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The Food and Drug Administration Monday unveiled the details of a new policy designed to make it easier and quicker for patients with very rare diseases to get cutting-edge treatments.

The new guidance would enable the agency to approve new treatments for rare diseases based on evidence for a "plausible mechanism" for how the treatment would work. The policy aims to speed the use of state-of-the-art technologies like gene-editing to create treatments tailored to individual patients suffering from diseases that are so rare that it would be difficult if not impossible to conduct a traditional study first.

"For decades families heard the same thing: There are not enough patients. The approval will take too long. You just have to wait for the science to catch up with your child, " Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a briefing announcing the proposed new policy. "That ends today. Individualized medicine is no longer theoretical."

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As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

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NewYork-Presbyterian nurses have ratified a new three-year contract, ending the largest and longest walkout by nurses in New York City history, the nurses’ union announced on Saturday evening.

The agreement was backed by 93% of the nurses voting, according to the New York State Nurses Association.

The 4,200 nurses in the NewYork-Presbyterian system will begin returning to work next week, the union said.

The NewYork-Presbyterian nurses were the last holdouts in the 41-day strike, which began on Jan. 12 and saw nearly 15,000 nurses at the hospital, along with Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Morningside and West and Montefiore Medical Center walk off the job and form picket lines on snow-covered sidewalks across the city. Their prior agreements ended Dec. 31.

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Since September, 16 major drug companies have inked deals with the Trump administration to lower prices. But in January — the time of year when pharmaceutical companies typically roll out price hikes — all 16 companies released higher list prices for some of their drugs.

The agreements, nicknamed "most favored nation" deals, were aimed at getting lower prices for American consumers and pushing other wealthy countries to pay higher prices for new drugs.

But drug companies, including the 16 that made deals, raised the prices of 872 brand-name drugs in the first two weeks of 2026, according to a new analysis by 46brooklyn, a drug price research firm.The drugs with price hikes included medicines to treat cancer, heart failure and Type 2 diabetes. The price of some COVID shots also went up.

"The real truth serum is what's happening in the marketplace after those deals occur," says Antonio Ciaccia, CEO of 46brooklyn, a nonprofit that tracks the list prices of prescription medications. "January is prime time for list price changes on brand-name drugs. So in examining where we are today, we're pretty much in line with the last few years."

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Dr. Kade Goepferd watched the Trump administration's moves on Thursday to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth with "a mix of sadness and frustration."

Goepferd, who is the founder of Children's Minnesota Gender Health Program, says that for the medical community, nothing has changed about the evidence supporting gender-affirming care that could justify the government's actions.

"There's a massive propaganda and disinformation campaign that is selectively targeting this small population of already vulnerable kids and their families," Goepferd says.

Federal health officials said many times at Thursday's announcement that their actions were driven by science and evidence, not politics or ideology. They frequently praised a report published by the Department of Health and Human Services in November. It concluded that clinicians who provide medical care to help youth transition have failed their patients and emphasized the benefits of psychotherapy as an alternative.

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With subsidies for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance set to expire, Americans who rely on them will probably switch to plans with lower monthly premiums and high deductibles or decide not to purchase any coverage, which will have a serious and damaging impact on the entire sector, according to healthcare policy experts.

The average amount ACA plan enrollees pay annually for premiums is estimated to more than double, from an average of $888 this year to $1,904 in 2026, according to a KFF analysis.

That will then have economic downstream effects, including for rural hospitals and people who have employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the experts.

With “a significant portion of people dropping their marketplace coverage and being uninsured, it doesn’t just impact them, it impacts everyone”, said Emma Wager, a senior policy analyst for KFF’s program on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

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