Actor Noah Wyle stars in the medical drama hit show “The Pitt.” On Thursday, Wyle and his mother, who has been a nurse for four decades, will be in Washington D.C. speaking with lawmakers about policy changes that could help health care workers. The two speak to “CBS Mornings” about support for medical workers.

Marketing executive Mathew Evins lived with chronic back pain for eight agonizing years. He described it as “excruciating.” By 2024, he had trouble just walking. He had exhausted non-invasive treatment, and his doctors agreed he needed surgery.

His insurance company had other ideas: “They went back to my surgeon and said, ‘Your patient needs another six weeks of physical therapy,'” Evins said.

So, Evins reluctantly complied, for six more pain-filled weeks. And even after that, his insurance denied coverage again … and again. “Emotionally, it’s like a roller coaster,” he said. “Physically, I just wanted relief.”

But no relief came. Seven months went by. His condition deteriorated. “Everybody I saw said, ‘This damage could become worse and/or permanent, if the surgery isn’t done as soon as possible,'” he said.

Twenty-seven million Americans don’t even have health insurance, so Evins had considered himself lucky … until he actually needed it. He agrees insurance companies should have a voice in coverage, “but they shouldn’t have the definitive voice.”

Most Americans agree; 73 percent say healthcare delays and denials are a major problem.

“It’s not the case that the providers are the angels and the insurance companies are the devils,” said author Katherine Hempstead. “I mean, we could do another show about hospital pricing. But I think that consumers feel like, ‘Hey, doctors are actually doing something. They’re trying to do something that they say will help me. And here is this intermediary coming in and saying that they can’t do it.'”

Hempstead, senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, has seen this play out over and over again: “I just heard a story yesterday about someone who was really benefiting from taking Botox for migraines and, all of a sudden, denied.”

Jeff Witten says 20% of insurance claims – one out of five – are denied, which is a major reason why he and Ben Howard co-founded a company called Sheer Health.  “Our goal is for people to never have to deal with their health insurance again,” said Howard.

Patients can just take a picture of their bill and upload it to Sheer Health. “We’ll handle everything,” said Howard. And he means everything. Sheer Health will fight every insurance battle on behalf of every client, either for $40 a month, or for a percentage if they get money back.

“Sunday Morning” reached out for comment from AHIP, a national trade organization for health insurance companies. The group responded in part: “…health plans, providers and drugmakers share a responsibility to make high-quality care … affordable … and easier to navigate…” 

But Mathew Evins struggled in vain to get coverage for his back surgery, until he found Sheer Health.  Sheer reviewed every last word of his policy and authorization requests, submitted an expedited appeal to his insurance company, and worked with his doctor just to understand the authorization issue.

“Sheer got everything resolved,” Evins said. “And I finally had my surgery in mid-October.”

The outcome? “I’m doing great.”

Katharine Hempstead thinks Sheer Health’s success speaks to our health care system’s failure: “I think it’s sad that we need that. It’s treating a symptom, you know, which is often a good business idea, but it doesn’t make me feel like, ‘Okay, that’s all we needed.'”

She agreed it amounts to buying insurance for your insurance.

What we clearly need, with or without Sheer Health, is a system that works. According to Evins, “It’s people’s lives that these insurance companies hold in the balance. Take that seriously. You’re not their medical practitioner. Don’t act like it.”

    
For more info:

     
Story produced by Amiel Weisfogel. Editor: George Pozderec. 

In:

One-third of Americans are cutting back on everyday living expenses — even skipping meals — and stretching their prescription medications so they can afford health care, according to new polling from the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America.

About 82 million Americans across low-, middle- and high-income brackets say they are spending less on utilities, driving less to save on gas and taking other steps to afford health care, according to the research center. They also report borrowing money and cutting back on utilities to afford medical care, the study said.

The findings were released as Americans are facing sharply higher gasoline and energy costs due to the Iran war, compounding a longstanding affordability crunch. 

