Biden administration proposes expanding obesity drug coverage under Medicare and Medicaid
Pablo Porciuncula / Contributor
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration has proposed a new rule to “significantly” expand coverage of anti-obesity medications for Americans with Medicare and Medicaid, according to the White House.
“Over the past few years, there have been major scientific advancements in the treatment of obesity, with the introduction of new life-saving drugs,” the White House said in a statement released on Tuesday. “These anti-obesity medications can help prevent the development of Type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, these drugs reduce deaths and sickness from heart attack and other cardiovascular outcomes by up to 20%. But for too many Americans, these critical treatments are too expensive and therefore out of reach. Without insurance coverage, these drugs can cost someone as much as $1,000 a month.”
Millions of Americans struggle with obesity — an estimated 42%, according to the White House — and it is now widely recognized as a chronic disease with increased risk of all-cause mortality and multiple related comorbidities such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke and some cancers.
Medicare and Medicaid currently cover the use of anti-obesity medication for certain conditions, like diabetes. But the new proposal on Tuesday would “expand access to these innovative medications for obesity, which is widely recognized as a disease and help an estimated 3.4 million Americans with Medicare,” the White House said.
“Medicare coverage would reduce out-of-pocket costs for these prescription drugs by as much as 95 percent for some enrollees. Approximately 4 million adult Medicaid enrollees would also gain new access to these medications,” the White House continued.
The proposal would “allow Americans and their doctors to determine the best path forward so they can lead healthier lives, without worrying about their ability to cover these drugs out-of-pocket, and ultimately reduce health care costs to our nation,” White House officials said.
The proposed rule would be implemented at the same time as a comprehensive agenda to lower the costs of drugs, including the drug price negotiation program and increased market competition.
“Thanks to the President’s efforts, seniors are already seeing lower prescription drug costs with insulin capped at $35, free vaccines, and out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs capped at $2,000 starting in 2025,” the Biden administration said. “Already this year, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved nearly $1 billion in out-of-pocket prescription drugs costs in the first half of 2024 because of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Furthermore, HHS has reached agreement with drug manufacturers for the first ten negotiated drugs, with new prices that are reduced between 38 to 79 percent starting in 2026.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President-elect JD Vance has been working the phones reaching out to senators trying to gauge support for former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — who Trump named for the attorney general role, according to three sources with knowledge of the calls.
Gaetz, who resigned from the House shortly after President-elect Donald Trump announced the pick on Thursday, has also been making calls to senators, sources said.
Vance’s actions underscore that he is expected to be the “eyes and ears” for Trump in Congress, a source told ABC News.
This comes as Senate Republicans have fired off warning shots to Trump that his nominee to head up the Department of Justice faces major hurdles in his path to confirmation.
“I know he’s gonna have an uphill battle,” Republican Sen. Joni Ernst told reporters.
Senate Republicans can only afford to lose four votes to confirm Trump’s nominees in the new Congress next year. Republicans are expected to hold 53 seats in the new Congress.
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said he has concerns with Gaetz’s attorney general nomination and thinks the former Florida congressman likely wouldn’t be confirmed if the vote took place imminently.
“There are concerns he can’t get across the finish line and we’re going to spend a lot of political capital — I say ‘we’ — a lot of people will spend a lot of political capital on something that even if it got done, you have to wonder if it’s worth it,” Cramer said.
Earlier this week, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal — who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the attorney general confirmation process — told reporters that he knew of at least five to 10 senators who currently disapproved of Gaetz as the nominee.
Cramer took that estimation a step further.
“I would guess if we had to vote today on the Senate floor, it might be more than that,” Cramer said.
Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. The committee was in its final stages of its investigation, sources confirmed to ABC News.
The committee was slated to meet on Friday to discuss the status of the Gaetz report, but the chairman of the committee confirmed on Friday that the meeting had been “postponed.”
Since Gaetz left his post in the House, the House Ethics Committee no longer has the jurisdiction to continue its investigation into him.
The Justice Department also spent years probing the allegations against Gaetz, including allegations of obstruction of justice, before informing Gaetz last year that it would not bring charges.
Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he does not think the House Ethics Committee should release its report into Gaetz.
“I think it’s a terrible breach of protocol and tradition and the spirit of the rules,” Johnson told reporters at the U.S. Capitol.
Johnson told reporters on Friday he didn’t think it was “relevant” for the public to know what’s in the report.
