By Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News

Larry Humphreys, a retired Federal Emergency Management Agency worker in Moultrie, Georgia, says he and his wife won’t be traveling much next year after their monthly health insurance premium payment increases more than 40%, to $938.

Humphreys, 68, feels betrayed by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. “As federal employees, we sacrificed good salaries in the private sector because we thought the benefits from government would be better now, in retirement,” he said.

As the nation’s largest employer-sponsored health insurance program, the FEHB Program covers more than 8.2 million federal government employees and retirees, and it was once celebrated as a national model for controlling costs while giving enrollees many health plan options.

But next year, average enrollee premium payments in the system are set to jump more than 12%, on top of a 13.5% hike in 2025. The two-year increase is higher than what many private employers and their workers are experiencing.

The FEHB rate hikes are similar to those for plans sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges — excluding the government subsidies most enrollees get, a major point of contention on Capitol Hill. The premiums insurers charge for Obamacare plans are rising 26% on average for 2026, following a 4% increase this year.

What’s making the latest hike in FEHB premium payments even harder to stomach for millions of federal employees is its timing: The 2026 increase was announced in October, when many federal workers were on unpaid furlough during the 43-day government shutdown.

Unlike most private employers, the FEHB Program gives its enrollees numerous health plans to choose from. That allows some people to lower their monthly premium payments by switching to plans with higher deductibles or copayments. But each year only about 5% of enrollees switch plans, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the program.

Humphreys, who has stayed with the same health plan for decades despite steadily higher prices, said it’s difficult determining which plan is best based on their health conditions. He has glaucoma and diabetes, and his wife, Julianne, has faced heart issues.

Their FEHB plan covers costs for their care not covered by Medicare, which typically pays 80% of their health bills.

“There’s a fear that if you do something and change plans and it’s wrong, you could be in a bad spot,” he said.

Open enrollment for federal employees and retirees runs through Dec. 8.

Among the factors causing premiums to increase, according to OPM, are an aging federal workforce with more chronic conditions, as well as prescription drug use, including pricey GLP-1 medications for weight loss.

About 42% of federal employees are over the age of 50, compared with 33% in the general workforce, OPM says. About 7% of federal employees are under the age of 30, compared with about 20% of workers overall.

OPM officials said the Trump administration’s policies aimed at lowering drug costs and focused on prevention of costly medical conditions will hopefully help it control premiums in the future.

“None of these initiatives of course will happen overnight – turning a $79 billion ship takes slow and steady progress,” Shane Stevens, OPM’s associate director for health care and insurance, said in a news release. “But, we are committed to improving the quality of life and quality of care for our members while also ensuring that healthcare remains accessible and affordable for those who work (or have worked) for the American people.”

OPM didn’t respond to requests for comment.

John Holahan, a health policy fellow at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, said OPM’s explanation left out a key reason for rising premiums: hospital consolidation. While the FEHB Program is a collection of health plans, in many markets — including the Washington, D.C., area — those insurers must negotiate with a handful of powerful health systems that have bought up other hospitals and doctors. That market power enables them to drive prices higher on FEHB plans, he said.

Jacqueline D. Bowens, president and CEO of the D.C. Hospital Association, said in a statement that “the costs borne by patients are not determined solely by the care they receive, but by how insurance companies choose to price, reimburse, and restrict access to that care.”

Holahan said it’s surprising that FEHB premiums are rising even faster than those of other, smaller employers. But he is not surprised federal employees don’t switch plans more often, even when it may be in their financial interest.

“It’s that people find the health care world so complicated,” he said. Holahan, a noted health economist, said he, too, finds it daunting to switch Medicare health plans.

Mike Lindquist, a scientific review officer for the National Institutes of Health, said he’s not happy with the rise in his premium payments the past two years. “It’s tough, as it’s a big expense.”

Lindquist, 43, who lives in Brunswick, Maryland, has been on the same Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan through the FEHB Program the past few years even though he evaluates his options each fall.

“By not switching, you don’t have to worry about choosing a new plan that might not take your practitioners,” he said.

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Jonathan Foley, a health consultant who worked as a senior adviser at OPM during the Biden administration, said premium increases will be a hardship for many enrollees. While the FEHB Program offers 200 health plans in total, with about 10 to 20 in each geographic market, enrollment is concentrated in just a handful of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

“This concentration reduces competition and gives outsize influence” to rate increases by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Foley said in an email.

He said the FEHB Program also faces higher costs because it requires its health plans to cover GLP-1 medications, such as Wegovy and Ozempic. Nationally, fewer than half of large employers offer this benefit, according to the Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

Another cost pressure has been more members using behavioral health benefits to treat depression and anxiety since the start of the covid pandemic, Foley said.

The Trump administration’s federal workforce reductions also have contributed to cost increases, Foley said. OPM has lost about a third of its employees in the past year, leaving fewer workers to oversee the FEHB Program and negotiate with dozens of health insurers, he said.

“The workforce reductions and the unpredictable nature of policymaking in the Trump administration has created considerable uncertainty among health insurance carriers,” Foley said. “The response of actuaries to increased uncertainty is to raise rates.”

