Congress must protect the CDC from politics

Plus: Inside an ER doctor’s barn  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Mandy Oaklander | November 14, 2026     The CDC has long existed to help protect us from infectious diseases and other health threats, writes Nikki Romanik, who previously served in the White House, in a new piece for TIME. Congress, she says, should take four steps to ensure that Americans can trust the CDC’s expertise, no matter who is in charge. TODAY’S TOPICS Inside an ER doctor’s barn How to take politics out of the CDC Boom times for psychedelic treatments         AT HOME WITH AN EXPERT The doctor will see the goats now Dr. Jerry Balentine, an emergency physician and president and CEO of the New York Institute of Technology, does a lot of dirty work on the weekends. His chores include fence repairs, squash harvesting, and delivering baby goats: 28 of them last winter. In the photo above, he’s unloading 40 bales of hay for the Nigerian Dwarf goats at Shady Farm, the homestead outside of Woodstock, N.Y., that he runs with his wife, Victoria. She turns their milk into cheese; the goats also pitch in by clearing brush. Balentine used to live in cities, where even his downtime was more intellectual than physical. Farm life gives him more balance. “You can lose yourself in a physical task while enjoying all the animals and nature around you,” he says. His advice for readers without livestock: Treat a chore as a chance to learn something. “It’s never too late to pick up a new challenge or learn new skills.” —Angela Haupt         SPONSORED BY SUPERHUMAN AI 1,000+ Claude Prompts Top Professionals Actually Use at Work Claude can be your analyst, editor, and strategist. But most professionals are using it to fix grammar. These 1,000+ Claude prompts take it from grammar tool to your most powerful AI work assistant. Sign up for Superhuman AI and get: 1,000+ ready-to-use Claude prompts to get real work done in minutes — researched, tested, and used by professionals at Google, Microsoft, and NASA Superhuman AI newsletter (4 min daily) so you keep learning new AI tools and skills to stay ahead in your career — the prompts are just the beginning Claim your free prompts         SATURDAY READ Congress must protect the CDC from politics By Dr. Nikki Romanik U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Washington, DC, on Sept. 4, 2025. Alex Wroblewski—AFP via Getty Images Democrats and Republicans in the new Congress will disagree about plenty in health policy. However, they should agree that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should be a scientific agency whose judgments hold steady no matter who occupies the White House. In January, Congress will have the chance to write that principle into law. For decades, the scientific independence of America’s public health agencies rested on a bipartisan understanding. Presidential administrations disagreed about health policy, sometimes profoundly, but their health secretaries generally respected the expertise and established processes of agencies like the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration. Earlier administrations of both parties—including those of Republican Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Democratic Secretary Xavier Becerra—faced charges of political interference, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some had merit. But I would argue that none have even approached the scale and scope of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s interventions. The safeguards that existed were administrative policies, and a new secretary can discard them. Read the full story here.         SPONSORED BY TLDR - ADVERTISE Reach over 8 million engaged tech professionals The tech decision makers you're trying to reach read TLDR every morning: 8 million tech professionals across 14 curated newsletters, with a 41%+ average open rate. Paid social can buy reach, not attention. Plaid drove 20.1x ROI from its last TLDR campaign. See TLDR vs. paid social         WHAT WE’RE READING The number of babies born in the U.S. with syphilis has climbed alarmingly, a new study shows, perhaps because of declines in federal aid for prenatal care, writes Laine Bergeson for CIDRAP. AI is changing the job hunt, but in-person networking still has an edge. Cathy Bussewitz at the AP shares tips for making meaningful connections.  The U.S. government will invest millions of dollars to research and develop psychedelic treatments, such as ibogaine, as mental health treatments, the Washington Post reports.         SPONSORED TIME100 Most Influential Companies is expanding TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2027 entries are now open. With new Exceptional Workplaces categories, the TIME100 Companies publication is expanding to recognize businesses pioneering new approaches to how people work, from flexible and hybrid work to technology integration and career development.  Because it’s no longer just what you do, but how you do it.  Submit your company.       More Newsletters from Click to sign up. THE BRIEF +FUTURE PROOF +INSIDE TIME +IN THE LOOP +WORTH YOUR TIME + Subscribe to TIME Email us: healthmatters@time.com Received this from a friend? Sign up here Connect with TIME PRIVACY POLICY   © 2026 TIME USA, LLC. All rights reserved. TIME Customer Service, P.O. Box 37508 Boone, IA 50037-0508, United States Unsubscribe

When ICU doctors are remote, who’s in charge?

