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Americans spend the most on health insurance in West Virginia and the least in Maryland, according to a WalletHub analysis published July 9.
The personal finance company compared the average premiums for a silver health insurance plan with each state’s median household income using June 2026 data from the U.S. Census Bureau and KFF. It calculated insurance costs as a percentage of median monthly household income to rank all 50 states.
The 10 states where people spend the most on health insurance, based on insurance costs as a percentage of median monthly household income:
Americans spend the most on health insurance in West Virginia and the least in Maryland, according to a WalletHub analysis published July 9.
The personal finance company compared the average premiums for a silver health insurance plan with each state’s median household income using June 2026 data from the U.S. Census Bureau and KFF. It calculated insurance costs as a percentage of median monthly household income to rank all 50 states.
The 10 states where people spend the most on health insurance, based on insurance costs as a percentage of median monthly household income:
Every baby speaks a language before they learn words. The amazing part is that it is the same language worldwide.
Before they can talk, babies use five sounds to express what they need. This discovery, made by Priscilla Dunstan, shows that newborns share a universal way of communication through sound reflexes.
Here are the five baby sounds and what they mean:
1. Neh means “I am hungry.”
This sound comes from the natural sucking reflex when babies want to feed.
2. Owh means “I am sleepy.”
It is formed when the mouth opens in a yawn, signaling tiredness and the need for rest.
3. Heh means “I am uncomfortable.”
Babies use this when something feels wrong, such as a wet diaper, tight clothes, or a temperature change.
4. Eairh means “I have gas.”
It is a deeper sound that comes from discomfort in the tummy. You might see the baby squirm or pull their knees up.
5. Eh means “I need to burp.”
A short, gentle sound that comes before small bursts of air leave the chest.
When parents learn to recognize these sounds, they begin to understand what their baby is really saying. What once felt like crying now feels like conversation.
Listening becomes the first form of love.
As usual, Medicare will cause health care costs to rise in their intenriont to decrease costs.
But there's a genuine belief that emerging technologies can improve people's health if we fundamentally change the way the system pays for care.
How to pay for Doctor AI is exactly what Medicare is experimenting with.
Driving the news: CMS'sACCESS payment model launches Sunday, with more than 150 participating health care organizations.
Medicare will pay providers based on whether patients reach specific, measurable outcomes, like lowering the blood pressure of a patient with hypertension, not on how much care they receive.
The focusis on chronic conditions that CMS says affect more than two-thirds of Medicare enrollees, including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, chronic pain, and depression.
And the low fixed payments — which translate to upfront payments as low as $7.50 per patient, per month — almost ensure that providers will make heavy use of technology and automation to reach desired outcomes.
The big picture: Moving away from paying for individual health care services has been a white whale for policymakers and the health care industry for as long as I've been covering it.
So far, there's been very limited success, and national health care spending reached $5.7 trillion in 2025.
Backing from Medicare — the nation's largest payer — will almost certainly add momentum to its use if the model is successful.
Yes, but: There are multiple ways that AI and other emerging technologies influence health care spending, and this only addresses part of the overall concern.
AI "bot wars" over payment rates and care approvals are already having an inflationary effect.
"It's very clear on the administrative side, AI is increasing spending. On the clinical side, it could go either way,"Peterson Health Technology Institute executive director Caroline Pearson told me.
2. Paying for the health bots
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The ACCESS payment ratesare much lower than the industry was expecting when the program was announced last December, whichmay have scared off some digital health companies that require intensive human labor.
"It's very clear that CMS is trying to encourage the use of very tech-heavy solutions — solutions that are leveraging tech rather than humans — and that's the only way you can succeed under this model," Pearson said.
Some of the biggest names in the digital health world are staying on the sidelines, possibly because they're designed for fee-for-service payments and can't generate enough cash flow per person.
"Right now the digital health space is a mix of companies that were built as tech-first and those that were built as human-first, tech-enabled," Pearson added, and they have "very different underlying cost structures."
What they're saying: "I think if you are delivering care in a way that's software-first with doctor supervision, you can totally make the rates work," said Brandon Ballinger, co-founder of Empirical Health, one of the ACCESS participants.
