Marty Makary Resigns from FDA + May's Biggest Healthcare News | with Jonathan Lopez
What this video covers
An episode of Last Month in Healthcare, the Self-Funded channel’s monthly news roundtable hosted by Nathaniel and Spencer with guest Jonathan Lopez of Avant Health. Makary himself does not appear: the show opens with the news of his resignation from the FDA, then works through May 2026’s other major healthcare stories — ACA marketplace costs, a Medicare physician-pay bill, AI diagnosis, and an FDA home-care initiative.
Key points
- The hosts report that Makary resigned as FDA commissioner on May 12, following weeks of reports that the administration was planning his removal, and that he had reportedly clashed with the food, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.
- Spencer calls Makary “a great human being” who was “always focused on the truth and honesty,” but says he had worried about what being inside “the federal government machine” might do to him; he speculates a dispute over flavored vapes may have been the final straw, while the panel stresses it does not know what happened internally.
- The panel further speculates — their word for it is guesswork — that Makary kept running into lobbying money and industry stonewalling, and says it hopes he uses the departure as a springboard to keep influencing health care.
- The rest of the episode does not involve Makary. On the ACA marketplace, the hosts cite a report that the average deductible rose about 37% to a record $3,786, average enrollee premium payments rose 58% (from $113 to $178 a month), enrollment could fall from 22.3 million to about 17.5 million, and Cigna and Aetna have exited the marketplace.
- The panel discusses the House Ways & Means Committee’s unanimous passage of HR 8163, the Provider Reimbursement Stability Act, which adjusts the 1992 Medicare budget-neutrality trigger from $20 million to $54.3 million with reviews every five years; they note inflation-adjusted Medicare physician pay has fallen 33% since 2001 and warn of rural hospital closures.
- They review a Harvard study in which an AI model outperformed two physicians at emergency-department triage diagnosis (67.1% exact-or-close versus 55.3% and 50%), agreeing AI should supplement rather than replace doctors; Lopez describes an AI care-coordination platform at his own TPA.
- The final news item is the FDA’s “Ready Home” innovation challenge, inviting device makers to shift complex monitoring and treatment from hospital floors to patients’ homes to reduce readmissions — a program announced under the agency Makary had led.
- A listener segment compares Cost Plus Drugs and cash-pay pharmacies with traditional PBM-managed benefits, concluding direct-to-consumer models work well for generics but cannot fully replace PBMs for specialty and biologic drugs; a closing game compares procedure prices across World Cup host cities.