19 charged in Pennsylvania home care fraud; New Mexico measles outbreak cost $5.4 million; cat training helps kids and cats alike — Morning Medical Update

19 charged in $4M Pennsylvania home care fraud

The Justice Department also expanded its Northeast health care fraud strike force to Philadelphia.

The Justice Department charged 19 defendants, including owners and employees of home care companies and Medicaid recipients, in alleged schemes involving more than $4 million in claims to Medicare and Medicaid, the department's National Fraud Enforcement Division announced Tuesday. Prosecutors allege aides billed for home health services they could not have provided, including one who was incarcerated at the time, one who was hospitalized and one who was driving for a ride-share and food delivery service.

In a case brought by the Pennsylvania attorney general, a purported aide allegedly claimed to care for as many as seven recipients at once and billed more than 24 hours in a single day on more than 1,100 occasions, costing Medicaid over $1.2 million. The announcement accompanied an expansion of the division's Northeast Health Care Fraud Strike Force to Philadelphia, in partnership with the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent.

New Mexico measles outbreak cost $5.4 million

Vaccination-related activities made up the largest share of the public health response, federal and state researchers found.

New Mexico's 2025 measles outbreak cost society an estimated $5.4 million, or $53,522 per confirmed case, according to a cost analysis published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New Mexico Department of Health tallied response costs, direct medical costs and lost productivity across 100 confirmed cases, 205 exposed contacts and 133 public health responders. The outbreak ran from February through September 2025 and included seven hospitalizations and one death.

Public health response accounted for roughly $3.2 million, with vaccination-related activities making up about $2.1 million of that, and direct medical costs totaled $290,148. The 133 responders logged 22,399 hours, an expense ultimately borne by taxpayers, CIDRAP reported. The authors cautioned that costs may be overestimated or underestimated because of incomplete reporting and that insurance data were used rather than actual medical costs. The U.S. has confirmed more than 2,300 measles cases so far in 2026, the highest annual total in 35 years, Reuters reported.

Move over, therapy dogs

A cat-training program improved behavior in children with developmental disabilities, and made the cats more social too.

Children with developmental disabilities who trained their family cats took on more responsibility for the animals' care, and the cats became more social, according to a small controlled study published in Animals. Oregon State University researchers assigned 36 children ages 8 to 17 to either six 45-minute training sessions with weekly homework or to a control group. The share of children in the training group who reported teaching their cats new behaviors rose from 44% to 94%.

Six cats moved from insecure to secure attachment classifications, and children in the training group reported taking on more cat care responsibility while the control group reported less. "People often underestimate what cats can contribute to human-animal interventions," said Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State who studies human-animal interactions. The sample was small and much of the outcome data came from participant surveys, so the findings are preliminary. Oregon State has a news release.