By now, you’ve likely heard of the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, which despite the “D,” is not an official governmental department (to become one would require an act of Congress) but rather an advisory body—one that’s wielding unprecedented power at the behest of President Donald Trump, who created it with the ostensible goal of eliminating wasteful spending throughout the federal government.

Led by Elon Musk, by some estimates the richest person on Earth, the DOGE team has been working quickly to access internal databases and slash personnel at government agencies ranging from the Federal Aviation Administration to the IRS.

Departments connected to healthcare are no exception.

DOGE has targeted Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) spending, staffing, and health research funding, raising concerns and causing confusion among industry leaders who spoke to Healthcare Brew.

“[There’s a] massive amount of uncertainty where this is heading. How do we prepare? What are the impacts going to be?” Ryan Lilly, SVP and managing director of healthcare at public relations agency MWW Health, said. “Healthcare is very interconnected…if you pull one lever here, the pressure comes out somewhere else.”

Keep reading here.—CM

As other major insurance companies drift away from Medicare Advantage (MA), Elevance is jumping into the deep end.

The insurer projects it will end 2025 with an increase of 7%–9% in MA membership, President and CEO Gail Boudreaux said in a Jan. 23 earnings call. Most of that growth already happened during open enrollment for the for-profit carrier, which had just over 2 million MA enrollees out of its 45.7 million total members as of December 2024.

The prediction comes as some other insurers want to lose MA members in 2025 amid a difficult market.

Boudreaux insisted during the earnings call that the chain wasn’t taking on more than it could handle.

“We remain confident in our ability to balance growth and margin performance in 2025,” Boudreaux said.

Keep reading here.—CC

Time to talk tariffs.

President Donald Trump appears committed to imposing sweeping tariffs on the US’s three biggest trading partners: A 10% tariff on all goods from China went into effect on Feb. 4, and a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico is “going forward,” Trump said on Monday.

In a fact sheet about the tariffs, the Trump administration cited an “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs,” including fentanyl. China is the biggest source of key ingredients used to make fentanyl, the BBC reports, and most of the drug is brought into the US across the Mexican border. However, crackdowns in China and Mexico in recent years appear to have reduced the flow, experts and officials told NPR, and a January 2025 study found that “tariff-based border control measures are ineffective against fentanyl trafficking.”

Regardless of the potential impact of tariffs on fentanyl smuggling, some healthcare experts warn that they could impact industry finances and patient care.

Hospitals. American Hospital Association President and CEO Richard Pollack, for example, sent a letter to Trump on Feb. 4, urging the administration to exclude medical devices and pharmaceuticals from tariffs.

Keep reading here.—CM

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