Last week, Trump signed a “right to try” bill that
allows terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs that are not approved
by the FDA. This is a major boost to Big Pharma companies. They now have even
greater leeway to push potentially harmful drugs onto patients.
However, it
is no consolation that the FDA chief this week said that, despite the
bill, the agency will still make decisions on whether patients receive the
drugs. Even before the bill, the FDA had approved around 99% of all such requests.
The FDA, like all governmental agencies, mainly operates in the interests of
the major corporations and their profit incentives. The Trump administration is
only making their control even more blatant.
The
conservative business newspaper the Wall
Street Journal reported that Social
Security will have to dip into its $3 trillion trust fund this year since its
costs exceeded its income, the first time it has done so since 1982.
It’s
important to keep in mind what the WSJ
says are the reasons are for this years’ costliness: “The tax cuts signed into
law last year have slightly lowered Medicare and Social Security’s projected
revenue over the next few years,” while revenue has also been reduced due to
Trump’s “decision to end a program [DACA]
offering young undocumented immigrants reprieve from deportation while allowing
them to work.” At the same time “The nation’s aging population is boosting the
costs of Social Security and Medicare,” a problem that could be remedied
through immigration. “Slower growth in the economy” is also noted, something
that could be aided by a public-funded jobs and infrastructure-rebuilding
program, if public fund weren’t already going to wasteful tax cuts that have not increased
growth.
Trump’s
effort to revitalize the profits of the coal company owners who funded his
campaign (as reported last week),
would, if successful, “cost ratepayers [i.e., the population] a fortune” since
the cost of coal energy is becoming much more expensive (“more expensive than
any other power source”) than cheaper, safer renewables, writes Greg Ip this week. This cost is even
greater when you add in the costs imposed upon the environment though climate
change.
Furthermore,
burning coal emits harmful soot emissions that directly kills people, both in
terms of the coal factory workers (“most tragically” harming “the coal miners
[Trump] seeks to help”—which goes to show these measures are meant to help
company owners, not workers) and by reducing the life expectancy of households that
use subsidized coal.
However,
Trump needs to secure campaign contributions
from the coal companies to help fund his reelection, and so the efforts
continue.
Obamacare
was a failure on many levels (it did not, and could not, reduce medical costs),
but the reason it is attacked is mainly because of its beneficial measures.
One of
its good features was that it charged taxes on the exorbitantly wealthy and
used that money to give healthcare to poor people who couldn’t afford it. This
tax is the main reason why the law receives is so much hatred within
establishment politics. It is also despised by insurance companies because it
restricts their ability to do things like denying coverage and charging higher
rates to people with pre-existing conditions. Now, Jeff Sessions and the Justice
Department are asking a federal court
to strike down these restrictions, including “the bans on insurers denying
coverage and charging higher rates to people with pre-existing health
conditions” and the limits “on how much insurers can charge people based on
gender and age.”
This is
just the latest salvo in Trump’s concerted effort
to destroy Obamacare. He is working in service of rich investors and the
insurance companies.
The
reason the US healthcare system costs twice as much as other industrial nations
while having some of the worst outcomes is because of the privatized system;
high costs are charged to increase profits, while companies try to skirt
providing as much care as possible to reduce costs. This could all be remedied
by switching to the type of less-costly, more efficient national healthcare
systems that almost all other Western nations employ, but the insurers won’t
allow it. Trump’s efforts attack Obamacare in the wrong direction and
exacerbate the problem.
There is also
a human cost. Maintaining the privatized system means “maintaining” a situation
that results in the unnecessary deaths of 45,000 people each year,
who die due to lack of preventative care resulting from lack of health
coverage. The Justice Department’s efforts to unwind protections for people
with existing medical conditions will only exacerbate this.
The Trump
administration is continuing its signature policy
of placing industry officials and lobbyists into government positions designed
to regulate industry.
A former
banker, Joseph Otting, now heads the
Comptroller of the Currency office, which oversees banks such as Bank of
America and U.S. Bancorp, which are “two of his former employers.”
Mr.
Otting’s initial efforts have been dedicated to rolling back “requirements for
banks to have anti-money laundering and community-development programs”—for the
record, big banks are the main lifeline of the illegal drug industry, because they launder its profits—and
toward encouraging banks to expand business into things like providing more “loans
to companies deep in dept.”
As I reported before,
the EPA recently was embroiled in a scandal after trying to conceal a federal
study showing that toxic chemicals had contaminated significant portions of the
country’s water supply. I noted that the intimate connections between the EPA
and the chemical industry are likely major factors behind this. Now, after much
lobbying from the chemical industry, the EPA has decided that it will only review
the effects of harmful chemicals that result from “direct contact with a chemical”
and will exclude “any potential exposure caused by the substances’ presence in
the air.”
The NYT notes “the approach means that the
improper disposal of chemicals – leading to the contamination of drinking
water, for instance – will often not be a factor in deciding whether to restrict
or ban them.” The agency “will not focus on exposures that occur from traces of
the chemical found in drinking water in 44 states as a result of improper
disposal over decades”—in essence, allowing the chemical industry free reign to
poison the environment, leading to illness and death, all in search of higher profits.
Needless
to say, the Trump administration is working diligently to increase the major
problems afflicting the country. This point was captured quite beautifully in a
recently released report by a Special UN Rapporteur who just completed
a mission surveying poverty and inequality in America. It provides a scathing
critique of US policy:
The US is
“a land of stark contrast” where “the immense wealth of the few” is juxtaposed
with “the squalor and deprivation in which vast numbers of Americans exist.”
For “almost
five decades the overall policy response has been neglectful at best,” but the
current administration’s efforts “seem deliberately designed to remove basic
protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make
even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of
citizenship." The tax cuts “overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and
worsened inequality,” and simply follow a general template that will only “worsen
this situation” even further.
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