Millions of people are also coping with higher health insurance costs after lawmakers allowed Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire on Dec. 31.

Budget cutting was even more common among Americans without health insurance, with more than 60% saying they made at least one financial sacrifice, such as borrowing money, to pay for health care, according to the research. 

Nearly one in 10 adults, or roughly 24 million people, say health costs have forced them to postpone their retirements. Americans are also making other sacrifices, such as delaying a job change, putting off buying a new home or postponing growing their family.

Edited by

Aimee Picchi

In:

She jetted home to Maryland and took several days off to care for him in his rural community in eastern Washington state and to set him up with a motorized lift chair that would help him stand up.

Fortunately for Whitman, who serves as chief public policy officer at AARP, her employer offers paid time off for caregiving for elderly family members, a benefit which experts say is growing in popularity as the U.S. population ages.

“Instead of having to take all my vacation, I could take several days of caregiving leave while I was out there,” Whitman said. “That’s been a huge godsend for a lot of my staff.”

More than 63 million Americans provide care for an adult family member, and most of them have regular paid jobs as well, according to AARP, formerly known as American Association of Retired Persons. But caretaking responsibilities can make holding down a full-time job challenging, especially for people caring for older adults and raising children at the same time.

The average caregiver spends about six hours a day caring for aging loved ones, according to Meghan Shea, vice president at New York Life Group Benefit Solutions, which provides life insurance and helps administer leaves of absence for employers.

“The challenge is that leave isn’t unlimited,” Shea said. “The average caregiving role spans about six years. So really, it’s a life change for these employees, and they need to figure out how to balance responsibilities in a new way, and that’s very stressful.”

In the U.S., the Family and Medical Leave Act provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year to care for immediate family members. The law requires federal, state and local agencies, and private employers with 50 or more workers, to maintain health benefits and job protections for those taking leave, according to the Department of Labor.

In addition to the law not applying to all workplaces, it does not account for people who can’t afford to take unpaid leave.

More than a dozen states mandate some form of paid leave for caregiving, whether for a newborn child or a family member with a serious illness. The state laws generally entitle workers to a portion of their normal paychecks, although for how long and other benefit details vary.

“Many people have to quit their jobs in order to care for somebody, and that not only affects their income but their retirement benefits, and then there’s a loss of productivity for the employer who may have lost a great person,” Whitman said. “Finding ways to support family caregivers is a huge employment issue right now.”

To meet growing demand, some companies and organizations have started offering a variety of caregiving benefits, including flexible scheduling and help finding resources. Here are some ways to determine if a workplace is supportive of caregivers.

Questions to ask

Shea recommends asking the following questions during job interviews, if paid leave and other caregiving benefits are important to you.

How much caregiving leave am I entitled to?

Do I have to take it all at one time?

Can I take it in multiple increments?

Is it paid? Is it unpaid?

What leave benefits am I entitled to at a federal and a state level?

What do you offer employees in addition to that?

Caregiving leave

For any caretaker, time is a valuable — yet scarce — asset. Employers that provide paid leave for caregiving typically offer two to six weeks, and some provide as much as 12 weeks, said Meghan Pistritto, a vice president in Prudential Financial’s group insurance division.

“Caregiving is a reality for a significant portion of the workforce,” Pistritto said. “The positive news is that employers are stepping up and they’re supporting their teams here. We’re seeing a lot of growth both in the employer-provided as well as in state-mandated paid leave programs that are showing up across the U.S.”

AARP gives eligible employees up to two weeks of paid time off per calendar year to care for family members or domestic partners with serious health conditions or who are at least 50 years old and need help with activities such as meal preparation, appointments and managing finances.

More than time off

Flexible scheduling and the ability to work remotely can be very helpful, especially when those benefits are actively promoted and normalized, Pistritto said. Managers can openly encourage conversations about caregiving needs and proactively check on employee well-being, making it safe for people to share their situations without fear of stigma, she added.

