Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sharply criticized the Trump administration on Thursday for seeking to provide as much as $40 billion in financing for Argentina to help the Latin American ally stabilize its turbulent financial markets.
Greene — a staunch Trump ally who’s bucked her party on numerous issues in recent weeks — argued Argentina should not benefit from taxpayer dollars while Americans are struggling back at home. She said that’s antithetical to the “America ...
healthcare
The government shutdown is holding health care hostage
Health insurance is supposed to help families, not bully them. Yet when big insurers, or their lobby in Washington, don’t get the policy outcome they want, they reach for the same lever: higher premiums.
That isn’t care. That’s pressure — and patients feel it first.
We have seen this before. In October 2017, the administration cut off cost-sharing reduction payments. Carriers answered by “silver-loading” the next year, piling the missing dollars onto sil...
MAHA is nothing more than empty rhetoric leading health care on a dangerous course
Over my career, I have worked as a primary care physician, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and an executive at CVS Health. So by all means, yes, let’s Make America Healthy Again. But if that’s truly the goal, then the Trump administration’s approach, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a farce.
Despite lofty slogans, there is no clear or coherent health policy coming out of this administration. Instead, we are seeing a patchwork of marginal reforms paired with sweepin...
How to reopen the government: Rebrand Obamacare as ‘TrumpCare’
As the first shutdown since 2009 rolls on, reopening the government will likely hinge on Democrats’ success convincing President Trump to learn to love a program that he has repeatedly attempted to destroy: Obamacare.
To do that, Democrats can lean on the type of strategic flattery employed by certain U.S. companies and world leaders to gain edge in their dealings with Trump. In short, Democrats’ best chance to break the impasse is by convincing President Trump tha...
The pandemic is over — let Biden’s health insurance handouts expire
Ronald Reagan once quipped that “nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.”
He could have been talking about the effort to extend — for a second time — former President Joe Biden’s Affordable Care Act-enhanced tax credits, a set of extremely generous federal health insurance subsidies intended to help Americans get through the COVID-19 crisis.
That crisis ended two years ago. Biden’s extra help, enacted by a Democratic-majority Congress in 2021 and ex...
If Trump wants to cut health spending, he’s defunding the wrong agency
The second Trump administration has made it a core mission to cut spending on public health programs. But ironically, one agency in its crosshairs is pivotal to cost-effectiveness research in health care delivery.
The Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, is aimed at helping health care organizations and providers to deliver safe, high quality and equitable health care.
Despite this vital mission ...
Trump is cutting Medicaid based on a flawed study
Our country is poised to take health coverage away from millions of low-income Americans largely based on the findings of a flawed and flagrantly misleading study.
President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill recently produced the largest cut to Medicaid health insurance in its 60-year history.
Claiming to reduce “fraud and abuse,” it will cut essential medical services for at least 12 million low-income people through unachievable work requirements, unaffordable out...
Obamacare faces a subsidy cliff — don’t bail it out without reform
The controversy over the 2010 Affordable Care Act dominated Barack Obama’s presidency. The implementation of ObamaCare caused health insurance premiums to soar and nearly collapsed the market entirely. The Biden administration responded by flooding the system with expanded federal subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
To stop premiums for older workers with pre-existing conditions from suddenly leaping by $10,000, Republicans will need to extend part of this a...
Republicans are making boogeymen of their own voters on Medicaid
Republicans love their boogeymen; the grotesquely exaggerated villains they use to justify their worst policy ideas. President Trump loves to parade his favorite boogeymen: the “criminal aliens,” the dishonest media, the Democrats, and so on. These dehumanizing caricatures help him rile up his base and lead them to back his cruelest initiatives.
As the GOP-controlled Congress argues the merits of the cuts included in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” act — which is deeply&nb...
Kennedy is gutting health advisory panels to weaken the Affordable Care Act
The famous thumbs-down by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2017 resulted in the notorious failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Subsequent legislative attempts also crashed and burned, teaching Republicans the importance of discretion in their efforts to sabotage that law.
Consequently, both congressional Republicans and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have instead turned to subtler tactics to undermine the Afford...