Joyce Frieden, MedPage Today. September 18, 2025 •
“We continue to fiddle in this subcommittee while Rome burns,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee, during a hearing on “Examining Policies to Enhance Seniors’ Access to Breakthrough Medical Technologiesopens in a new tab or window.” “We should be talking about the cuts to the NIH, FDA, CDC, and our nation’s other critical healthcare agencies. The committee should be examining directives from the administration that have delayed or completely halted critical work, and all of us should be talking about the impact this is having on our constituents.”
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) agreed. “Our healthcare system is being undermined right now in front of us, and American leadership and medical innovation, I believe, is on the line,” he said. “The [HHS] secretary has proposed cutting NIH funding by nearly half, and that will drag us back to 2007 levels. He’s pulling the rug from under researchers who make cancer breakthroughs possible, who run the clinical trials, and train the next generation of scientists. And those cuts are going to mean slower progress and higher costs and more Americans dying while waiting for cures that may never come.”
One of the bills discussed extensively at the hearing was the Nancy Gardner Sewell Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Actopens in a new tab or window, which would require multi-cancer early detection screening tests to be covered by Medicare relatively quickly upon FDA approval. The bipartisan measure currently has 304 co-sponsors.
Subcommittee members heard from patient advocate Roger Royse about his experience with a blood test that can detect up to 50 different kinds of cancers. “In June of 2022 I took a … multi-cancer early detection test,” Royse said. “I had no symptoms … I thought I had no risk factors, but I did have one really big one, and that’s age — I was 62 years old at the time. The test came back positive … and within a couple weeks, I was diagnosed with stage IIb pancreatic cancer. At that time, the 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer was 12%; it’s currently 13%.” However, “as it turns out, mine was caught in an early stage and was localized, meaning that my survival rate instead of 13% was 44%,” he added.
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fSubcommittee member Rep. Neal Dunn, MD (R-Fla.), a surgeon specializing in advanced prostate cancer, co-sponsored the bill. “The status quo for cancer detection in America today is simply unacceptable,” he said. “Each day, more than 1,400 Medicare beneficiaries receive the devastating news that they have advanced-stage cancers. Further, over 70% of cancer tests occur from cancer for which there is no routine screening. This demands our attention.”
“While practicing I certainly experienced firsthand the difference between early-stage and late-stage cancer diagnosis,” he said. “Simply put, when it’s caught early, patient outcomes are dramatically better. [This bill] offers us a chance to do just that.”
But not everyone at the hearing was completely on board. “As a cancer survivor, I appreciate that the goal of [this] bill is to save lives,” said Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the National Center for Health Research. “Multi-cancer early detection tests are so promising, but they’re not quite ready for prime time yet. The most recent research — in a study that just came out this week — has concluded that the existing tests are subject to bias, miss most early cancers in people who do not have symptoms, and may provide false positives to most patients. In one of these tests, test results indicating cancer was correct only 4% of the time.”
“I agree with the article on the American Cancer Society website that a test with many false positives, where many patients who are told they may have cancer do not have cancer, causes anxiety and results in additional testing that may be painful, harmful, expensive, time consuming, and stressful,” she added. “A test with many false negatives, in which patients are told that they do not have cancer when they actually do have cancer, is likely to result in patients who ignore signs and symptoms of cancer and thus delay needed treatment.”
Another bill discussed at the hearing was the Expanding Access to Diabetes Self-Management Training Act, which would allow allied health professionals to provide the self-management training, in addition to physicians. It also specifies that Medicare coverage includes an initial 10 hours of training as well as an additional 2 hours of training per year. The bill also prohibits CMS from limiting training that is deemed medically necessary.
Several subcommittee members spoke in favor of the measure, including DeGette, who added one caveat. “[This] is a great bill to help Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes take better charge of the disease,” she said. “As the co-chair of the diabetes caucus, I love this bill, but meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed to eliminate the National Diabetes Prevention Program at CDC, a program that is proven to help people with pre-diabetes avoid progression to type 2 diabetes through lifestyle changes.”
The bills must be approved by the subcommittee before moving to the full Energy & Commerce Committee for a vote; those that pass will then be sent to the full House to be voted on.
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