From Washington, DC,

• Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will vote on the appropriations bill that funds the FEHB and PSHB, among other programs, H.R. 7006 – Financial Services and General Government and National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2026

• Beckers Hospital Review tells us whether the ACA healthcare premium subsidies stand.

• Fierce Healthcare adds,
  • “The Trump administration has released a new update on enrollment on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, with signups lagging notably behind figures for the 2025 plan year.
  • “Per the latest snapshot report, nearly 22.8 million people have signed up for coverage across the exchanges through Jan. 3. By comparison, 23.6 million people had enrolled in ACA plans through Jan. 4, 2025, according to a report from a year ago.
  • “Of that total, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said 2.8 million individuals are new enrollees, while nearly 20 million are returning customers. Close to 15.6 million people signed up for coverage through Healthcare.gov, and 7.2 million used a state-based exchange, according to the report.

• Beckers Payer Issues provides us with eleven No Surprises Act updates.

• BenefitsLink calls our attention to a November 2025 IRS notice that provides for inflation adjustments to qualifying payment amounts issued in 2026 under the No Surprises Act. According to BenefitsLink, the notice was not well publicized.

• Milliman assesses “Medicare drug price negotiation: Navigating the next wave of maximum fair prices.”
  
• BioPharma Dive adds,
  • AbbVie is the latest among more than a dozen of the world’s largest drugmakers to sign a drug pricing deal with the White House, announcing late Monday a deal to invest $100 billion in U.S. pharmaceutical research and manufacturing and lower some product costs in return for tariff relief. 
  • As with the many other deals revealed between the Trump administration and large pharma companies, the agreement is short on details as well as its potential impact on AbbVie’s earnings. AbbVie only said that it will provide “low prices” to Medicaid and boost efforts to sell through a government portal widely used medicines like Humira, Alphagan, Combigan and Synthroid — all of which are off-patent and face competition from lower-cost biosimilars or generics. 

• Per an HHS news release,
  • The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced the appointment of two new members to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). These appointments reflect the commitment of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to transparency, gold standard science, and diverse expertise in guiding the nation’s immunization policies. In June 2025, Secretary Kennedy reconstituted ACIP to restore public trust in vaccines.
  • The new members are Adam Urato, MD, and Kimberly Biss, MD.

• MedPage Today offers backgrounds on the new members.

• Federal News Network notes that “A sea of challenges opens up with 105,000 feds retiring.”
  • “The one-year drop in the number of GS-14s and GS-15s across government is causing some to be concerned about the future of federal management.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

• MedTech Dive points out,
  • “Medtronic said Monday it received 510(k) clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for an app to connect its smart insulin pens with a glucose sensor made by Abbott.
  • “The app, called MiniMed Go, provides alerts for missed insulin doses, a dose calculator and guidance on what to do if a person misses a dose. It also includes software reporting for providers.
  • “The pairing is part of a partnership Medtronic struck in 2024 for Abbott to make an integrated continuous glucose monitor sold exclusively by Medtronic.”

• MedPage Today relates,
  • “Spring & Mulberry recalled a lot of its Mint Leaf Date Sweetened Chocolate Baropens in a new tab or window that was sold online and through retail partners nationwide due to possible contamination with Salmonella.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

• The American Hospital Association News reports,
  • “The five-year survival rate for all cancers in the U.S. has reached 70% for the first time, according to a report published Jan. 13 by the American Cancer Society. The study analyzed diagnosed cases of cancer in the U.S. from 2015-2021. Among the findings, the study said that since the mid-1990s, there have been notable gains in the survival rates for more fatal cancers, such as myeloma (from 32% to 62%), liver (7% to 22%) and lung cancers (15% to 28%). The cancer mortality rate declined by a total of 34% since peaking in 1991, averting 4.8 million deaths since then.”
• and
  • “A study released Jan. 12 by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology analyzed the current state of heart health in the U.S., highlighting the burden of disease, quality of care and mortality trends of risk factors and conditions that can lead to heart disease. The study found no change in the prevalence of hypertension among U.S. adults from 2009-2023 but found that hypertension-related cardiovascular deaths nearly doubled from 23 per 100,000 in 2000 to 43 per 100,000 in 2019. The prevalence of diabetes in U.S. adults increased from 11.9% in 2009-2010 to 14.1% in 2021-2023. Deaths related to type 2 diabetes increased from 30.4 per 100,000 adults in 2009 to 54 per 100,000 adults in 2023. The study analyzed other risk factors and conditions such as obesity, cigarette smoking and stroke, among others.”
    