"If AI can do things that would normally take a physician a lot of time, you can deliver outcomes more efficiently," he added.
"I think you see that effect in sort of the previous generation of digital health companies who say the payment rates are too low. Implicitly, that's because they're doing stuff with human time."
Yes, but: Low reimbursement rates like these may benefit tech-heavy companies with small staffs and low marginal costs, not necessarily the ones that deliver the most value.
"What I think will be important is, as the evidence base in ACCESS improves, can they make the pricing more dynamic," Pearson said.
And all of this requires some level of trust in the care AI can provide.
"We are putting a lot of trust into AI bots replicating the judgment and trust of humans," Venrock partner Bob Kocher said.
By the numbers: Peterson Health Technology Institute has been measuring the impact of various health technologies on health spending for several years now, and the results are all over the place.
Remote patient monitoring for diabetes is estimated to increase commercial spending by around $2,000 per user each year, while gastrointestinal management services reduce spending by nearly $1,900 annually.
Other similarly ambiguous assessments underscore ACCESS's central question: whether paying for measurable outcomes, rather than digital services themselves, can produce better health at lower cost.
What we're watching: Commercial insurers have pledged to incorporate outcomes-based payments aligned with ACCESS in their coverage by the beginning of 2028.
That could extend the experiment well beyond Medicare — but without knowing whether the new arrangements are workable.
What is lacking is patient satisfaction and/or measuring accessibility. Measuring an outcome does not reflect the quality of care.
Utilization — not cost growth — continues to accelerate spending, government actuaries said. Rising prescription drug spending, including on GLP-1s, is especially acute.
U.S. healthcare spending spiked 7.3% last year to reach $5.7 trillion, driven by soaring spending on hospital services and pricey prescription drugs like GLP-1s, according to new government data.
The sharp spending growth isn’t primarily caused by increasing prices. Cost growth has been moderate. Instead, Americans are consuming more healthcare after a lag during the coronavirus pandemic, CMS actuaries said. It’s the same trend they called out in the national health expenditures report for 2024.
But the high rate of growth last year was still surprising, according to Jacqueline Fiore, an economist with the CMS’s Office of the Actuary.
“Spending growth continued to grow more rapidly for 2025 than we had expected,” Fiore said on a call with the press on Wednesday to discuss the projections, which the CMS released in the journal Health Affairs.
The forces accelerating spending, however, are no surprise. Retail prescription drug spending is forecast to grow at the fastest clip over the next decade, but especially in 2025 and 2026 due to more Americans utilizing expensive drugs for conditions like cancer, and rabid demand for GLP-1s.
Drug spending is expected to grow fastest, especially now
Average annual growth in the spending category, 2024-2034, projected
GLP-1s, or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, were created to treat diabetes, but are increasingly prescribed for other conditions, especially weight loss. One in eight Americans reports taking a GLP-1. But the medications come with a sky-high price tag — around $1,000 per month.
GLP-1s are a major contributor to the current spike in U.S. health spending, according to John Poisal, the deputy director of the National Health Statistics Group in the CMS’s Office of the Actuary.
“A big, big part of this is GLP-1s, and that is pushing growth rates up for private health insurance for sure, for Medicare for sure,” Poisal said.
Overall health spending growth will be especially high through the end of this year, after which it’s expected to moderate as a result of recent policy changes, according to the CMS. Those include controversial Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which should tamp down on spending growth in the safety-net program, while increasing the number of Americans without insurance over the next decade.
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Still, the findings highlight healthcare’s growing burden on the nation’s coffers. Last year was the third consecutive year where U.S. health spending increased faster than 7%, blowing past overall economic growth, the CMS said.
That mismatch is expected to continue over the coming years, with the sector gobbling up larger and larger slices of the U.S. gross domestic product.
National health spending is expected to swell from 18% of the GDP in 2024 to $20.6% in 2034, when it will account for a whopping $9 trillion in spending, CMS actuaries predict.
