Tag: Trump

A Proud Republican Who Faced Off A Party Leader. . .and Won!

May 9, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

This past week, Trump’s posting of himself as The Pope surfaced once again David French’s classic Christmas, 2024, New York Times column titled “Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?”

As I wrote at the time, “French and his wife and three children have experienced the cruelty first hand since he openly expressed his opposition to Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign. That resulted in threats to his entire family by white supremacists who especially targeted his adopted Ethiopian daughter. Ultimately, he was “cancelled” by his own denomination, the small (approximately 400,000 members), Calvinist “Presbyterian Church of America”.

Over the past week, American politicians of every stripe have debated what exactly was Trump’s motive in debasing the Papacy as Pope Francis was being laid to rest. Three main theories have emerged.

1. As a malignant narcissist, Trump could not bear the fact that Pope Francis was stealing his limelight.

2. Trump was appealing to conservative Christian Evangelicals who are strongly opposed to the Papacy on theological grounds.

3. Trump was appealing to conservative Catholics like New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino who says, “… we respect Trump more than the socialist Pope.”

Of course, there likely are elements of truth in each of these. But I prefer to fall back on my New York City high school training and believe that this is the product of a dull witted school yard bully who thought this was funny.

This is not to say he has the courage to claim ownership. (Obviously this doesn’t get posted without his approval.) No. He lies to your face, saying:

“I had nothing to do with it, Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

With his blessing, the image was posted at 10:29 PM on May 02, 2025 on his Truth Social account.

Fair Warning: There Won’t Be Fair Warnings

Apr 23, 2025

By KIM BELLARD

Perhaps you are the kind of person who acts as though that the food in the grocery store somehow magically appears, with no supply chain vulnerabilities along the way. You trust that the water that you drink and the air you breathe are just fine, with no worries about what might have gotten into them before getting to you. You figure that the odds of a tornado or a hurricane hitting your location are low, so there’s no need for any early warning systems. You believe that you are healthy and don’t have to worry about any pesky outbreaks or outright epidemics.

Well, I worry about all those, and more. Say what you will about the federal government – and there’s plenty of things it doesn’t do well – it has, historically, served as the monitoring and warning system for these and other potential calamities. Now, under DOGE and the Trump Administration, many of those have been gutted or at least are at risk.

But, at the end of the day, the thing at risk is us.

Here is a not exhaustive list of examples:

FDA: Although HHS Secretary Kennedy has vowed he will keep the thousands of inspectors who oversee food and drug safety, it has already suspended a quality control program for its food testing laboratories, and has cut support staff that, among other things, make arrangements for those inspectors to, you know, go inspect. Even before recent cuts, a 2024 GAO report warned that the FDA was already critically short on inspectors.

The FDA has already laid off key personnel responsible for tracking bird flu, including virtually all of the leadership team in the Center for Veterinary Medicine’s office of the director. Plus: “The food compliance officers and animal drug reviewers survived, but they have no one at the comms office to put out a safety alert, no admin staff to pay external labs to test products,” one FDA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CBS News.

Even worse, drafts of the Trump budget proposal would further slash FDA budget, in part by moving “routine” food inspections to states.

CDC: Oh, gosh, where to start? Cuts have shut down the labs that help track things like outbreaks of hepatis and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. We’re having a hard time tracking the current measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to over half the states.

The White House wants to encourage more people to have babies, but has cut back on a national surveillance program that collects detailed information about maternal behaviors and experiences to help states improve outcomes for mothers and babies. It helped, among other things, compare IVF clinics. “We’ve been tracking this information for 38 years, and it’s improved mothers’ health and understanding of mothers’ experiences,” one of the statisticians let go told The Washington Post.

The Office on Smoking and Health was effectively shuttered, in what one expert called “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.” CDC cuts will force the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop collecting data on injuries that result from motor vehicle crashes, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related injuries.

And if you’re thinking of taking a cruise, you should know that the CDC’s cruise ship inspections have all been laid off – even though those positions are paid for by the cruise ship companies, not the federal government.

EPA: Even though EPA head Lee Zeldin “absolutely” guarantees Trump cuts won’t hurt either people or the environment, the EPA has already announced it will stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions, is shutting down all environmental justice offices and is ending related initiatives, “a move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.”

