“No amount of good is worth how terrible this feels.” This is probably not what House Speaker Johnson said when the Big Beautiful Bill finally got enough votes to pass last week. It is what an award-winning chef, Carmy, says in The Bear, a Hulu television series about Carmy returning to his hometown of Chicago to run his brother’s Italian beef sandwich shop. Season 4 just started and it is SO GOOD. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I explain how the chaos and the drama of the show is a helpful illustration of what just happened last week.
Other news from last week you may have missed due to the legislative chaos:
- There are two new AI leaders at HHS: Former White House AI advisor and NIH data scientist Travis Hoppe announced he is the CDC’s Acting Chief AI Officer in a LinkedIn post. Anindita (Annie) Saha will lead AI policy at the FDA’s drug center while continuing work at the agency’s Digital Health Center of Excellence.
- On July 2, the DOJ and HHS launched a False Claims Act Working Group, which will investigate fraud and improper payments in federal health programs. It will prioritize, among other things, the manipulation of EHRs to drive inappropriate utilization of Medicare services.
- The U.S. Senate HELP Committee announced that it is holding a hearing on health data privacy and cybersecurity. As of this writing, witnesses have not yet been identified.
“This is a delicate f***ing ecosystem.” Many of us health policy people could have told Congress that before they passed the 870-page Big Beautiful Bill that messes with America’s health insurance ecosystem. But this is a line delivered by Carmy’s “cousin” in The Bear television series, as he expresses his trepidation for changes that the very sophisticated chef brings to a decidedly unsophisticated restaurant. It is true that our federal government could use some sophisticated adjustments. This bill, however, does not include any sophisticated health technology provisions (though the bill is full of sophisticated national defense-related technology programs). In an earlier, House-passed version, the legislation included a provision that would have prohibited states from passing or enforcing already-enacted laws that regulate artificial intelligence (AI) models for 10 years. After receiving pushback from state attorneys general and others, the Senate took it out of the bill. So now AI developers and users must comply with a myriad of state AI laws, which is interesting because AI models aren’t developed for use in one state – indeed, AI models don’t know or care what state they’re in. While we are waiting for a federal AI framework and watching some Members of Congress congratulate themselves for passing this bill, I am thinking about the advice The Bear’s Carmy got from another chef (played by the great Olivia Coleman): “You have no idea what you’re doing and therefore you’re invincible.”
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