The Trump administration cut the Affordable Care Act federal insurance enrollment period in half (to 45 days), which has people scrambling to get insurance before time's up. But the administration's cutbacks to the program overall could have a disproportionate effect on minority communities, per NYT.
Why it matters: The Affordable Care Act has reduced the disparities in coverage across minority groups, even as African Americans and Hispanics throughout the country remain more likely than whites to be uninsured.
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were told by the Trump administration on Thursday that they are not allowed to use the words like "science-based," "evidence-based" and "transgender," in their budget documents, according to a CDC analyst who spoke to The Washington Post.
Why it matters: The administration wants to control what it considers controversial wording from agencies as they submit documents for the president's budget for 2019, expected to be released in February. However, the analyst told the WashPost they "could not recall a previous time when words were banned from budget documents" due to ideology.
The Trump administration, House Republicans and Democratic attorneys general have settled a lawsuit over the Affordable Care Act's cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, Bloomberg reports. The court filing doesn't give any details of the settlement, per Bloomberg, except to say that it's "conditional."
What to watch: It's hard to know the true significance of the settlement when zero details are available. But for California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, one of the Democratic attorneys general involved in the lawsuit, it represents a chance to move forward and try to preserve the subsidies on their merits.
