Somethings you should know about how Donald Trump is making America great, again. Health focus.

Here are just a few of articles that are emblematic of how Donald Trump is “making America great, again” re. your health.

Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention
By Joel Achenbach and Lena H. Sun
May 23, 2017 at 4:15 p.m. EDT
President Trump’s 2018 budget request, delivered to Congress on Tuesday with the title “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” has roiled the medical and science community with a call for massive cuts in spending on scientific research, medical research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for children of the working poor.

The National Cancer Institute would be hit with a $1 billion cut compared to its 2017 budget. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute would see a $575 million cut, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would see a reduction of $838 million. The administration would cut the overall National Institutes of Health budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion.

The National Science Foundation, which dispenses grants to a variety of scientific research endeavors, would be trimmed $776 million, an 11 percent cut. NSF had not been mentioned in the administration’s earlier budget outline, the so-called “skinny budget,” which was released in March.

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Trump is targeting Obamacare again.
PUBLISHED MON, APR 8 2019, Ashley Turner

President Donald Trump reignited the fight over Obamacare last month when his administration decided to support a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality.

The move puts the ACA in jeopardy once again as it faces potential repeal.

Trump tried to go further, pledging to replace the law with a new Republican plan before the 2020 election but beat a hasty retreat after his own party rebuked the idea.

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White House Reportedly Ordered Infectious Disease Chief ‘Not to Say Anything’ About Coronavirus Without Clearance
By Colby Hall Feb 27th, 2020, 2:35 pm

Perhaps most troubling in the NY Times reporting, however, is news that “one of the country’s leading experts on viruses” has been effectively muzzled by a White House that appears to be putting a higher priority on an effective political narrative than a better-informed public. To wit:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, one of the country’s leading experts on viruses and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.

The new White House approach came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged Thursday that a California woman with coronavirus was made to wait days before she was tested for the disease because of the agency’s restrictive criteria about who may get tested.

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Trump struggles to explain why he disbanded his global health team
March 9, 2020, 11:20 AM EDT, By Steve Benen

According to Trump, “you can never really think is going to happen,” but the NSC’s team existed precisely because officials recognized the possible threat.

One of Donald Trump’s most important missteps in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak happened before anyone had even heard of COVID-19. In fact, the president’s first error came back in 2018.

It was two years ago when Trump ordered the shutdown of the White House National Security Council’s entire global health security unit. NBC News had a good report on this recently, noting that the president’s decision “to downsize the White House national security staff — and eliminate jobs addressing global pandemics — is likely to hamper the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus.”

It was against this backdrop that a reporter asked Trump late last week about whether he was prepared to “rethink having an Office of Pandemic Preparation in the White House.” The president replied:

“I just think this is something, Peter, that you can never really think is going to happen. You know, who — I’ve heard all about, ‘This could be…’ — you know, ‘This could be a big deal,’ from before it happened. You know, this — something like this could happen…. Who would have thought? Look, how long ago is it? Six, seven, eight weeks ago — who would have thought we would even be having the subject? … You never really know when something like this is going to strike and what it’s going to be.”

It’s worth emphasizing that this is Trump’s second explanation related to his decision to disband his global health security team. “I’m a business person,” he explained two weeks ago in response to a similar question.

“I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

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After a Brief Burst of Sanity, Trump Is Back to Abnormal on the Coronavirus Response
At a press conference Monday, the president seemed to finally acknowledge reality. Then came Tuesday.
BY JACK HOLMES, MAR 17, 2020

After a brief brush with sanity, the President of the United States has returned to form.

Gone is the fleeting sober analysis from a White House press conference on Monday, in which Donald Trump acknowledged that the novel coronavirus will disrupt our lives for months, that there will be many, many more cases, and that the health of the stock market—pretty much his only concern up to this point—will now have to take a back seat.

By Tuesday morning, he was back to screaming at Democratic state governors on Twitter about “the Chinese Virus,” because all things are destined to become a nationalist drum to beat in the hopes it will drown out reality.

The reality is that the United States has screwed this up so far, but there is still time to avoid Italy’s fate.

One of our main failures has been our botched testing program. Put simply, the U.S. has scarcely tested anyone.

It’s hard for anyone to get a test, including frontline healthcare workers, some of whom have to be pulled out of service as a precaution, which in turn puts more strain on the system.

The proof that we could have done better is that South Korea, which experienced its first case one day before the United States did on January 21, has played things very differently.

What will go down as the biggest breakdown in the US response to #COVID19 is the lack of test kits.

South Korea and the US had their 1st patients on Jan 20 and Jan 21, respectively. Around the time that the United States had tested 11,000 people total, South Korea was testing 10,000 a day.

By March 4, according to Eric Topol, the South Koreans were testing 18,000 people a day. The population over there is around 51 million. In the United States, it’s 327 million.

We’re now at 125 tests for every million Americans, which places the U.S. behind Greece and the Czech Republic. Again: the U.S. and South Korea ran into this problem at almost exactly the same time.

This is not a pretty picture for the administration run by one Donald J. Trump, who spent the lion’s share of that eight-week period downplaying the threat, musing the virus could disappear miraculously, suggesting people were going to work after contracting the virus and it was no big deal, and continually declaring we were on the cusp of having a vaccine available to the public.

None of this was true, and none of it was helpful, and none of it was the kind of thing coming out of governments—like South Korea’s, or Hong Kong’s, or Singapore’s—that have managed this crisis well.

Do you feel safer now, with Donald Trump looking after your family’s health?

As for the economy, the overall solution is to pump trillions (not just billions) of dollars into the private sector, as more specifically described in: The Ten Steps to Prosperity. How we can recover and grow from here. Monday,  Mar 16, 2020

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell