Regardless of the outcome of the impeachment trial, in the upcoming months the Republican Party will make a pitch to the American people that they would do better for Americans if they are in charge.
However, at times like now, when the country is facing a global epidemic threat to our nation’s collective health, like the Wuhan Coronavirus, it is important to point out that Republicans like Trump would make it harder to respond to contagious outbreaks and bioterrorism.
A good example is the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to repeal and otherwise weaken Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act. One of the aspects of Obamacare that would be gutted by GOP repeal efforts is called the Prevention and Public Health Fund.
Through the ACA, the Prevention and Public Health Fund accounts for nearly one-seventh of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — approximately $1 billion a year.
The Prevention and Public Health Fund currently provides nearly half of the funding for the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program. It supports the efforts of state and local health departments to track outbreaks for conditions like meningitis and foodborne illness. It also helps develop rapid responses to evolving threats such as Ebola and the West Nile virus.
The fund also supports more than 40 percent of the CDC’s immunization program, which protects Americans from contagious illnesses, including outbreaks of measles and the flu. As part of this funding, my state of Maryland received nearly $1 million to build a vaccine safety net for uninsured people to keep them and their communities healthier.
Without these resources, the local capacity to provide emergency services to residents during times of extreme need will be decimated, putting all Americans at risk.
This fund would have been eliminated entirely by the American Health Care Act, or Trumpcare.
Furthermore, Trump’s proposed budget for 2020 would have drastically cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, roughly $5 billion or 13%. Instead, with the omnibus appropriations bill worked out with Congress, NIH funding fortunately increased.
NIH’s second largest unit is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – headed for the past third of a century by well-known immunologist Anthony Fauci. It would see its budget for the current fiscal year set at $5.88 billion, an increase of $362 million. The Trump budget had proposed cutting that unit of NIH by more than $750 million.
It bears repeating — Trump and the Republican Party as a whole have set out an agenda, that potentially exposes the US to greater risk for the outbreak of infectious diseases like the current Coronavirus.
Meanwhile they attack and try to defund Obamacare — and what you won’t hear them mention is all that Obamacare has already done to help the US better handle infectious diseases.
- Forty-nine states, five large cities, the district, and Puerto Rico will receive funds to develop and sustain capacity to participate in meaningful use of electronic health records, e.g. through implementation of electronic laboratory-based reporting according to national standards, allowing for more efficient and effective information exchange within the state and with CDC. Four states will receive additional funding to advance the national implementation of electronic laboratory records specifically addressing healthcare-associated infections (Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina and New Mexico).
- All 50 states, the district, the five largest cities, Puerto Rico and the Republic of Palau will receive funds for the continued support of flexible, cross-cutting public health epidemiology and laboratory staff, equipment, supplies, travel, and training to sustain and improve their capacity to detect and respond to emerging infectious diseases.
Republicans have come up with a lot of reasons to attack and criticize Obamacare. What they never seem to include in discussing their plans to repeal and replace, is how their plans would be better than Obamacare at preparing for and responding to outbreaks like the Coronavirus.
That is because, they simply have no plans at all, and the actions they do take, or intend to take — to weaken Obamacare for example — oftentimes leave us even more vulnerable.
“It’s going to take us longer to discover that people are becoming ill, longer to realize the connection between them, and longer to figure out how to treat them,” says Peter Kyriacopoulos, senior director of public policy at the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “We’ll have more people sick.”