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Prachi Sanghavi, a health-policy researcher at the University of Chicago, studies whether ambulances that provide medical care at the site of the emergency are better than basic ones that simply rush a patient to the hospital. (They are not.) She also studies whether the federal government’s rating system for nursing home quality is any good. (That’s a no, too). Her research helps Americans evaluate the country’s health-care practices. Unfortunately her work is now at risk.
Dr Sanghavi’s research uses data provided by the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal health-care agency that administers America’s public-health insurance. CMS announced plans in February to change its data-sharing practices. The proposal raises the fees for data and makes access less convenient. Nearly 400 researchers, including Dr Sanghavi, from over 75 institutions across America have signed a letter in protest. They claim that the new restrictions will jeopardise ground-breaking research.
America does not have a national health-records system, so the CMS numbers are the best data available. Over a third of Americans are covered by CMS, and over 1bn medical claims a year are processed through the agency. This makes it a trove for researchers studying anything from health-care privatisation to the causes of the opioid epidemic.
The agency says it is changing the rules over concerns for data security. On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. CMS had a data breach just last year. Sensitive personal information, such as social-security numbers and mailing addresses, was compromised for over 600,000 people. Last month Change Healthcare, a health-care payment company bought by UnitedHealth Group, a large private insurer, was also targeted.
Under the current model of data-sharing, researchers can receive physical copies of the CMS data. They are then responsible for keeping the data secure, explains Alice Burns, a researcher at KFF, a health-policy think-tank. Unlike the CMS data that were hacked, the data for researchers do not contain individual names and social-security numbers.
However, they do contain sensitive information such as health diagnoses and a person’s age, race and zip code. In some instances a determined hacker could be able to identify an individual, but it is highly unlikely, says David Maimon of Georgia State University, who studies cyber-security. The proposed policy requires researchers to switch instead to a virtual centre hosted by CMS.
This is about balancing risk and benefit, says Haywood Talcove of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a firm that sells fraud-prevention services. In this case the calculus seems lopsided. Since CMS has been hacked before, hoarding the data there doesn’t make it secure.
The researchers say that the benefits of the current model far outweigh the security risks. The protesting scientists claim that less-established researchers and those at poorer academic institutions could lose access. “Why wouldn’t we invite the best public-health experts in the world to look at the same data that we have?” asks Paul Mango, a former chief of staff at CMS under the Trump administration.
All is not lost. The changes have yet to go into effect, and the agency is accepting feedback from researchers until May 15th. But for now, the researchers would like to keep the status quo. Since the vast majority of older adults are on Medicare, these numbers give “a beautiful longitudinal view of a person’s life”, says Dr Sanghavi. It’s hard to put a price on that. ■
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BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.
“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.
“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.
Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.
The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.
On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.
Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
THESE DAYS are dire and dour for Democrats. But April 1st brought a brief reprieve—and not because of jokes. That was the day that the most expensive judicial election in American history in the battleground state of Wisconsin ended in a decisive triumph for the left-leaning candidate. It had drawn $100m of spending, including an estimated $25m from Elon Musk who also, perhaps unhelpfully, personally campaigned in the state. The same day, two special elections in Florida for vacant congressional seats took place in safe Republican districts. Although they did not win, Democrats improved their margins by 17 and 20 percentage points compared with the general elections held just five months ago. Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, staged a one-man protest on the floor of the Senate, excoriating President Donald Trump’s administration for 25 hours straight—a stunt, to be sure, but one that demonstrated proof of life in a party that supporters worried had gone limp.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Markets have turned their sights on how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration arrived at the figures behind the sweeping tariffs on U.S. imports declared Wednesday, which sent global financial markets tumbling and sparked concerns worldwide.
Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”
An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.
Chart of reciprocal tariffs.
Courtesy: Donald Trump via Truth Social
Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S. CNBC could not independently verify the U.S. administration’s data on these duties.
It didn’t take long for market observers to try and reverse engineer the formula — toconfusing results.Many, including journalist and author James Surowiecki, said the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries.
Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach to calculate tariffs and would imply the U.S. would have only looked at the trade deficit in goods and ignored trade in services.
“The formula is about trade imbalances with the U.S. rather than reciprocal tariffs in the sense of tariff level or non-tariff level distortions. This makes it very difficult for Asian, particularly the poorer Asian countries, to meet US demand to reduce tariffs in the short-term as the benchmark is buying more American goods than they export to the U.S., ” according to Trinh Nguyen, senior economist of emerging Asia at Natixis.
“Given that U.S. goods are much more expensive, and the purchasing power is lower for countries targeted with the highest levels of tariffs, such option is not optimal. Vietnam, for example, stands out in having the 4th largest trade surplus with the U.S., and has already lowered tariffs versus the U.S. ahead of tariff announcement without any reprieve,” Nguyen said.
The U.S. also appeared to have applied a 10% levy for regions where it is running a trade surplus.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative laid out its approach on its website, which appeared somewhat similar to what cyber sleuths had already figured out, barring a few differences.
The U.S.T.R. also included estimates for the elasticity of imports to import prices—in other words, how sensitive demand for foreign goods is to prices—and the passthrough of higher tariffs into higher prices of imported goods.
“While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero. If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the website reads.
This screenshot of the U.S.T.R. webpage shows the methodology and formula that was used in greater detail:
A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
Some analysts acknowledged that the U.S. government’s methodology could give it more wiggle room to reach an agreement.
“All I can say is that the opaqueness surrounding the tariff numbers may add some flexibility in making deals, but it could come at a cost to US credibility,” according to Rob Subbaraman, head of global macro research at Nomura.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this piece.