Donald Trump

Trump tried to explain his tax plan. It was a disaster.

Donald Trump, News, politics

Addressing reporters in the White House on Wednesday, President Trump tried to explain how he plans to shepherd his tax cut plan through Congress. As was the case during his failed push to repeal Obamacare, Trump couldn’t do it.

Trump began with a painfully obvious reminder — legislation is a result of a collaborative effort between the two chambers of Congress.

“In the House, I must tell you, they’ve been working really hard, and they’re coming ...

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While the nation focused on Mueller, Trump proposed dangerous changes to Obamacare

Donald Trump, health, health care, News, obamacare, politics

On Friday, shortly before word of pending indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller sucked up all the oxygen in the news cycle, the Trump administration dropped a 365-page proposal including numerous potential tweaks to the rules governing Obamacare. Among other things, the proposed rulemaking from the Department of Health and Human Services could allow insurers to sell stripped down health plans in the Obamacare exchanges, potentially leaving people without coverage when they need i...

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The hollow, contradictory hype of Trump’s big emergency speech on opioids

Donald Trump, drugs, health, Jeff Sessions, News

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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Trump declares public health emergency over opioids, adds no new funding

Donald Trump, drugs, health, health care, News, politics

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...

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Baltimore’s short on a lifesaving drug. Declaring the opioid crisis a national emergency can help

Donald Trump, drugs, News

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...

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The U.S. abortion rate fell dramatically. Will Trump learn the right lessons?

Donald Trump, health care, News, reproductive-rights

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...

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