• STAT News adds,
  • “46% of U.S. counties don’t have a cardiologist. ARPA-H’s new agentic AI program could bring them specialized care.”
    • “The Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program will support the development of Food and Drug Administration-authorized full-stack solutions that use agentic artificial intelligence to autonomously provide specialty care for every American living with advanced heart disease.”

• Beckers Payer Issues discusses The United Health Foundation’s 2025 “America’s Health Rankings Annual Report,” published Jan. 8.

• The Washington Post explains how to know when to keep your kids out of school.

• NIH’s latest Research Matters considers,
  • One dose of HPV vaccine as effective as two
  • Protective vitamin shots for newborns on decline
  • Source of gastrointestinal problems in myotonic dystrophy

• Per Genetic Engineering and BioTechnology News,
  • “Tahoe Therapeutics, Arc Institute, and Biohub have each made a multi-million dollar commitment to fill the massive data gap for virtual cell models. The teams exclusively told GEN Edge that more than 120 million single cell data points across 225,0000 perturbations will be generated using Tahoe’s Mosaic technology for mapping how drug molecules interact with biology.
  • “All three organizations lead a field that builds AI models trained on transcriptome data to predict how cell gene expression changes with cell states. In therapeutics, these virtual cells could gleam insight into new drugs capable of shifting cells from “diseased” to “healthy” with fewer off target effects.” 

From the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference,

• Healthcare Dive reports
  • “JPM26: Dr. Oz, CMS leaders make their pitch to hospitals, payers on Trump admin healthcare policies.
• and
  • “JPM26: CommonSpirit CEO teases new divestures, outlines AI wins and pitfalls”
    
• Fierce Pharma offers a potpourri of biopharma stories from day 2.

• STAT News adds,
  • It will be hard for OpenEvidence to top its 2025. The company announced nearly $500 million in funding last year and seemingly overnight became a go-to tool in the medical profession. A slide during the company’s Monday JPM presentation claims that queries to the company’s clinical evidence chatbot grew from 2.6 million in 2024 to 17.9 million in December 2025, with well over 100 million queries for the year.
  • “The company also revealed it will be launching “medical super-intelligence.” What does that mean? Katie Palmer explains in a new story.”

From the U.S. healthcare business and artifical intelligence front,

• Beckers Hospital Review reports,
  • San Antonio-based University Health is investing $1.7 billion in a five-year expansion, including two new community hospitals and two multispecialty clinics.
• and
  • “Skilled nursing facility operating capacity dropped by 5% in the U.S. between 2019 and 2024, according to a study published Jan. 12 in JAMA Internal Medicine.” 
    
• STAT New relates,
  • “Illumina became a genomics juggernaut by developing machines that could read large amounts of DNA accurately and quickly. But the company’s betting the next phase of its growth will be accelerated by helping customers better understand genetic data and apply it to drug development.
  • “The San Diego firm took a step in that direction on Tuesday, when it unveiled what it says will be the world’s largest dataset of its kind, the Billion Cell Atlas. The atlas is based on the results of turning on or off genes across 200 cell lines, including lines used to study heart disease, neurologic disorders, immune conditions, and cancer.”
  • “Data on how these genetic perturbations affect cells could in principle help drug companies validate drug targets or create “virtual cells,” artificial intelligence-powered models of cell behavior. Thus far, Illumina has generated data from about 150 million cells and expects to reach a billion by the end of the year. The company’s already offering the atlas as a resource for pharmaceutical companies, with Merck, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly as its first customers. Several others have expressed interest, too, according to CEO Jacob Thaysen.”
    
• Per MedCity News,
  • “If there’s any single company that understands or should understand the value of health data and its importance in patients’ lives, it’s Wisconsin-based EHR company Epic.
  • “And yet, while the company announced a whole host of future AI efforts last August, including a digital companion for patients called Emmie, it was OpenAI — which announced ChatGPT Health last week — that has actually given people the power to query their medical records and gain insights. Anthropic is announcing a similar capability for Pro and Max users of its Claude generative AI platform. Like Epic, other companies that demonstrated an understanding of that broad patient need also missed the boat.
  • “But in an interview on Friday, Epic’s chief medical officer pushed back on the notion that this was a “missed opportunity” for the EHR company.
  • “I would categorize it, instead of a missed opportunity, as thoughtfully developed over multiple years on top of other non-AI MyChart development and AI that’s actually going to be more thoughtful and tuned to your medical history and your personal medical care,” declared Dr. Jackie Gerhart, also a practicing family physician and vice president of clinical informatics.
  • “Gerhart, who has been with Epic for seven years, and another Epic R&D expert took some pains to describe how the company is developing the capabilities of Emmie, the digital concierge, deeply embedded within the EHR and able to not only handle simple queries like “create an exercise plan”or “explain my lab results” but also nudge you to do the things that you should do for better health.”