Of the many phony claims made by the current president, few are more outlandish that his promise to “Make America Healthy Again.” After appointing a conspiracy-theorist attorney with a long track record of wildly inaccurate claims to head Health and Human Services, trump has been full steam ahead in attacking the health of Americans.
The title of this piece is probably a more accurate expression of what “MAHA” really means.
Does that statement seem exaggerated? Fine. Let’s lay out the case, point by point.
THE DENIGRATION OF THE NURSING PROFESSION. As outlined in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that trump demanded, Nursing is no longer classified a profession. This will make student loans harder to come by, discourage talented potential candidates from pursuing a career in nursing, and serve to further diminish the value of one of the most overworked and underappreciated professions in the country.
For the record, nursing absolutely is a profession. It requires brains, compassion, resolve, and muscle. Don’t think so? Try moving a 400-pound patient who’s thrashing, hitting, and swearing at you. This is what nurses deal with daily.
trump and junior couldn’t last 5 minutes in nursing.
America already has a shortage of nurses. “MAHA” is only making it worse.
THE HYPOCRISY OF FOOD SAFETY. Under trump, our ability to trace contaminated food has been made more difficult, school meal standards for salt and sugar have been rolled back, foodborne illness tracing has been gutted, and work-rules for meat and poultry processing loosened, all threatening food quality and safety.
This, of course, comes from an administration that claims to be focused on a healthy diet. The facts speak otherwise. Oh, yes, red dyes have been removed and a super-sweet corn syrup has been replaced by super-sweet cane sugar. Whoop-di-doo. It pales in comparison to the damage that’s been done.
WORSENING NURSING HOME CARE. Skilled nursing care/Long Term Care (LTC)—call it nursing home care, if you’d like—is becoming increasingly important as America ages. Go ahead, tell yourself you’ll never need it, and neither will anyone else in your family. You’re probably wrong.
Across the country, as LTCs have been gobbled up by venture capital groups, nursing staffs have been severely cut, and quality compromised. Under the last administration, standards were set for staffing minimum ratios. Those have now been gutted under “MAHA,” placing patients at risk.
In addition, 28% of all LTC caregivers are immigrants. How many are undocumented (or “illegal,” if you’re into that sort of judgmental thinking)? It’s hard to say, but the numbers are unlikely to be insignificant. And that doesn’t count those in food services, housekeeping, etc.
As ICE raids continue to become more aggressive, at what point will they enter health facilities? At what point will they impact the availability of care?
Again, hard to say. But if ICE drags away a caregiver and leaves your relative lying in a soiled bed that was about to be cleaned, remember that’s what you voted for.
KILLING AFFORDABLE INSURANCE. Say what you want about the Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obama-Care, whatever you want to call it), but 20 million previously uninsured Americans are now covered with basic insurance. But that may not last long.
trump—who seems to have an almost insane hatred for anything Obama did—has been working tirelessly to destroy the ACA. The Big Beautiful Bill is a step in this direction. Without assistance, millions will now be unable to afford coverage, or at best afford only what can be described as “junk insurance”—insurance with coverage so poor and with such high deductibles, as to render it largely unusable.
Cheap, affordable, and useless.
Make no mistake. A lack of insurance kills people. Preventative care gets avoided, and emergency care is delayed—often until it’s too late. Thousands of lives are now at risk. Thank you, MAHA.
KILLING RURAL HOSPITALS. Rural hospitals already deal with reduced revenue, higher rates of uninsurance, higher rates of Medicaid, and older patients than their urban counterparts. By ruthlessly promoting Medicare Advantage ( which especially harms rural hospitals), throwing more people off the ACA, and negatively impacting long term care, MAHA is severely threatens care for rural America.
DEI or DIE? The facts are straightforward, and we’ve known them for years—in America, your sex, your race, where you live, where you work, and what you do can be important factors in your health. But oftentimes it’s not clear why. Trying to understand these issues has always been important.
At least until now. Today, research in the areas of health disparities has been halted, and government websites scrubbed of related information. Apparently, truth and scientific facts are now considered “woke.”
Tracking disease outbreaks and progression is now much harder. Understanding contributing circumstances to disease spread will be hampered. Those of us who are caregivers will be hamstrung.
AIR AND WATER POLLUTION. Regulations related to limiting air pollution have been gutted, and water pollution standards skewered. The proven science of man-made climate change has either been denied, or simply ignored in favor of short-term corporate profits. Your kid has asthma? Sorry, not nearly as important as a coal company’s bottom line.
Those who have followed junior’s early career as an environmental lawyer might think he would have something to say about all of this. But so far, there hasn’t been a peep. Apparently, his environmental values aren’t nearly as deep as his fealty to trump, without whom junior would just be yesterday’s news, much like any other former drug dealer with a worm-addled brain.
