Tag: Trump

Medical Associations Non-Pulsed by Trump’s Withdrawal From the Paris Accord

Jun 13, 2017• 9

By DAVID INTROCASO

Climate change, or changes in weather extremes, are having an increasingly harmful effect on human health. Last year, the 20^th consecutive year in which the US experienced above average annual temperatures, saw increasing instances of heat related ailments and deaths and increases in related exacerbations of chronic, including cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, respiratory and mental health, conditions as well as the spread of climate change-related food pathogens and vector borne diseases, most recently Zika.

One study estimated that absent any adaptation to climate change or disruption we will see an increase of 2,000 to 10,000 deaths annually in over 200 US cities. Worldwide, the WHO estimates 800,000 die prematurely each year from urban air pollution stemming from burning coal, oil and gasoline. Not surprisingly, those disproportionately paying the climate penalty are children, pregnant women, the elderly, the disabled, minorities and the poor. Half of those killed by Hurricane Katrina (responsible for almost half of hurricane related deaths over the past 50 years) were over 75 and black adult mortality was upwards of four times higher than for whites. Half of Hurricane Sandy deaths were of those over 65.

When President Trump announced the US would withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord, signed by 195 nations, the news was met with widespread criticism. The president’s own Secretary of State, and former Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, opposed the decision.

Would Repealing the ACA Violate International Law?

Apr 28, 2017• 2

By DAVID INTROCASO and JASON CHUNG

Barely one month after a stinging and stunning legislative defeat, President Donald Trump has committed to revising the AHCA and potentially resubmitting it for Congressional approval.

In addition to Democrats and widespread popular opinion against ACA repeal, the AHCA may face another obstacle – international law.

This week the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported that the United Nations Office of the High Commission on Human Rights forwarded a four-page letter to the Acting Secretary of State, Thomas A. Shannon, to express the Commission’s “serious concern” that the US was in danger of violating its obligations under international law if the U.S. ratified legislation repealing the ACA.

The letter authored by Dainius Puras, a Lithuanian with the somewhat remarkable title of UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, argues that repealing core elements of the ACA would negatively impact almost 30 million Americans’ right to the “highest attainable standards of physical and mental health”, particularly those in moderate and low income brackets and those suffering from poverty or social exclusion.

The Return of the Angry Granny State

Apr 26, 2017• 19

By CHARLES SILVER

Texas should call itself The Granny State. That’s because it’s a nanny state in which the public officials who run the place have the values of a tea-totaling, Bible-thumping biddy who knows how God wants everyone to live and can’t resist telling them. No buying liquor on Sundays when people are supposed to be at church. No gambling ever. No whacky-weed for medicinal uses or recreation, even in the privacy of one’s home. No gay marriage, preferably no gays, and no transgender folk deciding which restrooms to use. And, of course, no sex, sex education, birth control, or abortions. Women should have sex only in marriage and then only to reproduce, and those who get pregnant must carry their babies to term, regardless of the consequences for themselves or anyone else.

These religion-inspired policies have served Texans poorly. The state’s maternal mortality rate nearly doubled in just two years after Texas cut its budget for family planning by two-thirds and eliminated funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. It’s now the worst in the developed world, not just in the US. Texas ranks 8^th from the bottom in the frequency of STDs and has the 5^th highest teen pregnancy rate too. Its 35 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19 are nearly double the national average. Meanwhile, Colorado and other states have achieved miraculous reductions in teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates by providing young women with long-acting contraceptives, like implants and IUDs. If Texas is following God’s plan, then God’s plan is a bust.

Now Granny is once again sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Currently before the Texas legislature is Senate Bill 25, which would eliminate the wrongful birth cause of action that the Texas Supreme Court recognized four decades ago in Jacobs v. Theimer. The facts were as follows. While traveling, Dortha Jacobs became ill. Upon returning home, she consulted a physician, Dr. Louis Theimer, who discovered that she was newly pregnant. Fearing that the illness was rubella—also known as the German measles—Jacobs asked Dr. Theimer if there was reason for concern. Rubella can injure a gestating fetus severely. Dr. Theimer told her not to worry, but he did so without performing an available diagnostic test. In fact, the disease was rubella and the child “was born with defects of brain, speech, sight, hearing, kidneys, and urinary tract,” among others. The medical expenses were extraordinary.

Repealed and Misplaced

Mar 26, 2017• 1

By KIP SULLIVAN

Like Joe, Michael and others, I find myself wondering what, if anything, Trump learned from the demise of the AHCA last Friday. But I’m also wondering what Democrats and other Republicans are thinking. The question I would like to ask all Republicans is: Is it clear to you now that merely saying no to any Democratic proposal to lower the uninsured rate is bad for your party? The question I would like to ask all Democrats who supported the Affordable Care Act is: Is it clear to you now that that the managed care nostrums in the ACA cannot lower costs, and that attempting to lower the uninsured rate without cutting costs is bad for your party?

Now What, Mr. President? Here’s What.

Mar 26, 2017• 7

By STEVEN FINDLAY

In the wake of the AHCA’s demise, most lawmakers and policy experts agree that Congress will put repeal and replace aside for the rest of 2017.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged on Friday that means the ACA/Obamacare remains the law for the “foreseeable future.”

Thus, as was widely reported over the weekend, that begs the question: how will the Trump administration administer the law and when might be the right time to return to the issue of fixing and improving it (however you want to label that.)

This is unknowable at the moment. The President, although inconsistent in his remarks, threatened to let the ACA “explode” this year and in 2018, thus forcing Democrats, in his mind, to beg him to fix it. At the same time, he said maybe the legislation’s demise was the “best thing” that could have happened since it would allow him to work with Democrats to craft an ACA replace or fix bill that would win their votes, bypassing the hard-right Freedom Caucus block in the House.

