Offered wthout comment

This is a summary of the report of the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era. You can read the entire report for free but you have to register. The Lancet is one of the two or three foremost medical journals in the world. The authors are some two dozen prominent medical and public health researchers and analysts. I have nothing to add.

This report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era assesses the repercussions of President Donald Trump's health-related policies and examines the failures and social schisms that enabled his election. Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally. Although his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, he weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2·3 million, even before the mass dislocation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has accelerated the privatisation of government health programmes. Trump's hostility to environmental regulations has already worsened pollution—resulting in more than 22 000 extra deaths in 2019 alone—hastened global warming, and despoiled national monuments and lands sacred to Native people. Disdain for science and cuts to global health programmes and public health agencies have impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and imperil advances against HIV and other diseases. And Trump's bellicose trade, defence, and foreign policies have led to economic disruption and threaten an upswing in armed conflict.

 

I will add, although it should hardly be necessary to point this out, that public policies have an impact on public health. Public health researchers study these impacts, and offer their findings and expertise to the public. They don't decide what happens, unless they happen to hold government office, but they have every right, indeed a responsibility, to speak out publicly. One of the most grotesque developments on the right in past decades is the denigration and rejection of science and expertise. There are people who know more than you do about most subjects. You should listen to them. 

Also, The Lancet is a British Journal but the authors of this report are Americans.