Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.

The NIH is also working on an agreement to secure Medicare and Medicaid data, according to Bhattacharya, who said that select outside researchers will be able to access and study, but not download, the collected data from the registry.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals under his tenure. The department’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a study to examine links between autism and vaccines, even though medical experts have long debunked any such connection.

The news that HHS is putting together a registry and accessing Americans’ private medical records raises all kinds of privacy concerns. HHS and its departments, including the NIH and CDC, have laid off thousands of employees in the past few months, possibly giving Kennedy and Bhattacharya, also an anti-vaxxer, more compliant employees to push their agenda.

Kennedy has drawn criticism from mainstream medical researchers by calling autism “preventable” and made the outlandish claim that he can find a cure for the condition by September. On top of that, his vaccination stance has led to a haphazard effort to combat a growing measles outbreak across the country, as he gives conflicting recommendations on vaccinations versus quack treatments. What kind of conclusion will such an approach yield in his autism crusade?

House Republicans are trying to drastically cut Medicaid coverage and blame it all on the states.

When Democrats expanded Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to include adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level, states that implemented the expansion received a 90 percent federal medical assistance percentage, or FMAP, from the federal government. That means the federal government covers 90 percent of the costs for those enrolled in the ACA expansion, and the state covers 10 percent.

The GOP wants to drastically decrease the federal match rate for the ACA expansion and shift more financial responsibility to states, Republican Representative Austin Scott told Fox Business Tuesday.

“What we have talked about is moving that 90 percent level of the expansion back towards the more traditional levels of 50 to approximately 80 percent instead of the 90/10,” Scott said.

“Nobody would be kicked off of Medicaid as long as the governors decided that they wanted to continue to fund the program. And so we are going to ask the states to pick up and pay,” Scott said.

The cut would be devastating to the 20 million Americans who currently rely on the expansion for health insurance coverage—many of whom reside in red states—and would leave some 40 states that have adopted the ACA expansion to fend for themselves with their limited budgets. Research shows that states with the expansion have lower uninsured rates and those covered by the program have gotten healthier and more financially stable.

According to an analysis from the health nonprofit KFF, if states had to pay a higher match-rate percentage, many would likely abandon the ACA program altogether, resulting in millions of lost coverage for low-income Americans. Twelve states currently have laws in place that would end the expansion immediately or require immediate changes if the federal match rate were to drop, KFF pointed out.

“Eliminating the enhanced FMAP for adults in the Medicaid expansion could reduce Medicaid spending by nearly one-fifth ($1.9 trillion) over a 10-year period and up to nearly a quarter of all Medicaid enrollees (20 million people) could lose coverage,” the analysis found.

Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans have long tried to slash the ACA expansion to help pay for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Now the GOP is doing everything it can to avoid taking responsibility for putting the health of millions of Americans at risk.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday revealed a proposal for the largest State Department employment overhaul “in decades,” which would eliminate and restructuring entire offices in the department. Lost in the shake-up: Rubio wants to killed the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, or CSO—the agency responsible for documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine

The CSO also focuses on “conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization activities … driving integrated, civilian-led efforts to prevent, respond to, and stabilize crises in priority states, setting conditions for long-term peace.”*

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that the CSO received $336 million between 2016 and 2023.

“Nobody is really sure what they do,” a senior State Department official told The Free Press in........

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