The EPA has proposed rolling back 31 key regulations, including ones that limit limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams. Mr. Zeldin called it the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” and declared it a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” But, sure, it won’t hurt anything.

Shocking: Trump Builds a Wall Between Basic and Applied Research

Feb 28, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

The leaders of America’s scientific community seem genuinely surprised by the actions of the past three weeks. They expected to be spared the wrath of Trump because they believed that “Americans of all political persuasions have respect for science and celebrate its breakthroughs.”

Maybe so. But that is an inadequate defense against a multi-pronged attack which includes purposefully selecting unqualified hostiles to key management positions; restricting scientists travel and communications; censuring scientific discourse; and clawing back promised funding for research projects already underway. This “knee-capping” has extended beyond our geographic boundaries with Trump’s vengeful withdrawal from the WHO and the Musk inspired elimination of USAID.

“This too will pass,” whisper Republicans behind closed doors. But even so, the nature of scientific discovery and implementation is a complex rebuild. This is because the path from innovation to invention to implementation is interdisciplinary and requires collaborative interfaces and multi-year problem solving. Not the least of the challenges is gaining access, trust, and cooperation from the general public which requires funding, public education, and community planning.

Take for example a life saving device that is increasingly ubiquitous–found everywhere these days from rural high school cafeterias to the International Space Station and everywhere in between-– the Automated External Defibrillator or AED.

It is estimated that AED’s have the potential to save 1,700 American lives a year. Experts estimate that over 18,000 Americans have a life threatening cardiac arrest outside of a hospital with a shockable rhythm disturbance each year. But 90% don’t survive because access to an AED is delayed or not available. Without a correction in about ten minutes, you are likely to die. This means that the 6 pound AED has be where the patient is, the bystander has to know what to do with it, and there can be no delay.

Creating the modern day AED was a century long affair according to the “Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers” or IEEE .

DEI Is Now a Four Letter Word

Feb 4, 2025

By KIM BELLARD

I’d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there’s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can’t be silent about.

Diversity, we’re told, is actually a pretext for racism – against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the “right” kind of person. “Meritocracy” is the new buzzword; we want only the “best and brightest,” with none of the lowering of standards that we’re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn’t ending there.

Federal websites are being cleansed of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.

The Atlantic reports: “the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content.”

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have “disappeared,” and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science: ““I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

The President and his team even tried to blame last week’s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI. That’s just “common sense, ok,” according to President Trump.

Who Will Oppose American Apartheid?

Feb 3, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

This past month Bishop Mariann E. Budde drew the Episcopal Church into the national spotlight through a single act of courage. She is not the first, nor likely the last from this denomination to do so. There is a history. More on that in a moment.

The Episcopal church is an offshoot of the Anglican Church of England which dates back to 1534 when King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Pope who opposed his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Two-hundred and fifty four years later, in 1789, Anglican Church leaders who had helped settle colonies in North America, gathered to form a united Episcopal Church, revising their Book of Common Prayer to exclude its blessing to the English monarch.

Though declining in modern times, missionary minded Anglicans spread throughout the British empire and remain connected to the mother Church as members of the Anglican Communion. For example, British Anglican military chaplains were part of the force that occupied Cape Colony in South Africa in 1795. By 1821, they had established a formal religious foothold. Today, they claim 3.5 million members. In 2012, they elected their first female bishop, Ellinah Wamukoya of Swaziland. And yet, arguably the most influential female Anglican from South Africa is an immigrant to America, an emotional ally of Bishop Budde, and a retired Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

Her name is Margaret Marshall, and her place in American history dates back to June 6, 1966. That was the date this then 20 year old student, who was vice-president of the National Union of South African Students, was asked to stand in for the organization’s president, Ian Robertson (who was under house arrest for speaking out about Apartheid). She met and transported Bobby Kennedy to speak to over 1000 university students packed into the college auditorium at their “Day of Affirmation.”

Much like Mariann Budde last week in Washington, Bobby Kennedy caught his hushed audience by surprise that evening with these opening remarks:

“I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which was once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”

Margaret Marshall, some six decades later, recalled that moment in a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin. She said, “There was great tension in the room. People were on edge…As soon as the audience realized what he said, there was laughter and a sense of total relief. It was simply fabulous.”

