Health
Federal Health Workers Make Up Less Than 1% of Agency Spending
A few days ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, embarked on a media tour to defend his decision to lay off thousands of his department’s workers.
He announced a plan last week to cut 10,000 jobs, in addition to the estimated 10,000 jobs cut through retirements and buyouts in the early weeks of the Trump administration.
Mr. Kennedy had called the Health and Human Services Department “the biggest agency in government, twice the size of the Pentagon, $1.9 trillion dollars,” during an interview with NewsNation. He went on to suggest that the department was doing little to improve the health of Americans, “with all the money that was being thrown at it, with all the personnel that were being brought in.”
H.H.S. does spend more than the Department of Defense, which has a discretionary budget of about $850 billion. But according to several budget experts, the overwhelming majority of the H.H.S. department’s $1.8 trillion budget is not spent on its staff.
Spending on personnel at the federal health agencies accounts for a small fraction of its budget — less than 1 percent, according to three budget experts. That includes the staff of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and others.
The overwhelming majority of the money is spent through Medicare, for the health care of people older than 65, or through Medicaid, for people with low incomes. Those funds filter out to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, dialysis centers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and Medicare Advantage private insurance plans.
Melinda Buntin, professor of health policy and economics at Johns Hopkins University, said the $17.6 billion in costs for H.H.S. employees made up less than 1 percent of the department’s budget, and has risen in line with overall spending.
“I think that most people would be surprised by what a small share of Health and Human Services spending is for personnel, both their wages and compensation and benefits,” she said, noting that it made sense in the context of the agency’s spending on care.
Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said Mr. Kennedy’s framing was “incredibly misleading.”
“It would leave someone with a super wrong understanding of what is going on really,” Mr. Kogan said. “The only story of what’s going on in H.H.S. is that we have a huge increase in the elderly population.”
An H.H.S. spokesman said the work force reductions are meant to cut $1.8 billion a year in federal spending, and that the amount is significant.
The Administration for Children and Families, another agency within H.H.S., also spends billions of dollars on services to the public. It operates Head Start programs, foster care, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, formerly known as welfare, and care homes for unaccompanied minors from other countries.
Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, made his own calculation, also concluding that H.H.S. staff costs appeared to be shy of 1 percent of the department’s spending. The figure could be slightly higher, he said, given the number of health agency workers with advanced degrees.
So far, the Trump administration has talked about fraud in the federal government repeatedly — though not the type that’s long been a target in Congress. Lawmakers have repeatedly raised the idea of reeling in Medicare Advantage insurance plans, which were estimated to overcharge Medicare by tens of billions of dollars a year.
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An existing drug for HIV could double as a preventative therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers.
NRTIs (nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors) are antivirals that are approved to treat HIV infection, but scientists from UVA Health at the University of Virginia found that patients taking them were less likely to develop the common form of dementia.
There was a roughly 10% annual reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in people taking NRTIs for every year of use of these drugs, according to lead study author Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, M.D., professor of ophthalmology at UVA, who spoke to Fox News Digital about the finding.
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After coming across another mechanism that could potentially prevent Alzheimer’s, the researchers analyzed 24 years of health insurance data, including 270,000 patients.
The Alzheimer’s risk reduction among patients taking NRTIs was “significant and substantial,” the researchers wrote in the findings, which were published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
An existing drug for HIV could double as a preventative therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers. (iStock)
Now, the UVA team is calling for clinical trials of NRTIs to gauge their use for treating Alzheimer’s.
Approximately 10 million people worldwide are diagnosed with the common dementia each year.
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“This level of protection could translate into 60,000 fewer cases of Alzheimer’s disease every year in our country, and up to one million fewer cases every year around the world,” Ambati told Fox News Digital.
In addition to keeping the HIV virus from replicating, NRTIs also prevent the activation of inflammasomes, proteins that are involved in the development of Alzheimer’s.
“This level of protection could translate into 60,000 fewer cases of Alzheimer’s disease every year in our country, and up to one million fewer cases every year around the world,” the lead study author told Fox News Digital. (iStock)
“We had previously shown that NRTIs blocked the inflammasome, so it wasn’t altogether surprising that people taking NRTIs might be protecting against this disease,” Ambati noted.
“However, the degree of protection against Alzheimer’s was quite surprising.”
“It is very possible that this drug may be useful in Alzheimer’s prevention.”
Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and Fox News senior medical analyst, was not involved in the study but commented on the findings.
“Inflammasomes are intracellular protein complexes that trigger the release of inflammatory cytokines,” he told Fox News Digital. “HIV uses these inflammasomes to fight the immune system.”
Repurposing existing drugs can offer a “promising pathway,” according to an expert from the Alzheimer’s Association. (iStock)
“These chemicals are likely responsible for making Alzheimer’s worse, or for accelerating the process of cognitive decline based on neuro-inflammation.”
Rebecca Edelmeyer, Ph.D., vice president of Scientific Engagement at the Alzheimer’s Association in Chicago, also reviewed the study’s findings, which she called “interesting.”
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“Further research and specifically designed clinical trials are needed to fully understand the potential future use of NRTIs to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, but the study highlights the potential role drug repurposing can play in advancing new Alzheimer’s treatments,” she told Fox News Digital.
Repurposing existing drugs can offer a “promising pathway,” according to Edelmayer. As existing drugs’ safety and side effects are often already known, the studies can be quicker and less expensive than with new treatments, she added.
Potential limitations and next steps
The research team acknowledged some limitations of the study.
“Like all retrospective health insurance database studies, the findings of our study are an association between this class of drugs and the development of Alzheimer’s disease,” Ambati told Fox News Digital.
“They don’t necessarily provide a cause and effect — however, the fact that we found this link in multiple databases increases confidence in this result.”
Siegel agreed that the new study is observational, but noted that it takes place over many years.
“It also shows that only this particular HIV drug — inflammasome — dramatically decreases the risk of Alzheimer’s, not the other HIV drugs, including protease inhibitors,” the doctor said.
Nearly seven million people in the U.S. are currently living with Alzheimer’s, and the number is expected to reach 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. (iStock)
“I think this is convincing preliminary evidence that warrants further study,” Siegel added. “It is very possible that this drug may be useful in Alzheimer’s prevention, given the increasing evidence implicating immune dysregulation and inflammation as causes of AD.”
Looking ahead, the researchers have developed a new drug called K9. Like NRTIs, the novel medication blocks inflammasomes, but is “safer and more effective,” according to Ambati.
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“The fact that the new drug reversed memory loss and improved spatial learning in mice further increases confidence in our findings,” he told Fox News Digital.
The UVA team now plans to test K9 in clinical trials for Azheimer’s.
The study author cautioned that people should not take NRTIs for Alzheimer’s prevention unless they are in the context of a clinical trial. (iStock)
Ambati noted that people should not take NRTIs for Alzheimer’s prevention unless they are in the context of a clinical trial.
“If interested, they should be on the lookout for such trials for themselves or loved ones who may be affected,” he advised.
For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health
Nearly seven million people in the U.S. are currently living with Alzheimer’s, and the number is expected to reach 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The UVA study was funded in part by the UVA Strategic Investment Fund and the National Institutes of Health.
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