It’s a dour reminder for policymakers in Washington, who continue to equivocate on the best path forward to curb sky-high healthcare spending.
The Trump administration has largely relied on securing voluntary commitments from private healthcare companies, including insurers and drugmakers, to lower costs and remove barriers to care, a strategy that critics slam as ineffective given stakeholders’ profit motivations to retain the status quo.
Rectifying the situation has long been top of mind for patient advocates, value-based care evangelists, and budget hawks concerned that the U.S. isn’t getting bang for its buck. The U.S. spends twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy nations, but it consistently ranks last among peer countries in life expectancy, preventable deaths, maternal mortality, and other metrics.
The CMS’s new projections are likely to bring more attention to the issue, especially as lawmakers remain hyper-focused on healthcare in advance of November’s midterm elections.
American Medical Association Shares Framework to Address the Escalating Risk of Physician Deepfakes
American Medical Association Shares Framework to Address the Escalating Risk of Physician Deepfakes
Authors of this article:
Shalini Kathuria Narang, JMIR Correspondent
As AI becomes more sophisticated, new risks are emerging. In this News and Perspectives article, JMIR Correspondent Shalini Kathuria Narang reports on the American Medical Association’s response to the rising issue of physician deepfakes.
Key Takeaways:
Deepfakes created to impersonate doctors, manipulate the public, and endorse unproven treatments pose threats to patients and the broader health care system.
The American Medical Association has released a new policy framework to establish clear, enforceable protections for physicians against unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes.
Some states’ legislatures in the United States have passed laws to discipline vendors where an AI chatbot is engaged in the practice of medicine or is impersonating a human engaged in the practice of medicine.
A deepfake is a video, photo, or audio recording that seems real but has been manipulated with AI. The underlying technology can replace faces, manipulate facial expressions, and synthesize speech, depicting humans appearing to say or do something that they have never said or done.
AI-generated deepfake “doctors” impersonating physicians garner millions of views on social media, misleading the public and endorsing unproven treatments. The content typically promotes products for their creators’ financial gain while exposing the viewers to scams that erode the patient-physician relationship, undermine confidence in evidence-based care, and put the public at risk of harm.
According to the factchecking organization Full Fact, hundreds of AI-generated deepfakes of real doctors and academics to promote health products with bogus endorsements are damaging the reputations of those they impersonate and could lead to people making decisions about their health based on fake claims.
“[The] mental health space is an area of big concern, including significant privacy concerns, more with some of the general purpose chatbots claiming to help support mental health. We know many, many, many individuals and patients are using these chatbots for support that can cross the line and be dangerous, as we’ve seen suicides and bad outcomes related to the use of these chatbots in certain ways,” says Shannon Curtis, JD, Senior Director of Policy Development for the American Medical Association (AMA) Center for Digital Health and AI.
She adds that the AMA is looking for solutions to begin addressing the issue, including transparency to help users understand that they’re not actually engaging with a licensed clinician.
“We want to see a prohibition on chatbots from claiming they’re a licensed professional, or that they’re providing equivalent services as a licensed professional,” says Curtis. “We have called for more action to update our regulatory structure... A call for new, updated, appropriate regulatory oversight structures that can help provide that clarity and consistency for consumers, for physicians, for the industry, about what needs to be regulated, and what does not. And hopefully, turning that into a more appropriate, risk based regulatory system that fits where AI is, and hopefully fits where it is going.”
As AI chatbots become more sophisticated, and more harms are realized, it is likely more states will create regulations and exercise enforcements.
New AMA Policy Framework
Responding to the escalating risk of AI deepfakes, and recognizing that existing privacy, employment, and intellectual property laws do not adequately address AI deepfake risks in clinical contexts, the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI has created a policy framework to modernize physician identity protections and close legal gaps to uphold patient safety, professional integrity, and public trust.
The framework is built on 7 policy principles:
Physician identity as a protected right: A physician’s name, image, likeness, voice, and digital replicas are protected interests and should not be used beyond the scope of the clinician’s consent.