“The rules of the house have always been that a former member is beyond the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee. And so I — I don’t think that’s relevant.”
Republican Sen. John Cornyn told ABC News that it’s important to have access to what the House Ethics Committee has found in its investigation.
“I think there should not be any limitations on the Senate Judiciary committee’s investigation, including, whatever the House Ethics Committee has generated,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn said he would “absolutely” want to see the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gaetz during his confirmation process.
Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, called for the report to be released on Thursday.
“In light of Donald Trump’s selection of former congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, I’m calling on the House Ethics Committee to preserve and share the report and all relevant documentation on Mr. Gates with the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Durbin, a Democrat, said.
On Thursday, Durbin and Senate Democrats sent a letter officially asking for the House Ethics Committee to release its report on Matt Gaetz, including all other relevant documentation.
“The sequence and timing of Mr. Gaetz’s resignation from the House raises serious questions about the contents of the House Ethics Committee report and findings. We cannot allow this critical information from a bipartisan investigation into longstanding public allegations to be hidden from the American people, given that it is directly relevant to the question of whether Mr. Gaetz is qualified and fit to be the next Attorney General of the United States,” the senators wrote.
Durbin noted there is “substantial” precedent to release the report.
On Friday, Durbin said Trump’s various Justice Department nominees, including Gaetz and his personal attorneys, show his intention to “weaponize” the Justice Department for retribution.
“These selections show Donald Trump intends to weaponize the Justice Department to seek vengeance,” Durbin said in a statement. “Donald Trump viewed the Justice Department as his personal law firm during his first term, and these selections — his personal attorneys — are poised to do his bidding.”
The Senate’s new incoming Republican leader, Sen. John Thune, told reporters that he expects the Senate Judiciary Committee to do its job and for the Senate to provide advice and consent that is required under the Constitution.
Thune and Senate Republicans now face a new challenge in the next Congress, with Trump already daring Senate Republicans to defy him. Thune was just minutes into his election victory on Wednesday when Trump announced his controversial attorney general pick in Gaetz. It quickly became apparent that nominees like Gaetz will struggle to gain majority support from the Senate.
There are already questions about Trump’s other nominees, including Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, and Pete Hegseth, the Fox News personality, who has been nominated to the top Pentagon post.
ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel, Lauren Peller and Isabella Murrary contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court, faced with sagging public confidence and a deepening perception its decisions are politically-motivated, could soon play a critical role in how some 2024 presidential ballots are cast and counted and, potentially, how contested election results are certified.
“As prepared as anyone can be,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior justice, when asked recently about the flood of election-related lawsuits headed toward the high court.
Hundreds of state and federal cases involving disputes over the legitimacy of state voter rolls, access to voting places, and procedures for counting ballots are currently pending. A majority of them were brought by Republicans.
“It is a deluge,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank tracking the unprecedented volume of election-year litigation. “It is a strategy to sow disinformation and chaos in the election system.”
Many of the lawsuits, predicated on “conspiracy theories” and advancing tenuous legal arguments, will ultimately be tossed out on technical grounds, Weiser said. But some may reach the justices with the potential to alter voting procedures in the final weeks of the campaign, depending on how they rule.
In one closely-watched case from Mississippi, the Republican National Committee has asked a conservative federal appeals court panel to prohibit the counting of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 5. Roughly 20 states have long standing laws permitting late-arriving ballots, including Nevada, Virginia and Ohio.
“They’re saying federal law says election day means election day, which means that anything that comes afterwards was not on election day,” Weiser said of the GOP effort. “The argument has been raised in many cases across the country, and the courts have been routinely rejecting it. But given the context of the players involved, there’s now not a 0% risk that this could happen.”
In North Carolina, Republicans have sued state election officials seeking to remove 225,000 voters ahead of Election Day, claiming voter registration forms lacked the required identification information. The case is among more than three dozen GOP-led suits attempting to purge alleged ineligible voters, according to Democracy Docket, a left-leaning group tracking the litigation.
“It doesn’t strike me as implausible that you would see a case like that sharply before the Supreme Court in late October,” said University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq.
While the justices have generally sought to avoid interference in state voter registration policies and election procedures close to an election — a concept known as the Purcell Principle — they have occasionally issued rulings that have resulted in major changes.