“Comprehensive paid leave is just the starting point. Genuine caregiver-friendly employers also provide practical resources such as access to counseling, backup care services, and caregiver support groups,” Pistritto said.

Some employers offer access to “care concierges” who specialize in helping employees find health care providers, understand state and federally mandated benefits, and to navigate complex systems such as Medicare.

Whitman tapped such a benefit offered by AARP to obtain a list of caregivers in her father’s area who could help him at home in her absence. “Just having that list was a really important step,” she said. The concierge can also help workers figure out where to find durable medical equipment or do home modifications, Whitman added.

Turning to technology

If time off work isn’t feasible, a growing number of electronic devices are available to help caregivers keep an eye on loved ones while managing their paid jobs.

Susan Hammond lives across the street from her mother, who has dementia, in rural Vermont. Hammond spends four to five hours a day helping her mother prepare meals, take medication and shower, while also running War Legacies Project, a nonprofit organization that works to address environmental and health consequences from wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

For the hours when she is working or sleeping, Hammond set up cameras and motion detectors in her mother’s house that alert her on her watch or phone if the front door opens. Her mother sometimes meanders outside, believing she’s in the wrong house.

“The concern really is wandering. And she has said to me, ‘Why am I here? I’ve got to go home.’ At times from the camera, I can see she’s trying to get out and leave the house,” Hammond said.

Her job requires traveling within the U.S. and Asia, and when she’s away, she monitors her mother from afar while her siblings help with daily caregiving. Her mother once had a health issue while Hammond was away. When emergency medical technicians arrived to help, the monitoring software allowed Hammond to talk with her mother, to provide reassurance, and the medical staff, to answer questions.

“I can always know where she is just by looking at my watch,” Hammond said. “Because we can monitor the cameras and monitor the alarms, I know she’s safe.”

___

AP Business Writer Dee-Anne Durbin contributed to this report.

For Providence CEO Erik Wexler, who faces staff shortages, rising costs and reduced Medicaid payments in 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics spread across seven states with different regulatory environments, AI is perhaps less ubiquitous but equally powerful. The reaction to ambient technology that acts on insights gleaned from doctor-patient conversations? “This is life-changing technology,” Wexler told me. “When a physician says that, you feel like you’ve discovered plutonium.”

While many Americans may fear the impact of AI on their jobs, many welcome the prospect of it lowering their average $17,000 tab for health care, which is expected to account for almost 19% of U.S. GDP this year.

Americans’ struggle with affordability and access to health care are two persistent problems U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Suzanne P. Clark cited in her 2026 State of American Business remarks yesterday in an otherwise upbeat speech. She drew comparisons between this 250^th anniversary year and the last time America had a big birthday in 1976. Along with fond memories of waving a little flag in the Englewood, Ohio bicentennial parade, she recalled a dour mood shaped by 5.7% inflation, 7.7% unemployment, soaring energy costs, rising crime, stagnating productivity and a “ballooning regulatory state”—not to mention fear of nuclear annihilation amid the Cold War.

Fast forward to today, she said, and there’s been a threefold increase in GDP, a homegrown energy revolution, a 40% rise in median household income and of course several waves of transformative technologies. The lesson for Clark? “Despite all of our challenges, we live in an era of abundance and advancement,” she said. “America is very good at getting better.”

In the AI age, the question for business leaders is how to accelerate adoption and transformation while keeping costs in check. 2026 may be the year where the focus shifts to outcomes. As Jeff DiLullo, chief region leader of Philips North America, advised health systems leaders at our dinner: “AI either has to increase access to care, increase the quality and the outcomes, or reduce staff burden. And if it can’t do those things, don’t do it.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

Questions for the next Fed chair

The DOJ’s criminal probe into Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has delayed the search for his successor by raising questions about the independence of the next chair and whether they’ll win Senate confirmation. Two Republican Senators have vowed to withhold any vote until the investigation is resolved. One person who will “absolutely, positively” not take the job is JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, an often-rumored candidate. What about running the Treasury? “I would take the call,” he said in a new interview. 

