“I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life working my a** off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up, OK?” You may be thinking this was part of HHS Secretary Kennedy’s testimony at the Senate Finance Committee hearing yesterday, but it was actually Melanie Griffith in the movie Working Girl. Weirdly, these two have a couple of things in common: both are Medicare eligible and have used Botox, which is part of the policy news of the week explored below in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Some other interesting health IT-related news from this week:
- As remote patient monitoring (RPM) spending grows, the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is recommending increased monitoring of specific metrics to maximize the benefits of RPM while minimizing opportunities for fraud, waste, and abuse.
- HHS directed ASTP/ONC and the HHS OIG to enforce penalties associated with information blocking rule violations.
- The HIPAA Journal updated its comprehensive report on healthcare data breach statistics, based on data obtained from HHS Office of Civil Rights up to July 31, 2025.
“Whaddya need speech class for, ya talk fine!” That line is from the brilliantly funny Joan Cusack in Working Girl, but speech class is also not recommended for Secretary Kennedy’s spasmodic dysphonia condition that causes voice distortions—even when he is testifying before Congress. Botox injections (the brand name for botulinum toxin injections) are the most common treatment for that neurological disorder to prevent muscle spasms. Botox is also used for cosmetic purposes, which Melanie Griffith—the star of Working Girl—publicly admitted she overused. Interestingly, just a day before Secretary Kennedy’s fiery Senate hearing, his agency announced that CMS would start a five-year prior authorization pilot program for certain cosmetic services (including Botox) that are provided in ambulatory surgical centers in 10 states. This is a re-introduction of a Biden-era idea to prevent Medicare from paying for non-medically necessary services. The announcement follows another CMS prior authorization demonstration project that received a lot of attention in a congressional hearing this week: the WISeR model would use AI tools to review claims for services that also may not be necessary for Medicare beneficiaries. That’s a lot of get-permission-first processes for an agency that isn’t asking permission to forego traditional protocols. It reminds me of another line from Working Girl: “You can bend the rules plenty once you get to the top, but not while you’re trying to get there.”
