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Trump and Republicans Are Destroying America's Health Care

America has long had the most expensive and least efficient health care system of any developed nation.   We pay much more than European nations and have millions of Americans without access to quality health care - something that will worsen as the Felon/GOP "big beautiful bill" throws millions off of Medicaid, depriving many working class Americans of coverage and putting many rural hospitals at risk of closure. Yes, in the past America had some of the most innovative and cutting edge care for those who are wealthy and/or have top insurance plans, but that too is changing as the Felon and the GOP have taken a meat clever to medical research funding, waging war on vaccines, and ended funding for many promising programs - all with an eye to funding huge tax cuts for the very wealthy. Already the life expectancy of Americans has fallen, especially compared to nations in "Old Europe" where life expectancy has increased.  This trend will likely worsen as somewhere between 11 and 16 million Americans lose access to health care and medical research stalls and medical advances are left to other nations. For a political party that has long pretended to be "pro-life" the actual record is that but for opposing abortion, the Felon/GOP policies view millions of citizens as disposable garbage to be kicked to the gutter.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the ongoing destruction:

Here’s a piece of Republican rhetoric that used to be ubiquitous but that you never hear anymore: America has the best health-care system in the world.

Republican politicians liked this line because it helped them dismiss the idea that the system needed major reform. American health care at its finest offered the most advanced treatments anywhere. Democrats wanted to expand coverage, but why mess with perfection? “Obamacare will bankrupt our country and ruin the best health-care-delivery system in the world,” then–House Speaker John Boehner said in 2012.

In Donald Trump’s second term, Republicans haven’t given up their opposition to universal coverage—far from it—but they have mostly stopped singing the praises of American health-care innovation. Indeed, they are taking a meat axe to it, slashing medical-research funding while elevating quacks and charlatans to positions of real power. The resulting synthesis is the worst of all worlds: a system that will lose its ability to develop new cures, while withholding its benefits from even more of the poor and sick.

The United States has for decades languished behind peer systems in terms of access and outcomes. We are the only OECD country that lacks universal coverage, and the failure to provide basic care to all citizens contributes to our mediocre health. But America really was among the best countries at producing cutting-edge treatments. Those of us who have access to health insurance benefit from high-level technology and a for-profit system that generates incentives for new drugs and devices.

This was never a convincing reason that the United States could not expand health-care access to citizens who couldn’t afford it. But although the trade-off was false, the Republican Party’s support for medical innovation was genuine. Even during the height of anti-spending fervor during the Obama administration, Republicans in Congress approved large funding increases for the National Institutes of Health. During his first term, Trump tried and failed to repeal Obamacare . . . . .

In the second Trump era, the party’s opposition to universal health care has, if anything, intensified. The signature legislative accomplishment of Trump’s second term thus far is a deeply unpopular budget bill that is projected to take health insurance away from 16 million Americans once fully implemented.

But now the party has turned sharply against innovation too. Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in federal support for medical research, including canceling a promising HIV-vaccine project. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for mRNA-vaccine research, one of the most promising avenues in all of medicine. The United States is going to forfeit its role as medical pioneer even as it recedes further behind every other wealthy country in access.

Kennedy has made the party’s pivot explicit. He does not boast about the American health-care system. Instead, he calls it a disaster. “We spend two to three times what other countries pay for public health, and we have the worst outcomes—and that’s not acceptable,” he said on Fox News earlier this year. Kennedy is not wrong about the bottom line; American health care is costly, and the results are poor. But he is almost completely wrong about the cause of this failure. There are many reasons for Americans’ poor health, and shutting down vaccines and medical research, while depriving millions of access to basic care, will make all of those problems far worse.

[T]he anti-science wing of the party is in control of the agenda. Two main forces have driven the shift. One is the emergence of Kennedy’s “Make America healthy again” movement, a faction of gullible skeptics that Trump has brought into his coalition. RFK Jr.’s transition from left-wing kook to right-wing kook personifies the realignment of a certain strain of modern snake-oil peddlers into the Republican tent. Although they make up only a small share of the party, their intense interest in health and medicine has given them special sway—a classic instance of a tiny special-interest group determining policy for a larger coalition.

The second force driving this policy change is the rising power of the national-conservative movement. Natcons are a wing of almost fanatically illiberal culture warriors who believe that the Republican Party must use government power to destroy its enemies. The fact that cutting university medical research will harm the United States in the long run is, for the natcons, a minor consideration when weighed against the fact that universities and government-funded labs are full of Democrats.

The combined desire of both factions to attack the scientific elite has pushed the party into a retrograde opposition to medical innovation. Making matters worse, the unabashed corruption of the second Trump administration will further weigh down the sector’s innovation potential by elevating politically connected firms over market-competitive ones.

