gel syndrome” — a “life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy,” the newspaper reported, adding that almost half of the hundreds who have been tested in recent times were positive for the syndrome. That compares with early periods when just 2 of 9 such cases tested positive. “[T]he condition is changing the way many people shop, cook and eat in a place long known as a food-lover’s retreat for its thriving independent farms and restaurants,” the newspaper reported. It also said the condition has spread nationwide, especially as warmer conditions have expanded the range and active periods of the lone star tick: “Over the past three decades, alpha-gal syndrome has taken hold in a wide band of the United States from Oklahoma to Long Island, changing the lives and diets of people who come down with it. Its arrival on Martha’s Vineyard has been especially dramatic in part because its spread has been so quick … The acres of undeveloped woods and waving grasses that make the island so alluring to celebrities and vacationers are also deeply attractive to deer and the ticks that feed and breed on them.”

§ They afflict more than a billion people around the planet, staggering them with such excruciating pain that they are left debilitated for indeterminate spans. With all the other advances modern medicine has made, advances have been spare in treating migraines and cluster headaches, reports Jerome Groopman in the New Yorker magazine. He is a Harvard Medical School professor, a medical researcher and scientist, a longtime author on medical topics, and suffers himself from migraines. Groopman details the differing theories and approaches, especially with medications, doctors offer now for those with chronic headaches. He expresses frustration that more research and hope is not on offer for migraine and cluster headache sufferers.

HERE’S TO A HEALTHY 2025 — AND BEYOND!

Sincerely,

Patrick Malone
Patrick Malone & Associates