Cassidy backs CDC nominee; four plead guilty in $2.2M AI-powered Medicaid fraud; obesity treatment works in primary care — Morning Medical Update

Cassidy backs CDC nominee

The Senate health chairman moved after the agency revised its vaccines and autism webpage.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, M.D., the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate health committee and is believed to hold the deciding committee vote, said July 23 he will support Erica Schwartz, M.D., President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The New York Times reported. Cassidy, who had declined for days to say how he would vote, tied his decision to changes on the CDC's autism and vaccines webpage, which he called a sign of good faith. The page still says the statement that vaccines do not cause autism is not an evidence-based claim, a position adopted after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the agency to drop its longstanding stance, but it now adds that scientists "have not identified the root causes" of the disorder. There is no scientific evidence that vaccines cause autism.

Schwartz, a deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration, testified last week in support of vaccine safety and efficacy while facing questions from Cassidy about whether she would stand up to Kennedy. The committee vote slipped to this week after Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska missed the session. Ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would vote against her, saying he is not convinced she could resist pressure from Kennedy. The CDC has had a permanent director for one month of Trump's second term and is being run on an acting basis by National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D.

Four plead guilty in $2.2M Minnesota Medicaid fraud

Prosecutors said the men used ChatGPT to fabricate records when insurers asked for documentation.

Four Twin Cities men pleaded guilty to wire fraud for defrauding Minnesota's Housing Stabilization Services program of about $2.2 million, the Department of Justice said. Moktar Hassan Aden, 31, Mustafa Dayib Ali, 29, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, 26, and Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, 27, set up Brilliant Minds Services LLC in St. Paul, Minnesota, enrolled it as a Medicaid provider and signed up roughly 350 people with disabilities, then billed thousands of claims for services that were never provided or were inflated for higher reimbursement from April 2022 to April 2025. When insurers asked for supporting documentation, the men used ChatGPT to fabricate records. Prosecutors said the case reflects a growing trend of fraudsters using artificial intelligence (AI) to conceal schemes targeting health care programs. Each faces up to 20 years in prison. Sentencing dates have not been set.

Childhood obesity treatment works in primary care

Nearly half the children in a 730-patient trial hit a clinically meaningful weight reduction.

Family-based behavioral treatment for childhood obesity, long limited to specialty programs, works in the pediatrician's office, according to a randomized trial published in JAMA Pediatrics. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of Rochester Medical Center, the LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the American Academy of Pediatrics enrolled 730 children ages 6 to 15 with obesity at 41 primary care practices in four states from 2019 to 2024. Patients received enhanced standard of care alone or with up to 33 sessions with a trained interventionist, usually a registered dietitian or behavioral health provider, attended with a parent.

Both groups started about 77% above a healthy weight. After a year, the family-based group was at about 70%, compared with about 74% for enhanced care. At 18 months, about 42% of the family-based group had reached a weight reduction associated with better heart and metabolic health, roughly 1.5 times the rate in the comparison group. Families attended about 17 sessions on average, and more than 75% of sessions were delivered by telehealth with comparable results. About half of participating families were covered by Medicaid, and the treatment was billable to Medicaid and private insurance. Denise Wilfley, Ph.D., a principal investigator who helped develop the treatment, said the study's central question was whether it could be integrated into the settings where families already receive care.