HHS Secretary Kennedy Revives Preventive Services Panel With New Members
核心洞察
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed eight new members to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (搜索), the panel that determines which preventive services insurers must cover.
Five appointees are medical specialists in fields including gastroenterology, oncology and cardiology, a departure from the panel's traditional generalist clinician makeup.
The 16-person task force had not met in more than a year after Kennedy canceled its meetings, and its supporting agency lost roughly 200 staff.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight new members to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (搜索) on Thursday, filling a panel that has been largely defunct since the current administration took power. The 16-person independent body has not met in more than a year after Kennedy canceled its meetings, and the most recent news on the USPSTF website dates to August 2025. Eight members appointed during the Biden administration remain on the panel.
Five of the new appointees are medical specialists, including gastroenterology, oncology, cardiology and diagnostic radiology, a shift from the panel's past composition of generalist clinicians. The slate also includes a health finance professor. In an opinion piece published by Fox News, Kennedy defended the specialist appointments, writing that preventive medicine encompasses cancer detection, cardiovascular disease (搜索), medical imaging, pediatric care, diagnostic technologies and chronic disease. The American Medical Association said the makeup represents a significant departure from the task force's traditional membership and that a strong primary care voice must remain central to its work.
The task force's recommendations determine which preventive services health insurers must cover, including no-cost screening colonoscopies and drugs that prevent HIV (搜索). Before the pause, the group had signaled work on recommendations for breast cancer (搜索) genetic screening, pediatric autism disorder (搜索) screening and cervical cancer (搜索) screening. Its supporting agency, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (搜索), fell from nearly 300 employees in 2024 to 84 in 2026 following U.S. DOGE Service-driven cuts. Kennedy fired vice chairs John Wong and Esa Davis in letters dated May 11, and his authority over the panel traces to the 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management.
The new members are Seth Corey, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Cleveland Clinic who serves as chair; Patrick Hunter, a pediatrician at Pensacola Pediatrics; Ronald Karlsberg, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA; Venkatesh Murthy, a professor of preventive cardiology at the University of Michigan; Stephen Parente, a health finance professor at the University of Minnesota; Goldie Stands-Over-Bull, a family medicine physician at Texas Native Health; Louis Wilson, a gastroenterologist at Wichita Falls Gastroenterology Associates; and Dennis Wulfeck, a diagnostic radiologist at RadPartners MBB Radiology.