A bunch of health stories and a new beat

Autism, childbirth, and FDA layoffs

I’ve been at TIME for six years now (!), and have written about fun things like tampon shortages, philanthropists taking over a town, and problems in the solar industry, but have finally decided it’s time for a little change. Rather than covering economics and consumer issues exclusively, I’m going to focus on the consumer side of healthcare. So bring me your bananas medical bills, your strange stories of doctors being weird, your annals of unnecessary medical technology, because I’ll write about it all!

You may have noticed I was shifting into healthcare with my stories on IUDs being forced on poor women and why maternity care is underpaid, but I’ve made it official now, transitioning to TIME’s powerhouse of a health team.

So far, I’ve looked a lot at what the Trump Administration is doing to health as it guts HHS and other departments. That’s what my most recent story is about. It looks at how, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vows to find a “cause” for autism, his agency and others in the federal government are slashing funding for autism research and programs that support autistic children and that fund doctoral students hoping to help children with autism.

Trump Administration Cuts Autism Funding As It Pledges To Find a Cause

https://time.com/7279068/trump-administration-autism-research-cuts/

Some of the details in this story are truly maddening, like how generations of doctoral students have been funded by the Department of Education to both research autism and learn how to help autistic students in the classroom, and that grant was abruptly canceled April 2. Another two programs that helped autistic children transition from high school to college or work, and one that funded autistic college students, were also cut.

I also looked at cuts to HHS are changing newborn testing in the U.S., putting newborn screening programs in jeopardy and potentially creating bigger disparities between states in what rare diseases children are tested for. I’m very interested in how health services and interventions available to you vary by state, and was surprised to talk to some parents whose children died from rare diseases because their states didn’t test for them, while neighboring states did.

How Having a Baby is Changing Under Trump

Another recent health story looked at how cuts to the FDA are making food safety experts worried because the U.S. is already very bad at food safety. (For example, there was a rule that made farmers test water to make sure they weren’t spraying manure on vegetables and we just decided to make it ‘honor system.’)

Food Safety Was Slipping in the U.S. Then Came Massive Layoffs

I also wrote a fun story about people who hated health insurance so much that they stopped paying for it. Instead, they joined a company called CrowdHealth that has them pay cash for medical bills—when you pay cash, you get a steep discount—and then ask others in the network to help them out with the bill. This is a model that’s been used by religious health-sharing ministries for decades, but is now being pioneered in the health tech space by CrowdHealth.

They Hated Health Insurance. So They Started Paying For Each Other’s Care

Stay tuned here or on X or BlueSky for more health stories, or you can always go to my TIME author page: https://time.com/author/alana-semuels/

And please bring me your healthcare ideas!

BFAT, Books to Fall Asleep To

I know Kevin Starr is the unofficial (maybe even official?) biographer of California, but I just listened to a fantastic history of California that was really detailed and engaging. It’s by John Mack Faragher and it’s called California. It’s always interesting to hear the stories of the people (okay men) that San Francisco streets are named after, the early interactions with native people, and how few oranges sailors ate and how much scurvy they all had.