Prohibition on deceptive medical impersonation: AI-generated or altered content falsely conveying a physician’s endorsement, authorship, or medical judgment likely to mislead in a health-related decision must be prohibited.
Informed, opt-in, and revocable consent: Use of a physician’s identity in AI-generated or manipulated content requires affirmative, informed, opt-in consent.
Mandatory transparency and labeling: AI-generated or altered content depicting a physician must be clearly labeled. Patients interacting with an AI-generated health professional must be alerted before the interaction.
Shared responsibility to prevent impersonation: All participants—platforms, hospitals, health systems, and AI vendors—share responsibility for preventing identity misuse.
Enforcement and practical remedies: Processes must be in place to allow physicians to document, escalate, and address identity misuse. Institutions and platforms must facilitate investigation and escalation.
Minimizing administrative burden: Protecting physician identity should be a default that doesn’t place any undue burden on the physician.
“AI deepfakes that impersonate physicians are not just scams—they are a public health and safety crisis,” said AMA CEO John Whyte via a statement. “When bad actors exploit a doctor’s identity, they undermine patient trust and can steer people toward harmful, unproven care. We need strong action by federal and state lawmakers to protect physicians’ identities, ensure transparency, and stop this fraud. Safeguarding professional integrity is essential to preserving trust and delivering high-quality care in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.”
The new AMA framework aims to guide how the organization works with government officials and industry partners to stop AI-generated deepfakes of physicians. The AMA is eager to collaborate with lawmakers, regulators, and industry to protect patients and doctors from these risks.
“We were seeing a lot of physicians having their names stolen. It’s turning up on things like academic papers, that they had no part of. Our framework seeks to address those issues by creating a prohibition and requiring affirmative, opt-in consent from the physician in question if their name, image likeness, voice, etc, is going to be used going forward,” says Curtis.
Enforcing Guidelines
While the framework currently functions as a set of guidelines, Curtis notes that the AMA intends for it to lead to enforceable standards.
“Via the policy framework, we are seeking to create statutory or legal obligations that would prohibit a third party from creating a digital replica or a deepfake that utilizes a person’s name, image, likeness, or voice in a nonconsensual way,” she says.
She emphasizes the importance of enforcement mechanisms like statutory or regulatory requirements on the platforms that end up hosting this content and enforcement by a government agency like the Federal Trade Commission for those bad actors that are creating the deepfakes and disseminating them.
“Data privacy is a huge issue that is sometimes not well understood by individuals. We’d like to see some more action to help protect patients’ personal health information,” says Curtis. The AMA is collaborating with other groups to support the notice-and-removal obligations in the Take It Down Act and a growing coalition in support of the enactment of the NO FAKES Act.
Regulating medical practice typically falls under the jurisdiction of state medical boards in the United States. In addition to a recent landmark lawsuit filed by the Governor of Pennsylvania against Character.AI, some states’ legislatures have passed laws—for example, AB 489 in California, HB 2748 in Oregon, and the Conversational AI Safety Act in Nebraska—to discipline vendors where an AI chatbot is engaged in the practice of medicine or is impersonating a human medical professional.
Connecticut doctors caution against microwaving fidget toys due to the risk of burns
Health officials are warning about children burning themselves after microwaving gel-filled fidget toys.
A new trend circulating online is prompting children to microwave squishy, gel-filled toys, which can be found and purchased at many stores nationwide.
Doctors in Connecticut said they have seen a case or two of burns in children as a result, even causing a second-degree burn in one instance.
The doctors said these types of burns are a little different because the sticky substance inside sticks to the skin and will continue burning until you get it off. Their message — just don’t heat them up.
“Not putting things in the microwave that weren’t designed to be microwaved, that’s not the way the toy was designed to be used,” Dr. Alisa Savetamal, the medical director of The Connecticut Burn Center, said. “We have no idea how hot it gets. Be aware of these TikTok trends; they cannot be as fun as you think.”
If a child does suffer a burn from a toy like this, or even something else, the best immediate remedy is to run the skin under cool water. While some small burns can be managed at home, if you’re concerned, go to the doctor, as this type of injury can leave a scar.