The traditional Republican position defended cutting-edge medical innovation while denying its benefits to those too poor or sick to afford access to it. Who could have guessed that liberals would one day look back at that stance with nostalgia?

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Trump Keeps Trying to Change the Subject from Jeffrey Epstein

I have long held the view that if one is not guilty of something, then they do not try to change the subject and withhold or try to stamp out information about the story behind the accusations. The Felon and the ongoing fascination by many with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is a case in point.  Rather than prove his - doubtful in my mind - innocence by calling for a release of all information, the Felon has continued to lie and keep information locked up and, worse yet, through meetings between his former counsel and Ghislaine Maxwell  given the appearance of seeking to silence her and/or cut a deal.  In addition, the Felon has gone out of his way to distract both the public and the media from the Epstein saga.  Imposing tariffs, alleging possible planned meetings with Putin, the Texas GOP redistricting effort, renewed screams about the "Russia hoax," and calls for investigations into Obama and Hillary Clinton all appear aimed at changing the conversation and distracting attention from the reality that the Felon is acting lake someone who is guilty.  Luckily, so far the Felon's efforts are not working and in some ways are serving to keep interest in Epstein and his ties to the Felon the center of media attention.  A piece in The Atlantic by a former conservative Republican looks at the Felon's ongoing gyrations aimed at changing the subject to anything other than Epstein:

Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read this article. Don’t let it go to your head, and I won’t let it go to mine; we’re not special. He doesn’t want anyone reading anything about Jeffrey Epstein, or his own relationship with the late sex offender. And yet his intensive efforts to change the subject to something—anything—else seem to bring only more scrutiny.

This evening, CNN reported, a group of top administration officials, including the vice president, attorney general, FBI director, and White House chief of staff, had been planning to gather to discuss whether to release the recording of an interview between Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker and an Epstein associate, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Then, this afternoon, Reuters reported the meeting had been canceled, with Vice President J. D. Vance’s spokesperson denying that it had ever even been planned. Yesterday, Republicans in the House subpoenaed the Justice Department for some records related to Epstein.

As the Epstein story’s lock on headlines enters its second month, the president has employed three main tactics to try to dislodge it. First, he has ordered his supporters to stop talking about Epstein. . . . . This has been somewhat effective in certain quarters: In the days after Trump’s pleas, Fox News aired less coverage of the story.

Trying to stifle coverage this way has flaws. Much of the interest in Epstein originated in MAGA media itself, so claiming that these supporters fell for a hoax is dodgy—especially when the attorney general and the FBI director were among the foremost merchants of innuendo. And it almost goes without saying that screaming at people not to pay attention to a topic will only make them suspect there’s something to see.

Some Trump-aligned outlets may be willing to take his lead, but other media organizations are not. A press that might have treated the Epstein story as either old news or somewhat prurient just a few months ago is now eager to find new information about it.

Second, Trump has tried to change the subject, whether that’s attempting to breathe new life into his claims of a “Russia hoax,” threatening to federalize the District of Columbia, or taking a walk on the White House roof. Distraction has long been an effective tactic for Trump, but it’s also a familiar one. Trump’s efforts have produced an amusing dynamic where no matter what he does, many people treat it as an attempt to distract from Epstein, which only points back to Epstein. Trump also keeps stepping on his own ploys. When the president announced the return of the Presidential Fitness Test last week, he invited the Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor to join him. But Taylor is a sex offender, having pleaded guilty in connection with paying a 16-year-old to have sex with him. This was not only a strange invitation on its own; it was also a reminder about Trump’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of girls.

Third, the Trump administration and its GOP allies have tried to provide at least some information to the public, in the hope that it will sate appetites. Frequently, these moves have just whetted them. The Justice Department released what it said was “raw” footage from the jail where Epstein died, only for Wired to report that the tape was, in fact, spliced.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has called for “full transparency” about Epstein, yet he also adjourned the House rather than hold a vote on releasing files related to the case. The mystery of the reported planned meeting scheduled for tonight is more fuel for intrigue.

When Trump himself has spoken out recently, he has brought only more attention to the matter, to borrow his phrase. The president was evidently aware of Epstein’s sexual proclivities—“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” he told New York magazine in 2002—but has said that he didn’t know about Epstein’s criminal activity. . . . . Last week, however, Trump suggested that their clash came after Epstein “stole” employees from Mar-a-Lago—possibly including Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April. This drew understandable outrage from Giuffre’s family but also raised questions about what Trump might have known about Epstein’s trafficking.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Trump talks about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In that case, Trump’s heated denials fed a belief among many of his critics that he must be hiding something. But the juiciest rumors did not prove true; the worst of the scandal had already been made public. Perhaps the same is true of Epstein: We already know that Trump was friends with him, and we already know that Trump was seemingly aware of his interest in young women. If Trump isn’t hiding anything, though, he’s not doing a good job of convincing the public of that.

