Tag: gop
Trump, CDC, public health threat

How Trump's Health Care Layoffs Will Hasten A National Recession

As the news about the Trump regime’s purge at every Health and Human Services agency poured in, it dawned on me that this could be the beginning of the next great recession.

Beyond the massive cuts already underway, there is more to come in Medicaid and possibly even Medicare as the GOP advances legislation to extend corporate tax breaks. This will lead to a sharp reduction in household spending, which drives the economy. Health care represents 18 percent of that economy.

I have consistently advocated for reducing the medical industrial complex’s draw on national income. But this isn’t the way to do it. Cutting Medicaid and premium support for individual insurance plans will undermine public health, make America sicker and increase demand for ameliorative care, which will increasingly be provided free of charge as the ranks of the uninsured swell. That will force those still insured to pay higher rates, which in turn will exacerbate the decline in consumer spending as households prioritize basics like food, housing, heat, and health care over discretionary spending.

This is in addition to the havoc raised by the president’s broad and irrational tariffs announced yesterday. Unless every economist except those working for Trump is wrong, this will drive prices for every imported good higher: from food and clothes to cars and computers.

The ostensible goal — bringing manufacturing jobs home — is a decades-long project. Those who honestly believe Hamiltonian-style protectionism can work in the 21st century understand that industrial policy must be 1) strategically targeted; and 2) accompanied by policies that promote the protected industries. That’s exactly what President Biden included in his Build Back Better program, partially enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Trump regime is eliminating many of those provisions.

Is it safe? Will it be there?

The press did an admirable job over the past two days cataloging the effects of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s purge of 10,000 HHS workers (on top of the 10,000 who jumped ship during the earlier buyouts). Here are some of the more pernicious cuts:

  • The Food and Drug Administration eliminated 170 staff from its inspections department. Most were support staff for the people who visit facilities in the U.S. and around the world to ensure there are no impurities in drugs and no bacteria in food. The backlog of uninspected facilities will grow as “front-line investigators will now be spending significant time processing their own travel and related administrative requirements,” rather than spending that time inspecting firms to ensure the American consumer is protected, one FDA official told CBS News.

The staff cuts at FDA included veterinarians monitoring the bird flu outbreak, which has led to egg shortages and emboldened producers to price gouge. The laid-off scientists included vets who designed studies showing pasteurization killed viruses found in milk, according to the Washington Post. Drinking raw milk is among the many quackeries embraced by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  • The vaccine advisory panel at FDA lost the four staffers who run the meetings and monitor conflicts of interest, according to Bloomberg News. Meanwhile,Politico reports Sara Brenner, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, has asked for more data about the Novovax vaccine for Covid-19, the only non-mRNA vaccine on the market. Its approval was expected by April 1.
  • The HHS layoffs announced Tuesday included more than half of the 150 staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which evaluates policy alternatives for the HHS secretary. More than third of the 300 staffers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality received pink slips this week, according to Stat. AHRQ conducts or supports most of the research aimed at improving patient safety at the nations hospitals, where drug-resistant infections remain a major threat.
  • About two-thirds of the 1,200 people working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are being laid off, according to CBS News. They include the entire staff at the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory, which is responsible for ensuring respirators and other personal protective equipment work properly.

This will effect not just hospital and medical personnel but mineworkers, construction workers and others routinely exposed to dangerous air, chemicals and other hazards at work. The layoffs will take effect on June 30, American Federation of Government Employees union representatives told Modern Healthcare. "Everybody in NPPTL is being RIF'ed," said Brendan Demich, chief steward of the AFGE Local 1916.

  • It is unlikely the public will get many details about the effects of the personnel cuts. Most staff in the offices that respond to Freedom of Information Act requests at HHS have been put on administrative leave. Those offices at the CDC, NIH and the FDA were entirely eliminated. Journalists, lawyers and patient advocacy groups depend on FOIA requests to gain insight into internal deliberations and lobbyist interactions behind government decions.

An HHS spokesman told NPR that “the FOIA offices throughout the Department were previously siloed, and did not communicate with one another. Under Secretary Kennedy's vision for a more efficient HHS, these offices will be streamlined, and the work will continue.” Only there will be fewer people, longer delays, and centralized control over what gets released.