Ashley St. Clair sues xAI

The conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who had a child with Elon Musk, has sued his xAI firm in New York, seeking a restraining order to keep the chatbot Grok from undressing images of her. xAI has not commented on the filing, but has sued St. Clair in Texas for allegedly violating its terms with her lawsuit. 

Trump targets power plants

The Trump administration is reportedly considering a plan to have tech companies bid on building new power plants in an effort to lower electricity prices for average Americans, who are starting to push back against data centers. The president has praised Microsoft for announcing that it will pay higher utility bills for its U.S. data centers. 

Gov. Newsom comes out against billionaire’s tax

California Governor Gavin Newsom has joined a list of business leaders in opposing a billionaire tax for the state that will be voted on in November. He describes it as “bad business,” creating a split in the Democratic Party between him and New York City Mayor Zohran Momdani’s “tax the rich” sentiment.

Oracle struggles to bring employees to new HQ

Oracle is struggling to bring employees to its “world headquarters” in Nashville despite investing over a billion dollars in the office and offering various amenities. Most employees are reportedly hesitant to move simply because of salary ceilings in the state.

Tesla’s self-driving subscription model draws criticism

Tesla customers are speaking out on social media after CEO Elon Musk announced that the company’s self-driving technology will only be available through a monthly subscription after Feb. 14. The technology is currently available for a flat $8,000 fee, or $99 a month. “You will own nothing and be happy,” one X user posted.

The markets

S&P 500 futures were up 0.28% this morning. The last session closed up 0.26%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.08% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up o.02% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.32%. China’s CSI 300 was up o.41%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.90%. India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.11%. Bitcoin was at $95K.

Around the watercooler

Exclusive: Former OpenAI policy chief creates nonprofit institute, calls for independent safety audits of frontier AI models by Jeremy Kahn

‘They’re going to have to think and act a lot more like hotels’: The new rules of office space now that the ‘genie is out of the bottle on hybrid’ by Jake Angelo

Worried about AI taking your job? New Anthropic research shows it’s not that simple by Sharon Goldman

Singapore tries to give its flagging stock market a kickstart with a link to the NASDAQ, allowing firms to easily list in both places by Angelica Ang

CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.

Traci Hurley says watching her husband battle cancer in late 2021 was harrowing. “It was heartbreaking, and it was awful,” she said. “I lived in fear every day.”

A battle made worse, she says, because so many of the skirmishes were with their insurance company. “No family should have to go through having to fight to get treatment recommended by their physician covered, while fighting for their lives,” she said.

Millions of Americans say they are struggling to get medical care: either unable to pay sky-high deductibles, or, like Dan Hurley, denied coverage for tests and treatment by health insurance companies. Not only were both the Hurleys doctors; Dan, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, was also skilled in cutting through insurance red tape for his patients. 

“And yet, we still ran into issues a lot,” Traci said. “If we, as two physicians, had to struggle the amount that we had to struggle to get care approved, what about people who do not have medical knowledge? What’s happening to them every day?”

Dan was an avid hiker, until a nagging backache turned out to be cancer. He was diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, an ultra-rare bone tumor. To try to save his life, the tumor, along with Dan’s hip, had to be removed. Insurance only covered a portion of the costs.

Traci said, “Many of his treatments were denied. We had PET scans, we had CT scans denied. We had chemotherapy, we had radiation, we had certain medications that required prior-authorization, and were denied.”

The basis for the insurers’ denials, Traci said, was that they were “not medically indicated.”

“Make their lives as difficult as possible”

Ron Howrigon, now a consultant, spent two decades working for health insurance companies. “Health insurance companies know that five percent of their members account for 50 percent of all the costs,” he said. “So, I have this huge financial incentive to make their lives as difficult as possible.”

Howrigon says the business model is unlike other industries: “The more your customers use your product, the less money you make. Your incentive is to keep them from using your product.”

