Tag: health care
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.


Bill Cassidy

'You Own This': Top GOP Senator Burned As Kennedy Wrecks Health Services

As the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., presses forward with a mass firing in a sweeping effort to downsize the agency tasked with safeguarding the nation’s well-being—including removing top leaders from key programs, including from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a Republican Senator who cast the pivotal vote that enabled the controversial anti-vaccine activist to take the helm of the massive public health agency is facing scrutiny and backlash.

During Kennedy’s confirmation process U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana became an important voice and crucial vote in persuading his fellow Republicans to support what many saw as an extreme candidate. Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is a medical doctor who worked for decades in public hospitals, and is an active vaccine advocate.

Senator Cassidy “ultimately provided the one-vote margin needed to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the full Senate,” as the Los Angeles Times had reported.

Defending his vote to confirm Kennedy, Senator Cassidy said the scion of the American political family had made assurances to him that convinced him to support his nomination.

Cassidy “said he was swayed by Kennedy’s commitments to support the immunization schedules recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, maintain systems used to vet new vaccines and monitor their safety, preserve statements on the CDC website assuring the public that vaccines don’t cause autism, and meet with Cassidy ‘multiple times a month,’ among other things.”

“I will watch carefully for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines,” Cassidy said.

STAT News reported that Senator Cassidy “said he would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s keeper.”

Over the weekend, Cassidy was sharply criticized—and blamed—when HHS forced out Dr. Peter Marks, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration division responsible for assuring the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, as CNN reported. Dr. Marks resigned but was “given the choice to resign or be fired.”

On Tuesday, The Hill reported that Kennedy “won’t acknowledge the scientific consensus that childhood vaccines do not cause autism.”

“That skepticism over seemingly settled science appeared to come to a head over the weekend when the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top vaccine official was forced out and issued a fiery public letter blasting Kennedy.”

That official was Dr. Marks.

Cassidy appeared to express concern, but nothing more.

“I thank Dr. Marks for his dedicated service to the health of our country,” the Senator wrote. “His departure is a loss to the FDA. Commissioner Makary and Secretary Kennedy should replace him with someone of similar stature and credibility amongst the scientific community, who will lead without bias.”

Tuesday afternoon, CNN’s Manu Raju reported that he asked Cassidy about the firings of 10,000 HHS employees.

“I’m trying to understand it,” Cassidy said. “They say that they are consolidating duplicative agencies.”

Asked if he supports the firings, Cassidy replied: ‘Like I said I’m investigating.”

Back in January, Cassidy had asked RFK Jr. if he could “trust” him, as Politico reported.

Asked “if he thinks RFK Jr is backsliding on his commitments,” Raju reported, Cassidy said: “We’re in dialogue about that.”

Kennedy had told Cassidy that he was “not going to go into HHS and impose my preordained opinions on anybody at HHS. I’m going to empower the scientists to do their job.”

Many of those scientists were fired on Tuesday at 5 AM.

MSNBC analyst and Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn blasted Cassidy, writing: “Sen. Bill Cassidy, you violated the Hippocratic oath when you supported RFK Jr.’s nomination and you own this—and all the horrific consequences to come.”

Corn added a screenshot of a post from a popular epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, detailing a few of the consequences of Tuesday’s firings.

Cassidy also came under fire on Tuesday for telling CNBC, “Is there some way that we can cut Medicare—excuse me—reform Medicare—so that benefits stay the same, but that it’s less expensive, more efficient?”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

'This Will Kill People': House GOP Guts Medicaid For Billionaire Tax Cut

By a slim 217-213 margin, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill Tuesday night that makes deep cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps while simultaneously extending President Donald Trump's tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans. Wall Street Journal congressional reporter Olivia Beavers tweeted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had a group of Republicans "shaking his hand, back slapping and congratulating him" after the vote was confirmed.

As Politico reported, the vote was initially slated to fail with multiple Republican holdouts expressing reservations about the scope of cuts in the bill. While the legislation makes $2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts, Forbes reported that roughly $800 billion of those cuts came from federal support for state Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for low-income families. But some Republicans, like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN), Warren Davidson (R-OH, Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Victoria Spartz (R-IN) wanted deeper cuts.

After Johnson and Trump both leaned on the four holdouts, three of them ended up flipping to support the bill, while Massie voted with the Democratic opposition. The Kentucky Republican explained that his primary hangup with the budget bill was that it added $20 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

The bulk of that debt comes from extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for the next decade, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said was "skewed to the rich, expensive and failed to deliver on its promises."

