Selina Simmons-Duffin

Adults up to age 64 will have to regularly prove that they are working or that they qualify for an exemption.

The deadline for the policy to be implemented is next January, but Nebraska is getting started early.

The state says it's not adding staff or funding to implement the requirement, which will apply to roughly 70,000 Nebraskans.

Health advocates call the rules paperwork requirements, since most people on Medicaid who can work already do.

Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.

The tie-breaking vote for Secretary Kennedy's confirmation last year was cast by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the chair of the Senate HELP Committee, which oversees HHS, and a member of the Finance Committee.

Cassidy is a physician who supports vaccines.

He only agreed to support the nomination after Kennedy promised not to change vaccine policy.

and to appear regularly before the Help Committee.

The opposite has happened.

Kennedy has made dramatic, unprecedented changes to vaccine policy and hasn't testified before the Help Committee since September.

Since then, Cassidy has issued statements critical of the Secretary's moves on vaccines, but now he has the opportunity to question him publicly.

Selina Simmons-Duffin, NPR News, Washington.

According to the analysis of provisional birth certificate data, nearly 126,000 babies were born to mothers aged 15 to 19 last year.

The birth rate for that group declined 7 percent from the year before.

The report's lead author, Brady Hamilton, calls that drop extraordinary.

He's a statistician demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics.

Last year, the teen birth rate was 11.7 births per 1,000 female teens.

That's down from a rate of 61.8 in the early 90s.

Selina Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.