“From up here, it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack sh**.” No, Santa did not say this from the roof of the Capitol to House leadership when four Republican House members signed onto a Democratic-led petition that will force a vote on ACA premium subsidy extensions by January 2026. This is a line spoken by the great actor Bruce Willis in the best Christmas movie ever: Die Hard. That movie is a story about a Christmas Eve work party gone wrong, and it reminds me of what is happening in health policy. You can read more about it in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
As the limo driver says in the Die Hard movie, “If this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s.” There are lots of gifts from the federal government in the news:
- This is late-breaking: HHS just released a Request for Information about how the agency can accelerate the adoption and use of AI as part of clinical care, including how digital health and software regulatory frameworks should evolve to account for AI-driven tools while maintaining patient safety; how reimbursement structures can be simplified and better aligned to support the use of efficient, deflationary technologies; and how research and development investments can strengthen implementation science and best practices, especially for complex or high-acuity clinical scenarios. Comments due in February 2026!
- The Trump administration launched the U.S. Tech Force, a government-wide effort to recruit roughly 1,000 technology specialists to work in federal agencies as part of a two-year program. The White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) named several leading technology companies as initial private sector partners, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, and xAI.
- HHS also announced a new workforce initiative with its launch of a fellowship program for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to help build America’s workforce in technology and healthcare.
- The FDA plans to begin accepting de-identified, real-world evidence for certain medical device, drug, and biologics applications. The agency intends to broaden its accepted evidence to include these deidentified, larger databases to “track patient outcomes across diverse populations and real-world treatment settings, offering insights that traditional clinical trials cannot capture.”
- But: a key FDA digital health leader is leaving the agency after 15 years: Jessica Paulsen, Acting Deputy Director of the FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence.
“Twas The Night Before Christmas, And All Through The House, Not A Creature Was Stirring, Except… The Four A******* Coming In The Rear In Standard Two-By-Two Cover Formation.” This is not the version of the traditional Christmas poem that you should share with your family this holiday season, but it is a funny quip from the tech guy that alerts his fellow villain-thieves to the SWAT team coming in a scene of Die Hard. After all that we have been dealing with this year, I like this movie as evidence of how you can deal with even the most chaotic and terrible realities with a little wry humor. And, like all good movies about a crisis, it offers the viewers hope that things will get better. That is what the Consumer Technology Association’s CES event promises to do in January 2026, with all of its impressive digital health programming. CTA is a client of Maverick Health Policy, so we have direct insight into how many HHS officials will be there (everyone from HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill and FDA official Michelle Tarver to CMS leaders Chris Klomp and Amy Gleason). I am personally thrilled to be moderating a spotlight panel on “Healthcare 2035,” featuring industry leaders Nancy Brown, Eric Carreel, Caroline Pearson, and Glen Tullman. I am also looking forward to the “Health Wearables Symposium” where Dr. Ami Bhatt is going to debate Robert Jarrin about whether and how consumers should be managing their health with wearable medical devices. As we anticipate this well-produced but chaotic gathering in Las Vegas, we invite you to join us at CES on January 6-9, 2026, after what we hope will be a restful holiday. A few days into yet another Las Vegas conference, you may hear me shouting this [truncated] line from Die Hard – just so I can keep my energy up: Yippee-Ki-Yay!