"As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent," the CBPP wrote.

Democrats were united in their opposition to the bill, and made sure to travel to the House of Representatives chamber to cast their vote after Johnson made it impossible for them to vote remotely or by proxy. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) tweeted that she traveled to Washington to vote on the bill despite giving birth to her son earlier that day.

"They want to rip away health care from 400,000 CO kids, take food off the plates of seniors & veterans, and make life more expensive for hardworking Coloradans – all so they can give tax breaks to corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk," she wrote.

Political scientist and New York Times contributor Miranda Yaver condemned the bill in a post to Bluesky, pointing out that Medicaid "covers 1 in 5 Americans overall, including 41% of births and 63% of nursing home care." She added that the bill cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (also known as food stamps), which 41 million Americans depend on to afford groceries.

"This won’t just harm people. This will kill people," Yaver wrote. "They own this."

According to Bobby Kogan, who is the senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, the bill would "cut SNAP down to just $1.60 per person per meal on [average] while cutting taxes for the top 0.1% by $278k." He pointed out that the bill still has a major obstacle in the Senate, where Republicans are more reticent to green-light the tax cut extension and cut Medicaid. Kogan also reminded his followers that Trump's attempted 2017 repeal of the Affordable Care Act was finally halted in the Senate during the "vote-o-rama" amendments process.

Democratic activist Joe Katz opined that "all purple district Republicans" will have immense difficulty "trying to convince people this wasn't TECHNICALLY a vote for cutting Medicaid and SNAP to pay for billionaire tax cuts." Journalist and editor Jonathan Cohn asserted that Tuesday night's vote proves that "there are no moderate Republicans in Congress."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Pushes Plan To Gut Medicaid Despite Promise To Protect Program

Trump Pushes Plan To Gut Medicaid Despite Promise To Protect Program

President Donald Trump on Wednesday endorsed the House Republican budget plan, which would decimate Medicaid, the federal health insurance program that covers 72 million disabled and low-income Americans. What do Republicans get in return? Tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich.

In a rambling post on X, Trump wrote: "The House and Senate are doing a SPECTACULAR job of working together as one unified, and unbeatable, TEAM, however, unlike the Lindsey Graham version of the very important Legislation currently being discussed, the House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda, EVERYTHING, not just parts of it! We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget to 'kickstart' the Reconciliation process, and move all of our priorities to the concept of, 'ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.' It will, without question, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

The budget Trump endorsed would require cuts to Medicaid so extreme that it would surely force states—which administer the program—to either make up for the loss of federal subsidies or kick many recipients out of the program. Those cuts would then be used to help extend the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017, which primarily benefitted the wealthy.

According to a July 2024 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank:

Households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC). As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top—for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent—are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent.

Trump’s endorsement of the House GOP budget plan came just hours after he said in an interview with sycophantic Fox News host Sean Hannity that he wouldn't touch Medicaid.

“Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched," Trump said, an apparent lie if he wants the House Republican budget to pass.

"It's difficult to reconcile President Trump's vow to 'love and cherish' Medicaid with his endorsement of the House budget that would cut over $800 billion from the program. Cuts of that magnitude go well beyond eliminating fraud and abuse," Larry Levitt, executive vice president of health policy at KFF, said in a post on X.

Before Trump’s endorsement, the House budget appeared to be in trouble, with multiple GOP lawmakers in competitive House seats balking at the idea of stripping health care away from their constituents, Politico reported.

From Politico’s report:

The vulnerable incumbents wary of slashing Medicaid services include Reps. David Valadao of California, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania. Others like Nicole Malliotakis of New York from redder districts have also raised concerns. They were generally blindsided by the deeper level of proposed cuts, a Republican said, as that possibility never came up in earlier discussions with GOP leaders.

With the narrow majority Republicans have in the House, they can afford to lose just one vote and have the budget pass.

Of course, Trump's endorsement of the proposed budget could breathe life into House GOP leadership's efforts since Republican lawmakers have so far refused to stand up to Trump out of fear.

Even if the bill does pass the House, it would then have to pass the Senate, where Republicans are also criticizing the House bill.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told HuffPost on Tuesday that he does not support the kind of massive Medicaid cuts that the House budget calls for.

“I would not do severe cuts to Medicaid,” Hawley said of the program, which voters in his deep red state voted in 2020 to expand to cover an additional 460,000 people in the state.

In sum, Republicans are in disarray. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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