Since his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services six months ago, RFK Jr. has been on a rampage, dismantling the CDC, gutting Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, and medical research, restricting vaccine access, spreading lies about autism and disease treatment, silencing and firing scientists, and spreading life-threatening misinformation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s catastrophic health care cuts are taking effect, ripping away coverage and hiking costs for millions of Americans. By firing 20,000 employees who prevent infectious disease outbreaks, ensure access to life-saving drugs, and more, RFK Jr. and Donald Trump have created a public health catastrophe that will only worsen as they continue to slash Medicaid, implement cruel new AI-powered review panels for seniors’ health care, and massively increase premium and drug costs for middle-class Americans.
Here’s what to watch for during tomorrow’s Senate Finance Hearing on some key topics:
Vaccines
- Despite “assurances” made to Republican Senators, RFK Jr. has overruled experts on vaccine policy, replacing every member of the CDC’s top vaccine advisory panel with dangerous and unqualified anti-vaccine advocates.
- Despite a new variant of COVID-19 surging across the country, RFK Jr. is cracking down on COVID-19 vaccines, limiting eligibility to require a doctor consultation before vaccination as the FDA approved updated vaccines for the fall season. Now, CVS and Walgreens may be unable to distribute vaccines at all this fall.
- Last Month, RFK Jr. announced HHS would be winding down cutting-edge mRNA vaccine research, pulling funding for research projects developing vaccines for a wide range of diseases, from the common flu and COVID-19 to certain forms of cancer, HIV, and bird flu.
Dismantling HHS and CDC
- Trump and RFK Jr. are working to oust CDC Director Susan Monarez for not supporting the administration’s anti-vaccine agenda. On the same day RFK Jr. fired Monarez, four of the agency’s top leaders quit.
- RFK Jr. has laid off or pushed out more than 20,0000 workers at the CDC, FDA, and other health agencies even as public health threats escalated.
- As measles surged in West Texas earlier this year, Trump’s CDC cuts hampered emergency response efforts.
- As bird flu surged across the country earlier this year, the Trump administration stalled CDC reports on the outbreak.
- Under Trump and RFK Jr.’s purview, the CDC scaled back surveillance of foodborne illnesses.
- Under Trump and RFK Jr.’s purview, the CDC censored public health data and removed critical information from the agency’s website, including data on HIV, hepatitis, STIs, tuberculosis, youth risk behavior, social vulnerability to disease and disasters, mentions of gender, abortion, and more.
Gutting Medical Research
- Trump and RFK Jr. have frozen or eliminated billions of dollars in medical research funding.
- Trump’s proposed budget for next year imposes even larger cuts to medical research, slashing an additional $18 billion from NIH and nearly $5 billion from CDC
- Patient care and cutting-edge research have ground to a halt as hospitals and universities are forced to end clinical trials, including a major initiative to improve treatment for pediatric brain cancer.
Health Care Costs
- Thanks to Trump and Republicans in Congress, premiums are set to skyrocket by an average of 18 percent for over 24.3 million Americans enrolled in affordable ACA Marketplace coverage.
- Around 4.2 million people will become uninsured due to premium tax credits expiring.
- Over 20 million middle-class Americans will pay an average of 75 percent more for their coverage due to the combination of premium increases and loss of tax credits.
- Trump is ripping health care away from over 15 million Americans, including seniors, children, veterans, and people with disabilities, to pay for tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk and large corporations.
- Trump is cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the ACA to pay for handouts to the wealthiest Americans.
- Trump and Republicans in Congress are giving away at least $5 billion to drug companies at the expense of seniors and taxpayers by driving up the cost of prescription drugs for seniors on Medicare.
- Trump and Republicans in Congress are forcing over 5 million people into medical debt by causing families who lose their coverage to take on an average of $22,280 in medical debt when they previously had none.
Restricting Seniors’ Access to Care
- Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced plans to begin a pilot program that would impose prior authorization reviews for traditional Medicare in six states next year.
- Cumbersome prior authorization processes are bad for patients and frequently result in the denial or delay of essential treatments that are currently readily covered by traditional Medicare.
- RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz’s scheme to impose prior authorization on Medicare will involve hiring private companies to use artificial intelligence to determine whether patients should be covered. These AI companies will have a strong financial incentive to deny claims and cut patients off from care because Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.
Autism
- RFK Jr. claims that he has identified specific “interventions” that have caused the increase in autism diagnoses and will be revealing them this month.
- RFK Jr. promised to identify the causes of autism but has eliminated parts of his agency actively investigating them and has cut millions in funding for autism research, leaving the nation’s leading researchers out in the cold while hiring dangerously unqualified conspiracy theorists to investigate the repeatedly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.
- RFK Jr. has cruelly denigrated people with autism and their families, claiming that “autism destroys families” and is an “individual tragedy as well.” He has made bizarre comments about being able to diagnose children with “mitochondrial damage” just by looking at them at the airport. RFK Jr.’s cruel comments and proposals to create a national registry of individuals with autism have led some parents to avoid seeking a diagnosis for their children.