A Government Accountability Office report this year found that recent OPM staffing vacancies led to a suspension of fraud risk assessments in the FEHB Program.

John Hatton, staff vice president for policy and programs at an advocacy group called the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said higher prices mean it’s critical for FEHB members to shop and compare plans for next year. “The program was designed to promote competition to mitigate and drive down costs,” he said.

Hatton said OPM surveys show the main reasons people don’t change plans is they are overwhelmed by their options and worried about making a mistake. Switching to a plan with even a slightly higher deductible, he said, could save people a few hundred dollars a month on premiums.

But Humphreys, the Georgia retiree, said he likes that his current plan comes with low out-of-pocket costs for him and his wife. They owed little money when his wife suffered a kidney stone infection and sepsis, which put her in the hospital for 12 days.

That reassurance will soon come at a higher cost: Their FEHB and Medicare premiums will take up more than half of his pension check next year after accounting for taxes.

“I can take a lower-premium plan, but it’s a gamble I am not willing to take,” he said.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By ALI SWENSON

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday outlined a strategy to expand its use of artificial intelligence, building on the Trump administration’s enthusiastic embrace of the rapidly advancing technology while raising questions about how health information would be protected.

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HHS billed the plan as a “first step” focused largely on making its work more efficient and coordinating AI adoption across divisions. But the 20-page document also teased some grander plans to promote AI innovation, including in the analysis of patient health data and in drug development.

“For too long, our Department has been bogged down by bureaucracy and busy-work,” Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote in an introduction to the strategy. “It is time to tear down these barriers to progress and unite in our use of technology to Make America Healthy Again.”

The new strategy signals how leaders across the Trump administration have embraced AI innovation, encouraging employees across the federal workforce to use chatbots and AI assistants for their daily tasks. As generative AI technology made significant leaps under President Joe Biden’s administration, he issued an executive order to establish guardrails for their use. But when President Donald Trump came into office, he repealed that order and his administration has sought to remove barriers to the use of AI across the federal government.

Experts said the administration’s willingness to modernize government operations presents both opportunities and risks. Some said that AI innovation within HHS demanded rigorous standards because it was dealing with sensitive data and questioned whether those would be met under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some in Kennedy’s own “Make America Health Again” movement have also voiced concerns about tech companies having access to people’s personal information.

Strategy encourages AI use across the department

HHS’s new plan calls for embracing a “try-first” culture to help staff become more productive and capable through the use of AI. Earlier this year, HHS made the popular AI model ChatGPT available to every employee in the department.

The document identifies five key pillars for its AI strategy moving forward, including creating a governance structure that manages risk, designing a suite of AI resources for use across the department, empowering employees to use AI tools, funding programs to set standards for the use of AI in research and development and incorporating AI in public health and patient care.

It says HHS divisions are already working on promoting the use of AI “to deliver personalized, context-aware health guidance to patients by securely accessing and interpreting their medical records in real time.” Some in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement have expressed concerns about the use of AI tools to analyze health data and say they aren’t comfortable with the U.S. health department working with big tech companies to access people’s personal information.

HHS previously faced criticism for pushing legal boundaries in its sharing of sensitive data when it handed over Medicaid recipients’ personal health data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Experts question how the department will ensure sensitive medical data is protected

Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert who founded a nonprofit to fight political deepfakes, said HHS’s enthusiasm for using AI in health care was worth celebrating but warned that speed shouldn’t come at the expense of safety.

“The HHS strategy lays out ambitious goals — centralized data infrastructure, rapid deployment of AI tools, and an AI-enabled workforce — but ambition brings risk when dealing with the most sensitive data Americans have: their health information,” he said.

Etzioni said the strategy’s call for “gold standard science,” risk assessments and transparency in AI development appear to be positive signs. But he said he doubted whether HHS could meet those standards under the leadership of Kennedy, who he said has often flouted rigor and scientific principles.

Darrell West, senior fellow in the Brooking Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, noted the document promises to strengthen risk management but doesn’t include detailed information about how that will be done.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions about how sensitive medical information will be handled and the way data will be shared,” he said. “There are clear safeguards in place for individual records, but not as many protections for aggregated information being analyzed by AI tools. I would like to understand how officials plan to balance the use of medical information to improve operations with privacy protections that safeguard people’s personal information.”

Still, West, said, if done carefully, “this could become a transformative example of a modernized agency that performs at a much higher level than before.”

The strategy says HHS had 271 active or planned AI implementations in the 2024 financial year, a number it projects will increase by 70% in 2025.

By GERALD IMRAY

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — For 35 years, American zoologist Laurie Marker has been collecting and storing specimens in a cheetah sperm bank in Namibia, hoping conservationists never have to use them.

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But she worries that the world’s fastest land animal might be on the brink of extinction one day and need artificial reproduction to save it.

Marker says the sperm bank at the Cheetah Conservation Fund she founded in the southern African nation is a “frozen zoo” of cheetahs she’s been building since 1990. It would be utilized in a worst-case scenario for the big cats, whose numbers have dropped alarmingly in the wild over the last 50 years.