They’re Taking Selfies in the Streets …

Mar 26, 2017• 1

BY JOHN IRVINE

Filed under: Worth 10,000 words.

Taken as word of the Trump administration’s decision to pull the AHCA broke Friday afternoon, a selfie by Sean Patrick Maloney (D-Cold Spring) @RepSeanMaloney quickly went viral on Twitter.

Making Cancer Care Great Again

Nov 17, 2016• 1

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

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Q: Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency included a promise to repeal “Obamacare” in its entirety. If he succeeds in fulfilling that promise, what impact can we expect on American cancer prevention and cancer treatment?

A: Donald Trump, emboldened by eliminating ISIS, ending illegal immigration and energizing the economy, will eradicate cancer. Or at the very least, I predict, he will append it to his list of promised achievements as president.

Our current chief executive, dubbed “No Drama Obama” by his staff during the 2008 campaign, couldn’t resist the heady promise of a cancer “moonshot.” Trump, who’s declared, “I will take care of ISIS,” “close up those borders” and “jump-start America,” will likely rev up the rhetoric back to Nixonian “War on Cancer” levels.

A candidate whose campaign centered on his personal pledge to “make America great again” will surely be galvanized by the chance to make cancer care “great,” too.

The current Cancer Moonshot initiative, featured in President Barack Obama’s last State of the Union Address, is codified in a presidential memorandum of Jan. 28, 2016 and placed within the Office of the Vice President. While fighting cancer was of deep personal interest to Vice President Joe Biden, Vice President-elect Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, where pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has a major portfolio of oncology products. Coincidentally, Lilly in October introduced a new version of its PACE Continuous Innovation Indicator (CII), a customizable, online tool to review progress against cancer in order to inform public policy and accelerate innovation.

So what does Trump mean for new health tech?

Nov 11, 2016• 23

By MATTHEW HOLT

Matthew-Holt-color I’m a pundit who like everyone else was surprised by Trump’s victory in the (profoundly undemocratic and hopefully-to-be-abolished-soon) electoral college, and everything I say here is prefaced by the fact that there was very little discussion of healthcare specifics by Trump. So there’s no certainty about what will happen–to state the obvious about his administration!

What we do know is that Trump said he’d repeal & replace the ACA and the House has voted to repeal it many times (but the Senate has only once & Obama has always vetoed that repeal). A full and formal repeal requires 60 votes in the Senate which it won’t get with the Democrats holding 48. Note that the Democrats needed 60 votes to to forestall a Republican filibuster in order to pass the ACA in 2010. That 60 vote total is a very rare state of events which existed for only only one year–from Jan 2009 until Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Jan 2010 and one we likely won’t see again for many years.

But this doesn’t does not mean things will continue as usual for two reasons. Congress can change the budget with the Republican 52 seat Senate majority, and the Administration can change regulations and stop enforcing them. So we have to assume that the new Administration and its allies(?) on the Hill will roll back the expansion of Medicaid which was responsible for most of the reduction in the uninsured (even if it didn’t happen in every state). They’ll also reduce or eliminate the subsidies which enable about 10m people to buy insurance using the exchanges. Both of those were in the repeal bill Obama vetoed, although in the bill the process was delayed for 2 years.

This of course may not happen or may be replaced by something equivalent because many of the people who voted for Trump (the rural, white, lower-income voters) fall into the category of those helped by the law, and in a few of his remarks he’s also said that he’ll be taking care of them. Even this week Senator Wicker (R-Mississippi) said that they weren’t going to take away 20 million people’s insurance. In Kentucky which went from a Democratic to Republican governor 2 years ago, the new administration ended their local exchange (from 2017), but in fact not much consequential happened as people were sent to the Federal exchange. If there are changes to the exchanges and the individual mandate or they’re both abolished, there’ll be lots of commotion but it won’t be completely system changing.

My day job at Health 2.0 involves running a conference and innovation program based on a community of companies using SMAC technologies to change health care services and delivery–either by starting new types of health care services or selling those technologies to the current incumbents. So I’m acutely interested in what happens next, albeit somewhat biased about my preferences!

Overall I think that (unlike many other areas of American life) health care technology won’t be that greatly affected. Continue reading…

Repealing and Replacing the ACA: A Whole New Ball Game. Same Problems Though.

Nov 11, 2016• 6

By STEVEN FINDLAY

I’ll dive right in, with the stipulation that this blog is initial reaction in a very fluid, unprecedented and soon-to-be even-more-intense political environment. Fasten your seat belts!

The ACA. Replace is the critical word in “repeal and replace.” Consensus is already emerging that Trump and the Republicans will indeed repeal the ACA in early 2017, via the reconciliation process Congress used earlier this year. That resulted in the Senate’s first an only full ACA repeal vote. Obama vetoed the bill, of course. But Republicans demonstrated the do-ability of the reconciliation process. Lacking 60 votes in the Senate, they’ll very likely try repeal again that way.Continue reading…

Dear (Quite Possibly) President Trump

Nov 3, 2016• 33

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

Even the most ardent of Obamacare supporters are now forced to admit that the law has hit a rough patch this year. The opposition to Obamacare is positively gloating with self-congratulatory “I told you so” assessments of the supposedly dire situation. Defenders of the cause are counteracting with the customary deluge of charts and graphs to prove unequivocally that Obamacare is actually turning out better than they expected. Integrity and honesty being in short supply on both sides of this quandary, chances are excellent that no matter what happens next, the American people will lose big time, unless….