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The Medicaid portion of the House GOP’s massive domestic policy bill would result in 10.3 million people losing Medicaid coverage by 2034 and 7.6 million people going uninsured, according to a partial (CBO) Congressional Budget Office estimate. Republicans released the estimates just ahead of the start of Tuesday’s markup of the Energy and Commerce portion of the party-line legislation, which is key to enacting President Trump’s agenda. The uninsured numbers include 1.4 million people without verified citizenship who would be removed from the program and 4.8 million people who would lose coverage because of work requirements, the committee said. (Weixel, 5/13)

Police arrested more than two dozen people after activists protesting cuts to Medicaid interrupted the House Energy and Commerce Committee as it began consideration of legislation to change the program. Minutes into the markup, activists — including several in wheelchairs — chanted “no cuts to Medicaid,” persisting despite a warning from Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) that those making outbursts could be arrested. (Brooks, 5/13)

Melannie Bachman, 39, of Charleston, South Carolina, is among the patients closely watching the sweeping Republican bill to overhaul Medicaid that’s been brought to the House. She was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer — an aggressive and difficult-to-treat form of the disease — in 2021. She said she had to apply for Medicaid multiple times and wasn’t approved until four months later, which meant she had to pay for multiple screenings while waiting. Bachman no longer qualifies for Medicaid because she's cancer-free. (Lovelace Jr. and Kapur, 5/14)

House Republicans plan to slash $715 billion from state Medicaid programs over the next decade, but their proposal spares special Medicaid payments hospitals increasingly use to pad their bottom lines. (Bannow and Herman, 5/13)

Republicans in Congress are moving with rapid speed to advance President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks, spending cuts and beefed-up border security funding as leaders work to enact many of his campaign promises. House committees have been laboring for months to draft the legislation, which Republicans have labeled “THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,’’ a nod to Trump himself. Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing to approve the package and send it to the Senate by Memorial Day. Democrats say they will fight what House party leader Hakeem Jeffries calls “this extreme and toxic bill.” (Freking and Mascaro, 5/14)

With House Republicans warring over Medicaid, Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie is playing peacemaker — telling moderates the party isn’t going to gut the safety-net program while also assuring fiscal hawks that Republicans will slash hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s a delicate balancing act for the mild-mannered Kentucky Republican, who’s been largely successful in preventing an all-out, intraconference revolt. But he’s about to face his biggest leadership test yet Tuesday as his panel meets to advance its contributions to President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that go further than what some centrists would like — and not far enough to satisfy every hard-liner. (Leonard and Lee Hill, 5/13)

A small but powerful nugget is buried in the text of the House budget reconciliation bill released this week: a clause that would ban state and local governments from enforcing any laws on AI, even ones that have already been put into effect. (Trang, 5/13)

When the state of Georgia handed Deloitte Consulting a $10.7 million marketing contract last July to promote the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program, the initiative was in need of serious PR. At the time, a year after the program’s rollout, less than 2% of those eligible for Georgia Pathways to Coverage had enrolled, well short of state targets. (Coker, 5/13)

The American Hospital Association recommends that the Health and Human Services Department eliminate or ease a slew of regulations on billing, quality reporting, the workforce and other areas in a letter sent to regulators. President Donald Trump has made deregulation a centerpiece of his expansive overhaul of the federal government, including at HHS. The AHA wrote the department Monday offering more than 100 suggestions for policies to scrap in response to an April solicitation from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which also generated responses from other healthcare interests. (Early, 5/13)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is rolling out a broad new agenda for its innovation center that could lead to requirements that participants in value-based care programs to take on downside risk, the agency announced Tuesday. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation plan prioritizes shared risk and prospective payments, streamlined quality measurement, artificial intelligence and other technologies, and Medicare Advantage payment models, Director Abe Sutton said in an interview Friday. (Early, 5/13)

Physicians should expect to see more Medicare alternative payment models that involve downside risk, Abe Sutton, JD, director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), said Tuesday. "We've found at the innovation center that when we have 'upside-only' payment models, there's not necessarily an incentive ... for participants to change how they engage in care delivery," Sutton said at a conference in Washington sponsored by the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy. (Frieden, 5/13)

Medicare's innovation center plans to put more emphasis on empowering consumers to make personal choices in health care, and on promoting healthier lifestyles to prevent diseases, officials wrote in a strategy memo released Tuesday. (Goldman, 5/14)