Millions of Medicare enrollees who buy stand-alone prescription drug plans will see their average monthly premiums rise by 50% in 2027, a new analysis finds. But enrollees can avoid the average increase — from $34 a month to $51 — by switching to lower-cost plans during the program’s open enrollment period, which runs through Dec. 7. Robert Travis Scott of Abingdon, Virginia…
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A patient recently showed up to my emergency department after he’d been doing home repairs for several days, including lifting heavy equipment and moving boxes. When he started feeling a recurring tightness in his chest, he entered his symptoms into a large language model, which told him he likely strained a muscle. He rested and waited for the pain to go away, but it never did.
When he finally came to my emergency room a few days later, his EKG and lab tests showed that he had suffered a serious heart attack. Because of the long delay, part of his heart muscle was permanently damaged, and he now has chronic heart failure.
Because of the long delay, part of his heart muscle was permanently damaged, and he now has chronic heart failure.
At a Make America Healthy Again summit Tuesday that was co-sponsored by OpenAI and Anthropic, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasted that artificial intelligence would soon give Americans a second opinion “much better informed than any doctor in the country.”
He’s wrong to say that, and my position doesn’t arise from any philosophical opposition to AI technology. To the contrary, not only am I an emergency room physician, but I am also U.S. chief medical officer at Keikku, a clinical AI company. I use AI in some capacity every shift. However, the patient who consulted a chatbot and suffered irreversible heart muscle damage that a cardiologist could have prevented is an example of why human expertise matters now — and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future.
The AI chatbot a person uses at home cannot conduct
These Texas advocates call themselves “lionesses” for a reason: They say backing down is not in their nature. In 2022, a small group of formerly incarcerated women formed the nonprofit Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance to empower communities to challenge harmful practices within the criminal legal system. Since that time, they have put a spotlight on what they argue are dangerous…
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Last month, Donald Trump issued an indefensible broadside designed to upend the childhood vaccine schedule. The accompanying White House event was a misinformation extravaganza, which included the president falsely claiming that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines can possibly be “quite lethal” when combined into a single shot.
Asked if he had any evidence whatsoever to back that up, the Republican replied, “No, what I’ve heard is that there are, there are some people that say it is that way.” (He didn’t say who might be among “some people.”)
A day later, Trump kept this going, again falsely arguing, “MMR, if you give them separately, the M, the M and the R, it’s fine. When you put them together, they’re sort of like a nuclear weapon, according to some.” (He again failed to explain who’s included among these unidentified “some.”)
The president’s comments were preposterous nonsense, which he managed to make worse late last week.
Trump: “We’re also going to be demanding the drug companies, with respect to a certain situation — the autism — that they make their doses in 20% shots. So you have shot 1, shot 2, shot 3, shot 4, shot 5 … I think you’re gonna see a massive reduction in autism”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-18T20:04:37.916Z
At an unrelated Oval Office event, Trump said his administration would be “demanding” even more changes to the childhood immunization schedule, which he said were intended to address autism, which even he ought to understand by now has nothing to do with vaccines.
According to the president’s vision, it’s not enough to separate the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines needlessly; he also wants to divide
Five years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Amish country, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to address a large anti-vaccination crowd. It was 2021 and the COVID pandemic was still raging; the anti-vaxxer spoke to a crowd of 1,500 people, mocked vaccinations in general, and told them that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A. Already primed by their religious beliefs to…
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As this week got underway, a variety of Republican officials continued to focus their election-season messaging on, of all things, Covid-19 vaccines. For example, Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, who serves as chair of the House GOP Conference, told Fox Business that 82% of the women “who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage.”
The congresswoman, as part of the same interview, condemned Dr. Anthony Fauci for “straight-up lying to the American people,” which was, among other things, ironic given that she was peddling demonstrably false claims to a national television audience.
Unfortunately, McClain was not alone. A day later, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has a deeply unfortunate track record when it comes to using social media to promote misinformation, posted five online items in less than four hours, each of which claimed that the Covid vaccine had an 82% miscarriage rate.
The senator later took down the relevant tweets, one of which equated Covid vaccines with “chemical abortion drugs,” though an untold number of his millions of online followers saw, and perhaps even believed, his initial claims.
Those claims, however, were dangerously wrong. The New York Times published a fact-check report the day after the Texas Republican’s deceptive tweets, explaining in detail that Covid vaccines are not linked to miscarriage. It specifically referred to the 82% statistic as “misinformation.” From the article:
The people who have spread this statistic calculated it from a table in a preliminary C.D.C. analysis published in April 2021. (The authors of the analysis did not make the misleading calculation.) The calculation only included women who were vaccinated in the first or