Doctors Must Fight the RFK Nomination

Jan 29, 2025

By DANIEL STONE

As a doctor, I consider Secretary Xavier Becerra and his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to be allies of practitioners like me. The behemoth federal agency administers Medicare and Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration, and an army of public health workers. The Surgeon General, symbolic leader of the nation’s healthcare providers, reports to HHS. For decades, the Department has supported medical science in safeguarding the public’s health. Now that sacred trust faces the threat of Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run HHS.

RFK’s first problem is a stunning lack of qualifications. After a laudable triumph over drug addiction, he used his legal background to work on environmental protection. Kennedy never held a federal government position nor administered any public agency. He now appears poised for on-the-job training at an agency with 80,000 employees and a $1.7 Trillion budget. In contrast, Becerra served for years in Congress and on its Health Sub-Committee. He also served as State Attorney General, managing 4,800 employees. The qualification issue is not political. During Trump’s first term, his last HHS secretary, Alex Azar, had served as HHS general counsel and president of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. RFK has nothing remotely resembling his would-be predecessors’ qualifications.

Unfortunately, RFK’s shortcomings go well beyond mere lack of qualification. His distortions and public denials of established medical science infuriate practitioners like me. He casts baseless doubt on the well-established benefits of vaccines and on the polio vaccine in particular. Despite the seven decades since polio vaccine’s introduction, doctors still see patients who were infected before it was available. My patient Donna, born in 1955, counts herself among this group. She wears leg braces and often struggles with daily activities. For me, she symbolizes those who by accident of birth or happenstance missed the profound benefits of vaccines that RFK now disparages.

All The Way With LBJ – A Half Century After His Passing

Jan 23, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

This is the 52nd anniversary of the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his 5th Heart Attack. And two days ago was the 39th anniversary of the first celebration of a new federal holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In signing that original proclamation in 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, “The majesty of his message, the dignity of his bearing, and the righteousness of his cause are a lasting legacy. In a few short years he changed America for all time.”

The MLK federal holiday was not so “Kum ba yah” (“Come by here”) this year. President Trump was in no mood to be tutored on this 60’s phrase derived from an African American spiritual made famous by Pete Seeger. Rather, he took advantage of the convergence of MLK’s day and his own coronation to trash all things DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

Of those supporting the 2nd term President, from here and beyond, few could have had a broader smile on his face than dearly departed (July 4, 2008) former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helm led the opposition to the MLK bill, submitting a 300-page report that labelled King an “action-oriented Marxist” and a communist. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY) was so enraged at the time that he declared the report a “packet of filth”, threw it on the Senate floor, and then unceremoniously repeatedly stomped on it.

So, as a nation, we have been down this road before.

My Totally Wrong, Expert Predictions for Health Care 2025

Jan 5, 2025

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

January

In a blistering commentary, the American Medical Association’s flagship journal, JAMA, condemns the corrosive effect on patient care of the profit-seeking practices of health insurers. Separately, the organization announces that it’s selling the 13 journals in its JAMA Network to a private equity firm for $375 million “in order to enhance our mission of promoting the betterment of public health.”

February

Quickly following up on a campaign pledge to slash the federal budget, the Trump administration announces a radical consolidation of various entities at the Department of Health and Human Services. The new organization will be known as the Agency and Bureau for Children, Drugs, Explosives, Firearms, Families and Food (ABCDEFFF). Reflecting the new president’s strong personal preferences, “alcohol” will no longer be permitted in any agency name.

March

Bipartisan legislation demanding transparency from Pharmacy Benefit Managers dies in committee after industry executives explain that secret rebates to PBMs are like secret political action committee contributions to politicians: they allow you to loudly proclaim you’re an “advocate” for those supposedly paying you while actually serving the interests of those who are really paying you.

April

Pfizer announces that its once-a-day pill version of the wildly successful GLP-1 agonist weight loss drugs will shortly be submitted for government approval, and also that the company is moving its headquarters from New York to Louisiana, a state with a 40 percent obesity rate. Coincidentally, Louisiana is also the home state of Republican senators Cassidy and Kennedy, senior members of the Senate committees overseeing health care and all federal appropriations.