How often do insurance companies refuse to cover the cost of medical treatments? It’s hard to tell; health insurance companies are only required to report denial data for plans purchased through healthcare.gov.

A CBS News analysis of about 1.3 billion federal health insurance claims across three years shows that, in 2024, insurers denied 19% of in-network claims – about 1 in 5.

But for the biggest insurer, United Healthcare, that was a steep drop from the preceding two years, when it denied as many as one-third of its federal claims.

While it did not provide data to support it, United Healthcare says that, across all its plans, their initial denial rate is 10%. They also point out that when employers are self-insured, the plans they choose for their employees dictate coverage decisions.

“About 165 million Americans are enrolled in employer-sponsored health care plans, and 65% of them are enrolled in what’s called a self-insured plan,” United said in their statement. “The health insurance company they select provides administrative services such as handling calls from members and paying claims. But as the phrase ‘self-insured’ suggests, it’s the employer’s funds that cover claims payments. …

“Self-insured employers can design their health plans and determine what will and won’t be covered for their employees,” United continued. “It’s important to remember that your health insurer probably isn’t the one that designed it that way. Your employer did.”

“Insurance is out of control”

Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a surgeon who sees as many as 60 patients with breast cancer each week at her RedBud surgery center in Austin, Texas, said, “The insurance companies have, honestly, made it more difficult to be healthy in the United States.”

She says insurance denials actually add to costs: “I have two employees who spend almost all day navigating insurance. It seems that everywhere we turn, there’s an issue, whether it’s an insurance company saying, ‘You know, we won’t cover your surgery at that surgery center,’ or ‘We won’t pay for that medication, we want you to be on a different medication.'”

Case in point: On an early morning this past Fall, Jeannie Lee, a 40-year-old mother with breast cancer, was being prepped for a procedure – a lymphovenous bypass – that could have been done two weeks earlier during her double mastectomy, but both her and her husband’s insurance companies refused to cover the cost.

Lee is at high risk for developing a condition known as lymphedema where, Potter said, “It becomes very difficult to just use your arm. It can be painful. It’s swollen. It’s also deforming.”

Lee said, “I’m 40 years old. I have three young kids. It’s very necessary to do this procedure.”

Once Lee was able to obtain financial assistance through a new non-profit set up by Dr. Potter, she was back in surgery. “This patient is having an extra surgery, a separate general anesthetic, because her insurance company wouldn’t cover the surgery,” Potter said. “We could have done this very easily at the same time [as her mastectomy ].”

When she isn’t in surgery, Potter is often on the phone defending her treatment decisions to insurance company medical directors who, she says, often know little about her area of medicine. “Sometimes I get, you know, an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor. It was just completely absurd,” she said.

She sometimes posts her side of those conversations online.

Potter: “So, we’re speaking about lymphedema of the arm. So, this is not an area that you’re familiar with, correct?”

But a video she posted in early January 2025, she says, ended up putting her entire medical practice at risk. While she was in the operating room, Potter says she got a call from United Healthcare. That “urgent” call, she says, was to question why her patient needed an overnight stay in the hospital.

“It’s never happened before. I didn’t know what was going on, but they said it was urgent and I needed to call, and so I did,” she said. “I am operating. I’m doing the right thing for the patient. I’m going to keep her overnight. I walked out of the hospital and I just filmed myself in my unfiltered, you know, moment.”

Potter: “It’s out of control. Insurance is out of control.”

Shortly after she posted that video, she got a letter from the insurance company threatening to sue her for defamation. “I’m taking great care of patients. They’re just trying to scare me into being quiet,” Potter told us.

I asked, “And weren’t you scared?”

“I was scared,” she replied.

United Healthcare has not taken Dr. Potter to court. They declined an on-camera interview, but a company spokesperson says the call was due to an erroneous order, and a doctor would never be asked to leave surgery for a call about an insurance matter.

“It was such a gut punch”  

Miranda Yaver, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, says insurance companies know that only a small percentage of people will actually appeal claim denials.

