Putting us out of business

Academy Health is the scholarly association of health services researchers. That's what I am, and I have presented at many of their conferences. (I happen to specialize in communication, so I'm also a member of the Academy of Communication in Healthcare and I'm more active in that particular association.) Health services research is just what it sounds like -- studying ways of making health-related services more effective, accessible, and affordable.*

 

So Academy Health has issued a statement in response to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Wacko's testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. For some reason, they're trying to be conciliatory and they headline it with some mumbling about cautious optimism but there isn't actually any reason for that. You can read the whole thing and weep, but I'm just going to single out the piece that affects my colleagues most profoundly. It doesn't affect me very much because I'm semi-retired and I'm no longer actively seeking new funding, but it sure would if this had happened a few years ago.

 

The main source of funding for health services research in the U.S. is called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ. I'm just going to cut and paste the relevant Academy Health statement, which is not giving me reason for cautious optimism. Note that Kennedy blatantly lied, which I believe is called perjury. I'm sure the Department of Justice will be all over it.

 

AcademyHealth is also frustrated and disappointed to hear Secretary Kennedy’s response to Representative Don Beyer’s concern about the unlawful impoundments that have paralyzed the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Secretary Kennedy said: “Dr. Klein, who is running it, who is a Yale-educated physician, who is running AHRQ, still has hundreds of staff, and the agency is operating.” The question is not the credentials of the person at the top, but whether the agency has the grants management, contracting, and scientific staff to execute its statutory functions. It does not.

There are two false statements in his statement. First, it is widely reported that AHRQ does not have “hundreds of staff”, but rather over 85 percent of staff have been removed from the Agency, leaving well under 100 left. These removals have led to the complete and total collapse of the ability of the Agency to manage the extramural grantmaking program that Congress has required of it and that has saved countless lives across the country. That leads to the second false statement, which is that the Agency is operating in any meaningful sense of the word. That’s demonstrably false. Since September, the Agency has not released a single dollar of funding to hundreds of grants that it has already awarded, and has not issued a single new grant in over a year. These impoundments are so significant that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is formally investigating the illegal impoundments breaking the Agency.

Just this past week, we submitted testimony to the House Appropriations Committee laying out the damage that has been done to the Agency and the critical urgency for Congress to ensure that its laws are executed faithfully. You can read it here.

 

 

* The most important way is simple to state: universal, comprehensive, single payer national health care. But that isn't going to happen any time soon.