A better way to cut spending

Here’s another news story that caught my eye this week. Employment at the nation’s largest health insurance companies dipped 4.6% in the fourth quarter of last year, according to a review of SEC filings by Modern Healthcare reporters. Even if one excludes UnitedHealth Group’s overseas divestitures, the seven largest insurers cut 1.4 percent of their workers at a time when total jobs in the economy grew by 1.2 percent.

Slower spending growth by both Medicare and Medicaid is shrinking insurer margins. Seniors opting for private Medicare Advantage plans, which now cover more than half of beneficiaries, is slowing dramatically, up just 3.1 percent to 34.4 million people this year, according to a STAT report in late February. Medicare pays MA plans about 22 percent more on average than those beneficiaries would cost if they had remained in the traditional program.

Why? Medicare pays insurers a risk-adjusted monthly premium to cover seniors who choose an MA plan. The “risk” is determined by how sick people are, which insurers can game by coding for illnesses they never treat. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates Medicare loses over $80 billion a year from insurer upcoding — and that’s after slapping an across-the-board 5.9 percent reduction in payments to insurers.

Increase that reduction to 20% — making MA reimbursement about equal to FFS Medicare — would save Medicare $1.0 trillion over the next decade. This could lead to higher cost sharing, higher premiums and fewer supplemental benefits for MA enrollees (so those plans looked more like traditional Medicare). Or MA insurers could take a profit haircut. But it would also eliminate any need to cut Medicaid to pay for tax breaks.

Here’s the popular slogan I offered last month: Don’t throw people off Medicaid to pay for your tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy. Stop private insurers from ripping off Medicare.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.


The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

A Wall Street Journal editorial described President Donald Trump's tariffs as the "dumbest trade war in history." It's important not to overrate intelligence, even in leaders. Judgment and maturity may be more crucial. But Trump is no ordinary dunce. He displays a stubborn stupidity that threatens to plunge the world into chaos and potentially into depression.

It should go without saying that our constitutional system was never meant to be so vulnerable to the whims and fantasies of one man. Nothing as critical as the entire world trading system or the maintenance of the NATO alliance should be decided by which side of the bed the emperor woke up on today, but due to the cowardice and cupidity of the GOP and others, we've gradually lost our antibodies to strongman rule and find ourselves bowing before a power-drunk man/child.

His peculiar blind spots and obsessions now threaten everyone. All of those supposedly worldly-wise Wall Street types who either supported or did not oppose Trump's return to power deserve some of the blame today. One thinks of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has a long history opposing tariffs but was becalmed to the point where he told a Davos audience in January that tariffs are a good "economic weapon" and that critics should "get over it."

This kind of insouciance in the face of a severe economic threat is breathtaking. Even if Wall Street executives and others who chose to believe that Trump was preferable to Kamala Harris were indifferent to the civil liberties implications of a Trump second term and uninterested in public health and the administration of justice, you'd think they'd be interested in their own bottom lines. You would think they might have noticed that one of Trump's only long-term convictions was that America had been victimized by world trade and that tariffs would solve all of our problems.

Trump has an obsession with trade. He always has, and his views are wrong historically, economically and even morally. At his Rose Garden declaration of "Liberation Day" he repeated his oft-stated view that the U.S. has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far" for 50 years and more. Long-term trade deficits, he declared, are a "national emergency" that "threaten our way of life."

In vain did a procession of first-term advisers attempt to disabuse Trump of his absurd views about trade. They patiently explained that it is Americans, not foreigners, who pay tariffs. He was deaf to this. They noted that trade deficits are not a measure of wealth, far less who is "winning" or "losing." If we buy coffee from Costa Rica and they buy nothing from us (which isn't true, but just as an illustration), in no sense has Costa Rica taken advantage of, far less "raped," America. We gave them dollars and they gave us coffee in return.

That is called commerce, and nearly every exchange between a willing buyer and willing seller yields two winners, not one. Besides, as those first-term Trump advisers also tried to convey, those Costa Rican businessmen then take those dollars and buy American assets.