In the past few weeks, the court has issued decisions allowing Arizona to require proof of citizenship for state voter registration and rejecting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s bid to appear on the Nevada ballot.
“They’ve never really explained what is the ‘status quo’ and what is ‘last minute,’ and they have been incredibly inconsistent in how they applied [Purcell],” said Caroline Fredrickson, a Georgetown law professor and former president of the American Constitution Society.
Other possible scenarios for Supreme Court involvement in the 2024 election could unfold after Nov. 5, as local and state election officials tabulate ballots and certify results.
“Imagine a state such as Georgia, where you have a state election board that has in the past weeks evinced a certain tendency to invite and foment election related litigation, resisting certification of a slate of presidential electors that the state election board disfavors,” said Huq. “What happens then? Perhaps the Supreme Court would be called in to tell us.”
The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECRA) mandates that states must certify their results by Dec. 11, but does not spell out what would happen if they do not do so. There could be litigation to resolve the appointment of a state’s electors for president by Dec. 16 when the Electoral College meets to cast votes.
The law explicitly directs disputes over certification to a three-judge panel for resolution with the U.S. Supreme Court getting the final word.
“It’s certainly contemplated as a second layer fail-safe,” said Weiser, “but I’m relatively confident that all the earlier layer fail-safes are going to hold and that we’re not going to be in that scenario.”
The court could also be asked to weigh in on any attempt by members of Congress to disqualify former President Donald Trump from a second term, if he were to win the election, during certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2025.
In the case Trump v. Anderson last year, the justices unanimously ruled that states could not disqualify a presidential candidate as an “insurrectionist” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it left open a federal process to make that determination.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says anyone who took an oath “as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution” and who then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemy” cannot hold office.
Trump’s critics allege he clearly violated Section 3 given his connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to block certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
Under the ECRA, if one-fifth of the members of the House and Senate voted to object to certification of Trump’s electors on the grounds that he is ineligible to hold office, that decision could ultimately be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
“You could imagine a kind of Bush v Gore style, very, very rapid sequence of motions or petitions being filed and making their way through the court system,” said Huq. “I can imagine that happening, although I think it’s unlikely. But I suspect the Supreme Court would make short work of it.”
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump on Friday made his first public show of support for Pete Hegseth, his embattled pick for defense secretary, since Hegseth began making the rounds on Capitol Hill speaking to Republican senators amid misconduct allegations.
“Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
“He was a great student – Princeton/Harvard educated – with a Military state of mind. He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that,” Trump added.
The post comes after Trump’s public silence as Hegseth met with GOP senators every day this week in the face of new allegations of sexual impropriety, financial mismanagement, public drunkenness and other personal misconduct.
The New Yorker reported the claims over the weekend. ABC News has not independently confirmed the magazine’s account.
Hegseth has denied the accusations, but telling senators he’s a “changed” man and vowing not to drink alcohol should he be confirmed to head up the Pentagon.
ABC News previously reported Trump had not been working the phones for Hegseth as he did for Matt Gaetz, who similarly faced sexual assault allegations. Gaetz ultimately withdrew his name from consideration.
But Hegseth on Thursday vowed not to back down as he wrapped up sit-downs with senators who will be tasked with his confirmation.
“The conversations have been robust, candid at times,” he said. “There’s great questions on policy, personality, everything, so we are going to earn those votes, fighting all the way through the tape.”
His confirmation, though, remains far from certain. Republicans will have a narrow three-seat majority in the Senate next year.
Trump’s team, ABC News reported, was focused on figuring out where the nine female Republican senators stand on Hegseth. So far, one key female Republican on the Armed Services Committee — Joni Ernst — has notably not yet backed Hegseth. Two female senators — Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Katie Britt of Alabama — have endorsed Hegseth.
Several Republican senators have said they’d like to see background checks for Trump’s Cabinet picks.
Multiple sources, including a Trump transition official, have confirmed to ABC News that Hegseth will be getting a background check from the FBI. Hegseth informed the transition team earlier this week he’d be willing to get the check.
Hegseth’s attorney Tim Parlatore said Thursday on CNN that Hegseth’s name had been submitted to the FBI and that the FBI gave them the needed forms on Wednesday.
“I am expecting that the background check is going to take a lot of the false stories that have been circulated in the media and it’s going to put them completely to bed. I think that the surprise you’re going to find is how false all the reporting has been,” Parlatore said.