“You don’t do anything with it unless until it’s needed,” Marker, one of the foremost experts on cheetahs, told The Associated Press from her research center near the Namibian city of Otjiwarongo. “And we never want to get to that point.”

Conservationists mark World Cheetah Day on Thursday with less than 7,000 of them left in the wild, similar numbers to the critically endangered black rhino. There are only around 33 populations of cheetahs spread out in pockets mainly across Africa, with most of those populations having less than 100 animals, Marker said.

Like so many species, the sleek cats that can run at speeds of 70 miles per hour (112 kilometers per hour) are in danger from habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict and the illegal animal trade. Their shrinking, isolated groups mean their gene pool is shrinking also as small populations continuously breed among themselves, with repercussions for their reproduction rates.

Globally, cheetah numbers in the wild have dropped by 80% in the last half-century and they’ve been pushed out of 90% of their historical range.

Scientists believe that cheetahs already narrowly escaped extinction at the end of the last ice age around 10,000-12,000 years ago, which first reduced their gene pool.

Marker said the lack of genetic diversity, along with the fact that cheetahs have 70-80% abnormal sperm, mean they might need help in the future.

“And so, a sperm bank makes perfect sense, right?” Marker said.

A common conservation tactic

Storing sperm is not unique to cheetahs in the wildlife world. It’s a tactic that conservationists have developed for other species, including elephants, rhinos, antelopes, other big cats, birds and others.

The value of animal reproductive research, Marker said, is seen in the desperate battle to save the northern white rhino from extinction.

There are just two northern white rhinos left, both females, making the species functionally extinct with no chance of reproducing naturally. Their only hope lies in artificial reproduction using northern white rhino sperm that was collected and frozen years ago.

Because both remaining northern white rhinos — a mother and daughter — can’t carry pregnancies, scientists have tried to implant northern white rhino embryos in southern white rhino surrogates. The surrogates haven’t managed to carry any of the pregnancies to term, but the conservation team has committed to keep trying to save northern white rhinos against all odds.

Other efforts around artificial reproduction have been successful, including a project that bred black-footed ferrets using artificial reproduction after they’d been reduced to a single wild population in Wyoming in the United States.

Last resort

Marker doesn’t chase down cheetahs to collect their sperm but takes samples opportunistically. In Namibia, cheetahs are mostly in danger from farmers who view them as threats to their livestock, meaning Marker’s team are called out for cats that have been injured or captured and will collect samples while treating and releasing them.

Sperm samples can also be taken from dead cheetahs. “Every cheetah is actually a unique mix of a very small number of genes. We will try to bank every animal we possibly can,” Marker said.

The samples from approximately 400 cheetahs and counting are now stored at ultralow temperatures in liquid nitrogen at the Cheetah Conservation Fund laboratory. Marker’s research does not involve any artificial insemination as breeding wild animals in captivity is not allowed in Namibia.

Should cheetahs be threatened with extinction again, the first backup would be the roughly 1,800 cats living in zoos and other captive environments. But, Marker said, cheetahs don’t breed well in captivity and the sperm bank might be, like the northern white rhinos, the last resort.

Without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance,” Marker said.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Treasury Department imposed a $7.1 million fine on a New York-based property management firm Thursday, accusing it of violating sanctions by managing luxury real estate properties for oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Gracetown Inc. had received 24 payments between April 2018 and May 2020 totaling $31,250 on behalf of a company owned by Deripaska. OFAC says it gave Gracetown notice that dealings with Deripaska were prohibited, but the firm proceeded anyway.

Justice Department filings from 2022 connect Gracetown Inc. with U.K. businessman Graham Bonham-Carter, who was arrested in October 2022 for conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska as well as for wire fraud connected to funding Deripaska’s U.S. properties and efforts to expatriate the oligarch’s artwork to New York.

A lawyer who has represented Deripaska previously didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Gracetown couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Deripaska has faced economic sanctions since 2018, when the Treasury Department accused him of acting for or on behalf of a senior Russian official and operating in the energy sector of the Russian economy. All of his assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction were blocked, and U.S. people and firms are prohibited from dealings related to Deripaska, his properties and his interest in properties.

Deripaska sued The Associated Press in 2017 over a story that March about his business dealings with Paul Manafort, a former campaign chairman for President Donald Trump. Deripaska said the AP article was inaccurate and hurt his career by falsely accusing him of criminal activity. A federal judge dismissed the defamation and libel lawsuit that October.

In 2022, Deripaska and three associates were criminally charged in New York with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and plotting to ensure his child was born in the United States.

Treasury says its Thursday enforcement action against Gracetown “highlights the importance of following OFAC-issued guidance and the significant consequences that can occur from failing to do so.”

John K. Hurley, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial Intelligence, said “we will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who enable sanctioned actors.”

Gracetown was established in 2006 to manage three luxury real estate properties in New York and Washington, D.C., that Deripaska acquired around the same time through various legal entities.