“All of us are vulnerable to being denied,” she said. “Not all of us can weather the storms easily when it comes to appealing and overcoming these barriers.”

Yaver calls it “rationing by inconvenience.”

“A lot of people don’t know that they even can appeal,” Yaver said.

I asked, “You’re saying that it’s not really the denial that ends up keeping people from getting care, it’s that people give up? “

“Fewer than one percent of those in-network claim denials result in appeal, even though people were winning roughly half the time,” Yaver said.

Clearly, it does pay to appeal, but some patients, like Dr. Dan Hurley, fighting an aggressive cancer, run out of time. Much of his last months were spent, says his wife Traci, on the phone with insurance company personnel: “He would go line by line with them and they’d say, ‘Okay, yeah, we need to get a supervisor involved. We’ll call you back.’ And then they don’t.”

Dan’s goal, she says, was to see insurance companies held to a standard similar to doctors, making them liable for malpractice when they deny lifesaving care. “The act of signing that denial is practicing medicine,” Traci said, “the same way, if a patient came to me and I made a decision about treatment and that decision went sideways, I’m liable. That’s how it works.”

Dan Hurley died on August 3, 2023. One week later, his wife got a letter from the insurance company asking her to pay $80,000 for a round of chemotherapy that had been pre-authorized, but was suddenly retroactively denied. “It was such a gut punch to get it that day,” she said. “This is unbelievable, right? Almost laughable.”

Dan Hurley’s battle has become his widow’s. “There’s a part of me that says, ‘Oh, he would be so proud of me,’ but there’s also part of me that he’d be like, ‘Come on, chop, chop, you got this, let’s go, pick it up, don’t be sad, you know, keep going.’ Because that’s what he was like.”

     
For more info:

     
Story produced by Sari Aviv. Editor: Jason Schmidt. 

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 50,000 in December, while the unemployment rate edged down to 4.4%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But the December gain did little to change the broader picture: employers added just 584,000 jobs in all of 2025, a sharp decline from 2 million jobs in 2024. It was the weakest year for job growth outside of a recession since the early 2000s, Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, told Fortune. 

“This really caps off a year of anemic job gains,” Long said shortly after the report came out. “It’s fair to call this a hiring recession or a jobless boom.”

Markets initially reacted positively to the report but later gave up gains. The S&P 500 was flat and Nasdaq inched up slightly lower. Bond yields were little changed, suggesting investors saw the report as weak but not weak enough to force the Federal Reserve into near-term rate cuts.

Yet under the hood of a relatively stable unemployment rate, the composition of the job growth remains starkly narrow. Nearly all of last year’s net job creation came from health care and social assistance, sectors that rely heavily on government funding. According to Long, roughly 85% of all jobs added in 2025 were created by April, with little momentum afterward. 

In fact, health care alone accounted for about 405,000 of those gains, while social assistance added roughly 308,000. Together, those two sectors contributed more than the entire net increase of 584,000 jobs overall last year, meaning the rest of the economy shed jobs on balance, Long said.

Elsewhere, hiring was flat or negative across much of the economy. Blue collar jobs were heavily hit: manufacturing failed to rebound, and construction posted only marginal gains and mining. Meanwhile, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing lost jobs over the year. Federal government employment also declined sharply as the White House pushed to shrink the workforce.

“There was no manufacturing revival in 2025,” Long said. “Manufacturing was already weak, and the tariffs didn’t help. After that, you started to see other sectors getting worse too.”

White-collar hiring was no stronger. Professional and business services and the information sector both posted net job losses for the year, reflecting persistent layoffs in tech and corporate roles. 

“In many ways, 2025 was both a white-collar and a blue-collar jobs recession,” Long said.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, has remained relatively low—but that stability is increasingly misleading, economists say. The jobless rate has risen gradually from 4.0% in January to 4.4% in December, and there are now about 583,000 more unemployed people than a year ago.

In addition, long-term unemployment has climbed, and more workers are stuck in part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work.

