Color this life threatening. This is another one of those stories which is shocking but not surprising, considering the cast of characters involved and their agenda. The Wall Street Journal just broke a disastrous story that “Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to remove all the members of an advisory panel that determines what cancer screenings and other preventive health measures insurers must cover, people familiar with the matter said.” What that means is that the same skin tumor, lump, basic warning signs screaming for attention might now go untreated — or become prohibitively expensive.
Kennedy plans to dismiss all 16 panel members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force because he views them as too “woke,” the people said.
The White House has made a priority of targeting initiatives that promote diversity equity and inclusion, or DEI, in everything from artificial intelligence to health research grants.
The task force has advised the federal government on preventive health matters since 1984. The Affordable Care Act in 2010 gave it the power to determine which screenings, counseling and preventive medications most insurers are required to cover at no cost to patients. The group, made up of volunteers with medical expertise who are vetted for conflicts of interest, combs through scientific evidence to determine which interventions are proven to work.
The Supreme Court decided a case in June that originally focused on a task-force recommendation to cover certain HIV-prevention drugs. The employer plaintiffs had successfully argued previously that requiring them to cover such drugs for employees violated their religious rights. The group also argued that the task-force members weren’t properly appointed. The high court ruled that the task- force appointments were constitutional, while highlighting that the Health and Human Services Secretary has the authority to remove the members of the panel at will.
Next to Pete Hegseth being the live wire of incompetence and the locus of where if anything is going to blow, it will blow with the Department of Defense, Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is the GOP’s worst mistake. He is a political crackpot without the qualifications to be deciding anything “medical” as that term is generally construed, and his decisions are culture war based and kooky. Unfortunately, that’s going to end up killing people. But “ignorance is death” is the working motto of the Trump administration, in truth. They should print that on the red hats and be done with it. The candor would be refreshing.
A recent essay in The American Conservative magazine called for the removal of the task-force members, arguing that it had embedded “left-wing ideological orthodoxy” in all of its efforts. The essay pointed to the task force highlighting racial discrimination when discussing risk factors for anxiety in older children and teenagers, as well as the task force’s use of terms such as “pregnant persons.” The task force mentioned the “lasting psychological impact and stigma of enslaved Black women being forced to act as wet nurses” in an April publication on breast-feeding, the essay noted.
HHS didn’t offer details on the secretary’s plans for, or views on, the task force.
“The Secretary looks forward to working with the USPSTF to improve public health,” a spokeswoman for the secretary said, referring to the task force.
The secretary’s office this month abruptly postponed the task force’s July meeting, alarming some Democrats and public health leaders.
“In no world should experts be replaced with unqualified anti-science cronies of RFK Jr. who will make preventive healthcare more expensive and harder to get over baseless conspiracy theories or debunked disinformation,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.), who sits on the Senate’s health committee.
I agree with Senator Murray’s premise, that Kennedy’s nut job cronies should not replace experts — but that said, here we are. It started out with him tinkering with immunization in June, now we’re up to AIDS and cancer. Who knows where it will end — beyond the obvious place, which is the graveyard.
” The group, made up of volunteers with medical expertise who are vetted for conflicts of interest, combs through scientific evidence to determine which interventions are proven to work.”
Unpaid, proven unbiased, and scientifically proven?
All of those sound anti-Trump to me.
Watch for their replacement with highly paid, (at your cost), biased, partisan grifters pushing false dreamed up ‘theories’ from the far reaches of right wing nutville.
Trump with his army of criminals has killed more Americans from both North and South America than Putin ever could have with his pathetic army of criminals and abducted Russians.
You know, I have never understood why no one has ever made a TikTok video contrasting the invasion of Ukraine with the so called invasion of illegal immigrants. One could make hundreds of them. Dead bodies strown up and down a Ukrainian street, people picking oranges. Make these racists shits face up to their pure evil. Posters glued to the light post in WalMarty parking lots.