Like the rash of executive orders he signed in the early months of his administration, President Donald Trump’s Thursday address declaring a national public health emergency to help fight deaths linked to opioids was long on performance and short on substance.
The failure to invest new funding in the project and the vague promise that more policy specifics will be revealed in the coming weeks are symptomatic of Trump’s high-flash, low-focus approach to policymaking.
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Donald Trump
Trump declares public health emergency over opioids, adds no new funding
President Donald Trump has finally declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, two months after he first said he would. The belated declaration is short of what is immediately needed to combat this epidemic. It offers no new funding that experts on the frontlines of the crisis say is needed — one expert says hundreds of billions in investment is necessary — and does not seem to yet prioritize increased access to the critical overdose reversal drug nalox...
Baltimore’s short on a lifesaving drug. Declaring the opioid crisis a national emergency can help
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND — If the paramedics had gotten there two minutes later, Darrin Dorsey would be dead. “Through the process you don’t even know you are about to die or you’re dead,” said Dorsey. “You only know what happened to you when you wake up and someone tells you.”
He recalled overdosing on fentanyl-laced heroin nearly two weeks ago. Dorsey’s near-death experience comes as Baltimore city officials have been trying to get naloxone, a...
The U.S. abortion rate fell dramatically. Will Trump learn the right lessons?
A new study found that the U.S. abortion rate fell dramatically between 2008 and 2014, thanks in large part to more people using effective birth control. But researchers are worried that lawmakers won’t learn the right lessons from the study’s findings — and that recent progress in the area is already being reversed under the Trump administration.
One of the other central findings of the study, authored by Guttmacher Institute researchers Rachel Jones and Jenna Jer...
Tracking Trump: president gives himself top marks for military bereavement calls
President claimed he ‘called every family of someone who’s died’ as tensions flared with sergeant’s relatives and later gave himself 10/10 on Puerto Rico
- Each week Trump seems to make more news than most presidents do in a lifetime. The Guardian is keeping track of it all in this series, every Saturday
It was unclear exactly what Donald Trump hoped to achieve when he decided to cut a key element of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – subsidies to insurance companies to help them cover those on low incomes – except perhaps a sense of pure destructive joy in damaging something his predecessor built that Republicans in Congress seemed unable to dismantle. On Saturday, he, crowed that he had ended a “Dems windfall” for insurance companies.
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Number of US adults without health insurance up 3.5m this year, study finds
Rising premiums and political turmoil over Obamacare undermine the gains that drove the nation’s uninsured rate to a historic low
The number of US adults without health insurance is up nearly 3.5 million this year, as rising premiums and political turmoil over Obamacare undermine coverage gains that drove the nation’s uninsured rate to a historic low.
Related: 'He keeps zigging and zagging': the perils of doing a healthcare deal with Trump
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Trump changes his mind about bipartisan health care deal for the fourth time in three days
President Donald Trump flip-flopped on a flip-flop Thursday afternoon, telling reporters he’s “open to” a bipartisan health care deal Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) struck earlier this week.
During a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday, Trump said that he wouldn’t sign the bill, and then said 11 minutes later it was a good solution, and then tweeted the next morning that he could “never support” it.
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‘He keeps zigging and zagging’: the perils of doing a healthcare deal with Trump
This week, senators moved to salvage the Obamacare subsidies Trump cut – but Washington remains confused over which way the president is swinging
Chuck Schumer was at the gym when his phone rang, just over a week after the latest version of the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act foundered. It was Donald Trump calling the most senior Democrat in the Senate with an idea.
Related: Senators reach bipartisan deal to salvage Obamacare subsidies Trump eliminated
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