“It’s a slowly weakening job picture,” Long said. “Whatever metric you want to focus on, that story shows up.”

Recent revisions added to the sense of fragility. The Labor Department revised October payrolls down to a loss of 173,000 jobs and November down to a gain of 56,000, confirming that hiring late in the year was weaker than initially reported.

The “jobless boom” is also being sustained by an immigration crackdown that has lowered the labor supply. By reducing the pool of available workers, the administration has effectively reduced the breakeven bar for the labor market; because there are fewer people looking for work, the unemployment rate remains low even as the private-sector engine hits stall speed.

Analysts at Jefferies were cautious to interpret the weak December payroll figure on its own, pointing to firmer signals in the household survey, which they described as “very encouraging.” They noted that employment rose by 232,000 in December while the number of unemployed fell by 279,000.

“The decline in the unemployment rate came from more of the right reasons than we anticipated,” Jefferies economist Thomas Simons wrote, adding that broader underemployment also improved.

Simons also emphasized that December jobs data are among the noisiest of the year and should not be over-interpreted.

 “There is an enormous amount of seasonal noise this month, and even more in January,” he said, noting that upcoming annual benchmark revisions could “re-contextualize the path of job growth over the course of last year.” 

That backdrop helps explain the Fed’s policy direction. Despite inflation remaining above target, the central bank has prioritized supporting the labor market. Wage growth remains relatively strong—average hourly earnings rose 3.8% over the past year—but Long said that strength is unlikely to persist.

“That was the number that surprised me,” she said. “Wage gains are still pretty strong, but I expect them to cool. Workers can feel they’ve lost bargaining power. It’s not just job seekers—people who still have jobs are frustrated too.”

Looking ahead, Long expects the Fed to pause in January, with a possible rate cut in March if hiring continues to lag. “This jobless boom is very uneasy on Main Street,” she said. “There’s justification for more cuts if this continues.”

Like many of her Democratic colleagues, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is urging Congress to act quickly to address the spiraling cost of health care for millions of Americans who could soon see huge spikes in their insurance premiums.

“Now that the [Affordable Care Act] tax credits are expiring, which the Democrats did put in place — and they set the expiration date for this year — I see a financial crisis for Americans,” Greene told “CBS Mornings” in an exclusive interview Friday. “And so on this issue, I don’t see political party lines.”

About 22 million lower- and middle-income Americans rely on the tax credits to reduce their health insurance costs when they buy policies through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. During the longest government shutdown in history, Democrats pushed Republicans to extend the subsidies as a condition for reopening the government, but the shutdown ultimately ended Wednesday without a deal to extend the tax credits. Democrats were promised, however, that a vote on the tax credits will be held next month.

But House Democrats took notice of Greene’s views on health care. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, asked by “CBS Evening News” co-anchor John Dickerson if he had found any Republican allies during the 43-day impasse, replied,”Three words — Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

“She’s been very clear that this health care crisis is not made up, it’s real, Republicans have no health care plan, and that Democrats are correct in fighting to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries continued.

And top Republicans noticed, too. Earlier this week, President Trump said of Greene after she criticized him for focusing on foreign policy, rather than high prices at home, “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie — nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”

“I haven’t lost my way — I’m for the American people only,” Greene told “CBS Mornings.” “I am America first and I make no apologies about that to anyone.” But she added that the rapidly rising health insurance costs had affected her personally. 

“As far as health insurance is concern it hurt my own family. Back in 2010, the Democrats passed Obamacare, and in 2014 when it went into effect my family’s health insurance went from $800 to over $2,400 a month, and we’ve seen the health insurance industry prices just go up and up,” Greene said.

“I see simply that the American people have been done wrong, and I want my party to produce a solution and a plan that fixes this mess once and for all,” Greene said. “And so that is what I’ve been urging here in Washington, and I really hope to see Republicans and Democrats both work together to come up with a very good solution with health care for the American people.”

Joe Walsh and

Aimee Picchi

contributed to this report.