KILLING RESEARCH AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. Basic research, not just regarding vaccines (we’ll get to that next), but across the fields of biological sciences, has been slashed. Programs have been eliminated. Information stifled. Truth subverted. Funding for such absurd research programs as cancer treatment has been eliminated.
Not that this is unexpected. junior has been saying crazy stuff for a long time. Polio isn’t caused by a virus, but by “toxins.” AIDS has nothing to do with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), it’s just “lifestyle.”
Then there’s that part about swimming in sewage-polluted water.
For all practical purposes, junior doesn’t believe in germ theory. Oh, he’d probably deny it. But his actions tell the story.
Maybe we should detour just a moment and talk about Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. In the 1850s, Dr. Semmelweis noted that women who delivered babies with the help of doctors who had recently treated other women with pelvic infections quickly developed the same infections and died. Semmelweis came up with a radical idea.
There were tiny organisms, he said, in the bodies of the infected women called “germs.” Doctors were transmitting the germs. Semmelweis told them they needed to do something different.
Wash their hands.
They thought he was crazy. But women who were cared for by physicians who actually washed their hands saw a dramatic reduction in mortality. A few years later, newly developed microscopes were able to clearly identify those germs. Our entire approach of washing, disinfecting, and yes, even mask wearing, arise from the work of Dr. Semmelweis.
Today we recognize him for what he did for women and the entire field of health care.
Well, most of us do. Apparently not junior.
It’s not germs. It’s all nutrition, or lifestyle, or toxins, or whatever. I’d like to know what junior was doing with himself during junior high science.
Then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
Which brings us to:
VACCINES. A full discussion of junior’s insane tirade against vaccines would take days, but I’ll only hit the high points. He doesn’t think they work.
Spoiler alert. They do. Disease after disease, from small pox to polio to tetanus have been virtually eliminated. The fall in cervical cancer since the introduction of the HPV vaccine has been so dramatic, we may be able to eliminate it in the next generation. Some countries already appear to have wiped it out.
Still, junior doesn’t think vaccines are safe. Spoiler alert. They are. Although very rare serious complications can occur, you’re more likely to get struck by lightning.
Of course, this hasn’t kept junior from distorting reality. His hand-picked panel seems hellbent on delaying or excluding vaccines from children. Hepatitis B is a potentially fatal virus that can be picked up during childbirth or shortly afterward from blood exposure, nail clippings, or other environmental surfaces that’ve been contaminated by blood or body fluids. 90% of infants infected at or around the time of birth will go on to develop either cirrhosis or liver cancer. That’s why we give it to the child soon after they’re born. They quickly develop immunity, and side effects are virtually non-existent.
But junior insists it shouldn’t be given until later. Why? Just because.
If you look at the facts you can tell junior is off-base. When Hep B vaccines were simply “recommended” or implemented for populations deemed “high risk,” significant numbers of children still got infected. After Hep B vaccine was added to the routine newborn immunization schedule, hepatitis B infections dropped by 99%, a remarkable achievement. This is what junior wants to take away.
The fact that millions of Americans buy into junior’s dishonest claims that vaccines aren’t properly vetted and then go out and pay outrageous dollars for all kinds of bogus vitamins, supplements, cleanses, and other potions, which have far less research to back them up, would be funny if it weren’t so deadly.
Influenza is real. RSV is real. They can kill you. And if they don’t, you can spread them to someone you love, and it may kill or severely disable them.
Think about that.
And this just in. Recent research indicates a significantly lower rate of Alzheimer’s dementia in patients who’ve received the shingles vaccine. Nothing about it from junior, though.
And of course, there’s COVID. I’ve written about that plenty of times (references at the bottom). But let’s add one more thing. The current junior-controlled CDC claims it’s written a memo describing 12 children who died from the COVID vaccine.
What children? When? Where? Or for that matter, what memo? They won’t say. Usually, such concerns would be immediately released, reviewed by peers, and validated. Apparently, that’s not important anymore.
Suffice it to say Americans will die because of our steps backward in science and medicine. “MAHA” is proving to be nothing more than hollow words. Even if we move on in the next election, it’ll still take years to make up our lost ground.
It’s going to be a rough ride. Hopefully, someday we can recover, and actually move forward toward a healthy America.
Brilliant! Thanks. A special shout out for putting your tribute to nurses first. Barb Braden is applauding you. She worked heroically for decades to transform nursing education and gain for nurses the respect they so deserve.
Thank you, Eileen. Barb was a true American hero. She would be appalled to see what Trump is doing. Of course, we all are.