The global trading system the United States shepherded into existence in the post-World War II era has been a boon to people around the globe, and no one has benefitted more than the people of the United States. We've run trade deficits with many nations for many reasons. Sometimes that's a reflection of savings versus investment rates in other countries (think Germany). Sometimes it's a reflection of relative wealth (Vietnamese consumers can't afford to purchase as many American products as Americans can afford to purchase of Vietnamese products).

But in any case, it doesn't really matter because countries that run big trade deficits can be super wealthy. The United States has run trade deficits since the late 1970s and has also been the richest nation on the globe during those years. In fact, even during Trump's first term, which he has widely proclaimed to have been the greatest economy in the history of the universe, we ran consistent trade deficits. In fact, the trade deficit increased during the first Trump administration from $481 billion in 2016 to $679 billion in 2020.

In a saner world, Trump's delusions would not guide U.S. policy. They'd be checked by his own advisers, the Congress and the public. But here we are.

This is not the first time in history that a leader's misconceptions have been implemented on a broad scale, but you have to reach into the history of dictatorial regimes to find parallels. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko gained acceptance not because they were true but because Stalin wanted them to be true. Lysenko promised a new golden age with dramatically improved crop yields that would transform even Siberia into a paradise of orchards and gardens. This was touted by Stalin as the "new biology" and ruthlessly enforced. Naysayers were arrested and executed. The result was repeated famines in the USSR and in China, where Mao also embraced the fallacy. Millions of men, women and children starved to death because a leader was able to impose his fantasies on a whole society.

Global trade is an engine of prosperity, and one man's stupidity now threatens billions.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Chuck Schumer

Senate Democrats Poised To Reject Plutocratic GOP Budget Bill

House Democrats are calling on their colleagues in the Senate to reject the GOP-passed spending bill—and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says he’s got the votes to do just that.

“Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path, drafting their continuing resolution without any input—any input from congressional Democrats,” Schumer said Wednesday. “Because of that, Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House.”

The Republican-led House caved to President Donald Trump and co-president Elon Musk Tuesday, passing a spending bill that would force $880 billion over 10 years in cuts from social safety net programs like Medicaid. The move is a naked attempt to extend GOP tax cuts for the rich at the expense of working-class Americans.

While Republicans were able to pass the bill in the House with the vote of only one Democrat, it’s a different story in the Senate, where Republicans will need Democrats to help them. And so far, they’re not getting it.

“They should refuse to allow this bill to pass in the Senate,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, warned her Senate counterparts on Tuesday. “If they don't, I think there's going to be a huge backlash from across the country. And I think, all of them will, you know, will have to deal with the consequences of that.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was also clear about her feelings on the matter. “The Republicans have the White House, the Senate, and the House. If they want to do this, and if they want to screw over the American people, they can do this with their votes and their party. I do not believe that Democrats should participate.”

“Everyone needs to call their Dem Senator right now. They are starting to cave,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on her social media account, adding that voters should “Tell them: 1. Vote NO on Cloture AND 2. Vote NO on the Republican spending bill. Don’t let them pivot to reconciliation. GOP doesn’t need Dem votes on that and they know it.”

Maybe Schumer and his fellow Senate Democrats have been getting those calls from voters—and at least for now, they seem to be listening.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Stifling Dissent, GOP Ejects Lawmaker From Trump Speech

Stifling Dissent, GOP Ejects Lawmaker From Trump Speech

Republicans showed their intolerance for dissenting viewpoints once again, this time during President Donald Trump’s primetime speech broadcast across the world.

Speaker Mike Johnson had Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas removed from Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night after Green dared to object to Trump as he began to speak.

Green stood up as Trump began, asserting that Trump had “no mandate” for several of his recent actions—seconds after Trump claimed that his small electoral victory was a “mandate” for sweeping changes.

Johnson angrily banged his gavel and ordered Green to “take your seat.” He then called in the sergeant at arms to forcibly eject the Democratic congressman.

The move was unusual and serves as further evidence of Republicans using political power to silence dissenting views. When Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina infamously yelled “You lie!” during former President Barack Obama’s speech in the same room in 2009, Wilson was notably allowed to stay.

This wasn’t even the first moment of the night when Republicans refused to tolerate dissent of any kind.

Earlier in the evening, as Trump entered the room, Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas ripped a sign reading “This is NOT normal” out of the hands of Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico.

Republicans only value one kind of speech: their own.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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