Plus: Getting too little sleep makes you easier to scam  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Mandy Oaklander | November 13, 2026     More hospitals are using remote critical-care doctors as they struggle with costs. Yet patient care can suffer when intensive care units are run by a physician on a screen rather than one at the bedside. My colleague Alana Semuels investigated the teleICU trend in her new feature for TIME. “I first became interested in teleICUs after learning about the case of Conor Hylton, a dental student who died in a teleICU in 2024,” Alana told me. “I soon learned that this controversial model is proliferating across the U.S.—and that patients can’t typically tell whether the hospital they’re about to visit uses remote or in-person care at the ICU overnight.” TODAY’S TOPICS When fatigue meets fraud The trouble with teleICUs Even the thermostat can cause a fight         BIG NUMBER $7.7 billion That’s how much Americans over 60 lost to cyber crimes in 2025, according to the FBI—a 34% increase over the previous year.  Phishing—when people are prompted to give up passwords and personal information via messages that look like they’re from trusted sources—is a common tactic, and a new study, which I covered for TIME, finds that even mild sleep deprivation makes people more vulnerable to it.  Read the full story here.         SPONSORED BY HUBSPOT FOR STARTUPS Find what’s slowing your GTM. Most GTM problems aren’t one big failure. They’re one or two weak spots quietly dragging down the rest. The free GTM Audit scores your go-to-market across four dimensions, then sequences a 90-day roadmap for your stage. Drop your URL. Get your score in about 10 minutes. Get My GTM Score         A GOOD READ Inside the troubling rise of teleICUs Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Pexels, Arafat Uddin via Canva) It was the middle of the night in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Island Hospital in Anacortes, Wash., and a patient was hallucinating and in withdrawal from alcohol. The Ativan he’d been given wasn’t enough to lower his heart rate, and Joyce Selph, a longtime nurse, was called over to assist.  The protocol, she knew, was to call the attending physician and figure out next steps, but there was a problem. The hospital used a teleICU model, in which doctors staffed the ICU during the day, but only remote doctors were available overnight, via computer screen. Selph and the other nurses had tried to reach the teleICU doctor, but no one answered the calls. There was no one else to ask, and the patient was rapidly deteriorating. So Selph, who had been a nurse for more than 30 years, did what she assumed a doctor would do; she started the patient on Precedex, a medication that can help sedate a patient.  Giving medication without a doctor’s orders risked her license, Selph knew, but not doing anything risked the patient’s life. The patient survived. Selph was so disturbed by the incident that she complained to her nursing supervisors and to the hospital’s administration that having a doctor on screen rather than in person was bad policy, but they decided to keep it for financial reasons, she says. Soon after, Selph quit her job at Island Hospital, she says, because she felt that the teleICU was endangering patients’ safety and making her practice outside of her scope.   “They did it as a cost-saving measure because they were having trouble getting hospitalists to want to be there,” Selph says. “But I felt very strongly that it was unsafe.” (Island Health said, in a statement to TIME, that it launched a teleICU program in 2021 to strengthen the level of critical care available in its rural community. It has used a vendor to run the program, the spokeswoman said, and “any technical challenges that have arisen have been addressed directly with [the vendor] to ensure continued safe, effective patient care.”) More hospitals are implementing teleICUs, especially overnight, as they struggle to recruit enough providers while keeping costs low. Having a remote physician who can staff multiple hospital ICUs at once can keep ICUs open and revenue coming in, even in the midst of an ongoing shortage of doctors. Though the model was initially pitched as a way to help rural systems deploy experts at all hours, it is frequently used in more urban and suburban areas as well. One 2025 paper surveyed 574 adult ICUs across the country and found that about one third implemented some form of telemedicine.  Read the full story here.         SPONSORED BY SUPERHUMAN AI 1,000+ Claude Prompts Top Professionals Actually Use at Work Claude can be your analyst, editor, and strategist. But most professionals are using it to fix grammar. These 1,000+ Claude prompts take it from grammar tool to your most powerful AI work assistant. Sign up for Superhuman AI and get: 1,000+ ready-to-use Claude prompts to get real work done in minutes — researched, tested, and used by professionals at Google, Microsoft, and NASA Superhuman AI newsletter (4 min daily) so you keep learning new AI tools and skills to stay ahead in your career — the prompts are just the beginning Claim your free prompts         WHAT WE’RE READING Trump gutted USAID. Congo is paying the price in an Ebola epidemic, write Anthony W. Gambino and Proscovia Nabunya for TIME. Friends don’t let friends sign up for Medicare Advantage, Emma Freer writes in an opinion piece for MS NOW. Is your thermostat causing relationship drama? Anita Chaudhuri at the Guardian explores why couples fight over room temperature—and what those arguments might really be about.         SPONSORED TIME100 Most Influential Companies is expanding TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2027 entries are now open. With new Exceptional Workplaces categories, the TIME100 Companies publication is expanding to recognize businesses pioneering new approaches to how people work, from flexible and hybrid work to technology integration and career development.  Because it’s no longer just what you do, but how you do it.  Submit your company.       More Newsletters from Click to sign up. THE BRIEF +FUTURE PROOF +INSIDE TIME +IN THE LOOP +WORTH YOUR TIME + Subscribe to TIME Email us: healthmatters@time.com Received this from a friend? Sign up here Connect with TIME PRIVACY POLICY   © 2026 TIME USA, LLC. All rights reserved. TIME Customer Service, P.O. Box 37508 Boone, IA 50037-0508, United States Unsubscribe