Health Execs Showered Trump With Millions; CDC Data Altered; Healthcare Bankruptcies

Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.

Health Execs Showered Trump With Millions

Healthcare executives paid millions to attend at least six dinners with President Trump in the 2 months before he took office, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

The meetings involved industry leaders from pharmaceuticals, insurance, and health systems, the article stated. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and reportedly complained about pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) during one dinner.

Trump also met with PBM and insurance company CEOs, including UnitedHealth’s Andrew Witty, CVS’s David Joyner, and Cigna’s David Cordani. These companies gave Trump at least $1 million each, according to WSJ.

Overall, Trump held more than 50 meetings with executives at Mar-a-Lago after the November election, “highlighting the extent to which U.S. corporations have showered Trump with money hoping to avoid his public wrath and shape his thinking on esoteric issues where he has shown less policy interest,” the article stated.

The leader of one New York City trade group described it as “a proactive effort to not be a target.”

CDC Data Altered

STAT is tracking changes to data.cdc.gov, a CDC website that provides public access to its data, revealing that at least 135 of those datasets had been removed.

While many have since been restored, they often returned with changes that bring them in line with Trump administration orders to scrub certain language from federal documents.

For example, when a heart disease mortality dataset was added back, its more than 59,000 references to the term “gender” were replaced with the term “sex,” STAT reported. The same thing happened to an Alzheimer’s dataset.

Indeed, STAT found “at least 67 items that appear to have been removed specifically because they contain the word ‘gender,’ regardless of the context in which it was used,” the article stated.

STAT began downloading all available files from data.cdc.gov near the end of January, and now makes those archives available publicly. Its analysis also found that while two key datasets were pulled but then restored to the CDC’s main website — the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System — neither was restored to data.cdc.gov.

Both sites contain data on now-sensitive topics like gender identity and sexual orientation, STAT stated.

Private Equity Involved in Healthcare’s Biggest Bankruptcies

Private equity was involved in seven of eight of the largest healthcare bankruptcies in 2024, according to a report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).

These are bankruptcies involving liabilities over $500 million, the group said. When looking at all healthcare bankruptcies last year, private equity was involved in 21% of them, according to the report.

The findings are part of a new tracker created by PESP that acts as a running list of all U.S. bankruptcies connected to private equity. It found that 11% of all corporate bankruptcies in the U.S. in 2024 had ties to private equity, and when that figure was narrowed to the largest bankruptcies (again, those involving liabilities of over $500 million), it rose to 56%.

Valentina Dabos, lead author of the tracker, said in a statement that the consequences of bankruptcies in healthcare “can be life-altering. Bankruptcy-driven closures or cost-cutting measures leave patients without reliable access to care, disrupting treatment plans, and jeopardizing lives.”

PESP will be tracking bankruptcies through 2025, noting that healthcare has already seen a major bankruptcy this year. On Jan. 11, Prospect Medical Holdings filed for bankruptcy, with debts of more than $400 million. Former private equity owner Leonard Green & Partners took hundreds of millions of dollars in debt-funded dividends throughout its ownership in the company, according to PESP.

Please enable JavaScript to view the

comments powered by Disqus.