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America Will Suffer From Trump’s Assault on Facts

The old Soviet Union was notorious for pumping out false information to make it appear the regime's economic policies and programs were successful.  Just about everyone, including much of the Soviet population knew the data and statistics were cooked and edited to depict a reality that was not true.  Under the Felon's regime were are seeing a similar war on facts and objective reality. In addition the regime is seeking to defund research - ranging from climate change research and data collection to vaccine research - and and programs that produce data that shows the  regime's failings and/or display a real world that counters the regime's ideology.  With the Felon's attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the firing of its director, the Felon is sending a message to the world that economic and other data that is essential to the financial markets and would be foreign investment - which the Felon claims to want - are going to be untrue and unreliable.  The result will potentially less foreign investment and a degrading of U.S. government bonds.  Meanwhile, here at home many will find it ever more difficult to know the truth about the economy, climate change, product safety and a host of other issues. A main editorial in the New York Times looks at where Americans find themselves:

President Trump [The Felon] treats facts in the same way that he treats people: He expects them to line up in support of his goals, and if they don’t, he seeks to get rid of them.

Last week Mr. Trump was confronted by the inconvenient truth that job growth has been in a three-month slump. A more grounded president might have considered whether the data raised questions about his agenda. Mr. Trump characteristically insisted that the questions were about the data. He charged that the beige functionaries of the Bureau of Labor Statistics were engaged in a conspiracy to discredit his administration, and he fired the head of the bureau. The firing is so clearly damaging to the credibility of the federal government that it drew objections from some Senate Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s allegations against Erika McEntarfer, the longtime public servant whom he summarily fired, have no foundation in reality. . . . . Experts, including past leaders of the agency nominated by presidents from both parties, said that it was effectively impossible for the bureau’s leader to manipulate those numbers.

But there is no doubt that Mr. Trump’s actions will cast a shadow over the rest of the government that he leads. Public servants must now do their work while fearing that they may be fired merely for producing information that displeases the president [Felon]. Mr. Trump is also making it harder for the government to obtain information, as people and businesses asked to respond to questions now have reason to doubt whether the answers will be accurately reported.

The reality is that Mr. Trump’s actions will create the very problem he claims to be fixing. Instead of improving the quality of information gathered and reported by the government, he is sowing doubts about the ability of federal agencies to produce reliable data. And in doing so, he is leaving Americans ever more reliant on whatever he declares to be the truth.

The production and dissemination of reliable information is an important government service. The decisions Americans make, from whether to wear a raincoat to which medicines to take and which investments to make, are often shaped by federal data.

Countries that fudge statistics are basically lying to themselves, and they suffer the consequences, as Ben Casselman documented in a recent analysis in The Times. Greece understated its fiscal deficits for years, even prosecuting an official who insisted on reporting the actual figures — lies that contributed to a crippling debt crisis beginning in 2009. Argentina became so well known for undercounting inflation that investors were left to assume the worst, driving up the country’s borrowing costs. Authoritarian regimes have long published rosy data that conceals and deepens the immiseration of their populations.

The Trump administration, blind to this history, is engaged in an increasingly wide-ranging effort to erase data or to prevent the collection of new data that contradicts its political agenda. It has proposed to defund the Hawaiian observatory that has measured the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958. It shut down a national database created to track misconduct by federal police officers. It removed from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a long-running study of adolescent behaviors — including sleep, sexual activity and substance abuse — and then, after a court blocked the decision, reposted the data with a note insisting that much of it wasn’t accurate.

One of Mr. Trump’s most powerful political techniques is to seize on problems as the justification for his destructive policies.

The bureau does face challenges. It relies on a monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households at a time when people are harder to reach and less willing to participate in surveys of any kind. The agency needs to work harder to gather the same amount of data, but Congress has repeatedly refused its requests for additional funding. As a result, the bureau has been forced to rely increasingly on other sources of information to impute what is happening in the job market.

Dr. McEntarfer said last year that the agency, without more funding, might need to remove 5,000 households from its survey, which would further reduce the quality of its estimates.

A president concerned about the quality of the jobs data ought to be focused on addressing those problems. Mr. Trump, however, isn’t proposing to provide more funding or to improve the agency’s methods. He is not interested in how many jobs the American economy will produce this month. In firing Dr. McEntarfer, Mr. Trump made clear that he doesn’t want to know the answer.

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