May

The new private equity owners of the JAMA Network say that all staff except one editor at each journal will be replaced by ChatGPT. A source at the private equity firm tells the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI won out over Gemini “because our CEO is a Leo” and over Claude “because nobody likes the French.”

June

Controversial right-wing firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, long the subject of rumors that she’s had cosmetic surgery, is diagnosed with a serious infection after an unspecified procedure. The House quickly schedules its first hearing on medical error in over two decades, but then cancels when the American Hospital Association points out the official term for what the Georgia Republican contracted was a “healthcare-associated infection,” so it’s entirely possible she accidentally brought the infection with her to the pristine hospital. Meanwhile, with House leadership telling Members they were free to vote their conscience, a resolution to send Greene a “Get Well” card passes unanimously after deletion of the word, “Soon.”

July

Following through on years of promises to reveal a “really great” replacement for the Affordable Care Act, President Trump on July 4 announces the “100-100-100” Make America Healthy Again plan. In keeping with the GOP’s advocacy for “skinny” plans with low premiums that encourage “consumers” to “comparison shop,” the plan will cover 100 percent of any medical bill for up to $100 a day for a premium of just $100 a month. Separately, Elon Musk tells a meeting of health insurance executives the plan can also replace both Medicare and Medicaid, enabling the federal government to cut spending by almost as much as the market capitalization of Tesla.

August

Before Congress recesses, a coalition of progressive organizations issues a press release declaring that all basic health services, whether provided by government agencies or the private sector, should be “available to the entire population according to its needs.” Shortly afterwards, the coalition is forced to make an embarrassing retraction after ChatGPT alerts the lone editor of JAMA that the coalition accidentally re-released a section of the report of the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, formed in 1927.

September

The Business Roundtable says its members are committed to improving the quality of health care for all employees because “quality health care is good business.” An 85-year-old freelancer for The New York Times notes that this was the exact title of a September, 1997 policy paper by a Roundtable task force in which an executive for Sears, which at the time operated over 3,500 stores, declares, “We believe that quality health care is lower-cost health care.” Sears currently has about a dozen stores.

October

Medicare Advantage plans step up their advertising expenditures after public opinion polls show that nobody anymore believes the portrayal of happy and healthy seniors playing pickleball instead of writing tear-soaked letters pleading for approval of hip surgery. The trade associations for hospitals, drug and device companies and PBMs call on Congress to provide greater oversight of greedy insurers. The editor of JAMA resigns after ChatGPT writes an editorial extolling the merits of MA plans run by for-profit companies.

November

The National Rural Health Association says that in the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, its members will accept live turkeys in partial payment of the medical debts that now affect 99.99 percent of all Americans after passage of the administration’s “100-100-100” Make America Healthy Again plan. A KFF survey explains that the number is not 100 percent because Congress retained conventional health insurance for itself and top federal officials and because America’s billionaires had opted for self-pay.

December

A Washington Post editorial declares, “The bottom line is that if we want to contain spending, we will have to make critical choices about how care is delivered, to whom, and under what conditions.” Different chatbots differ on where that quote originally came from, but agree that if any humans believe the American public is ready to make critical choices, they’re hallucinating.

Michael L. Millenson is president of Health Quality Advisors & a regular THCB Contributor

A Health Economist to lead the NIH

Dec 12, 2024

By SAURABH JHA

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic a seroprevalence study from Santa Clara indicated that the viral spread was far greater than was believed. The study suggested that the infection fatality rate (IFR) was much lower than the case fatality rate and perhaps even lower than the suspected IFR. The researchers estimated that 2.8% of the county had been infected by April 2020. The virus was contagious and, most importantly, caused many asymptomatic infections.

The study, released as a preprint within a month of the lockdown, should have been published by the NEJM or Lancet. The specificity of the immunoassay was a whopping 99.5% and could not have been lower than 98.5%. Instead, it was roundly criticized by born-again methodological purists. Noted statistician, Andrew Gelman, known expert at dealing with (very) imperfect statistical methods, wanted an apology from the researchers for wasting everyone’s time by making “avoidable screw ups.”

Around the same time, a similar study published in JAMA came to similar conclusions. Researchers found that the seroprevalence COVID-19 antibodies in LA county was 4.65%, 367 000 adults had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, substantially greater than the 8430 confirmed infections. They concluded that “contact tracing methods to limit the spread of infection will face considerable challenges.” No one asked the researchers for an apology, presumably because the study had passed anonymous peer review and had escaped the wrath of the medical commentariat.

A few months later, a German study suggested that many infected with COVID-19 had myocarditis. This meant that the asymptomatic were not just reservoirs of viral transmission, but walking tombs of cardiac doom. By many, the researchers, who used cardiac MRI to look for myocarditis, put a figure at nearly 80%. That’s a lot. No virus had ever done that. That number itself should have invited scrutiny. The animated, born-again empiricists, who has been energized by the Santa Clara study into becoming methodological sleuths, went into hibernation after the German myocarditis study. The study was swallowed uncritically by many and was covered by the NY Times.

If the rigor demanded of the Santa Clara study was that of a Pythagorean proof, the German myocarditis study received the scrutiny of a cult prophet. The burden of proof in them days was like shifting sand, which shifted depending on the implications of the research. The Santa Clara study suggested the test – isolate strategy was forlorn, as controlling the viral spread was akin to chasing one’s tail. The German myocarditis study was cautionary, emphasizing that that the virus should not be under estimated, as even asymptomatic infections could be deadly. The Santa Clara study challenged lockdowns, the German study supported lockdowns.

The senior author of the Santa Clara study, Jay Bhattacharya, has been nominated by President Trump to be the next NIH director. His nomination has surprised a few, upset a few, irritated a few, shocked a few and, as befits a polarized country, pleased many. Bhattacharya may well have won the popular vote, though I’m uncertain he will win the institutional vote.

Bhattacharya’s anti-lockdown views rapidly made him a persona non grata in academic circles.

Take a deep breath: Trump may not mean that much change–for health care, that is

Nov 18, 2024

By MATTHEW HOLT

At some point I had to crawl out of my hole and put pen to paper on the election debacle that just took place, and what the ensuing lunacy might be like for the health care system. So this is my attempt to do just that.

It’s really hard to understand why Trump won this election or why Harris and the Democrats lost. There was a lot of weirdness going on. Remember that before the vote Harris was generally praised for running a steady campaign, the Democrats had tracked to the right on immigration (trying to pass what IMHO was a horrendous bill ), and Harris kept talking about having a Glock, being a prosecutor and campaigned with a Cheney. The swing states (which vote at a much higher proportion than everyone else) all (with the narrow exception of Pennsylvania) voted for Democratic senators. For President they only went 3% against where they were in 2020. Even weirder was that hundreds of thousands of Trump voters didn’t appear to vote down the ballot at all. Yet nationwide the swing was big enough for Trump to win the popular vote. (If you really want to dig in, Charles Gaba has put together a great spreadsheet)

The simplest explanation is that the teeny middle in American politics voted against the incumbent. And the “middle” is getting teenier. In 1964 Johnson got 61% of the vote. Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1984) won with nearly 60% of the vote. Obama’s big 2008 victory was with just 53% of the vote and he won by 7%.

Biden won in 2020 with just over 51% and Trump will end up winning while likely getting just less than 50% of the vote. This isn’t an overwhelming mandate. It’s a small minority of voters switching because they are pissed off with the status quo. This year the bug bear was inflation, which really wasn’t Biden’s fault even though he got the blame. It also appears that a decent slug of Arab-Americans and far left Democrats stayed home or voted for Jill Stein because of Gaza.

And let’s not forget the impact of the Electoral College which reduces turnout outside of swing states (not exclusively). Surely if we had a popular vote in which every vote counts, turnout would be higher, including in the big 2 states that are Dem strongholds (NY & CA).

However, even if you think it’s inconceivable that a majority would vote for Trump because of what happened in 2016 to 2021 (especially on January 6, 2021!), apparently that’s not enough of a disqualifier. He’s going to be President.

So what happens next? Particularly in health care.

My expectation (and hope) is that this is a snake eating its own tail. There are so many repugnant egos circling around Trump that it’s more than likely they’ll turn on each other, and little to nothing gets done. That doesn’t mean nothing will happen.