Trump's health policies may have killed more than a million Americans
Publicly released: Thu 11 Feb 2021 at 1601 AEDT | Thu 11 Feb 2021 at 1801 NZDT
Peer-reviewed Systematic review Opinion piece/editorial People What do these mean? Peer-reviewed:This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts. Systematic review:This type of study is a structured approach to reviewing all the evidence to answer a specific question. It can include a meta-analysis which is a statistical method of combining the data from multiple studies to get an overall result. Opinion piece/editorial:This work is based on the opinions of the author(s)/institution. People:This is a study based on research using people.
CC.O
Trump may be out, but his health policies remain, and US researchers suggest they may have caused nearly a million unnecessary deaths pre-COVID-19, and tens of thousands after the pandemic hit. They say that without Trump, 461,000 fewer Americans would have died annually, and 40 per cent of US deaths during 2020 from COVID-19 could have been avoided. Additionally, they estimate that Trump's rollbacks of environmental protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone. The researchers suggest that going back to pre-Trump health policies likely won't cut it, and the entire US health system should be dramatically reformed.
Media release
From: The Lancet
The Lancet: New report details devastating impact of the Trump administration’s health-harming policies, calls for sweeping reforms
* First comprehensive assessment of damage to health inflicted by former President Trump cites decades of policy failures made worse by the Trump administration, resulting in 461,000 unnecessary US deaths annually before the COVID-19 pandemic, and tens of thousands of unnecessary COVID-19 and pollution-related deaths attributable to his actions.
* Lancet Commission calls for immediate rollback of Trump’s health-harming policies and additional sweeping reforms to reverse the deteriorating health of the US population: “The path away from Trump’s politics of anger and despair cannot lead through past policies.”
The first comprehensive assessment of the health effects of Donald Trump’s presidency is published today in The Lancet revealing devastating impacts on every aspect of health in the USA. The Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era [1] also traces the policy failures that preceded and fueled Trump’s ascent and left the USA lagging behind other high-income nations on life expectancy.
In new analyses, the Commission finds that 461,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2018, and 40% of US deaths during 2020 from COVID-19 would have been averted if the USA had death rates equivalent to those of the other G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom). The report also estimates that Trump’s rollbacks of environmental protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone.
The Commission finds that US life expectancy began trailing other high-income nations’ in about 1980 as President Ronald Reagan initiated anti-government, wealth-concentrating policies that reversed many of the advances of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Reagan’s political philosophy, known as neo-liberalism, has continued to influence US health and economic policy under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Many Trump policies, including tax cuts and deregulation that benefit the wealthy and corporations, austerity for the poor, and privatization of Medicare, emulate Reagan’s.
The report warns that a return to pre-Trump era policies is not enough to protect health. Instead, sweeping reforms are needed to redress long-standing racism, and the four-decades of policy failures that weakened social and health safety nets and led to widened inequality.
The Commission emphasizes that these failures left the USA particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cuts in funding for public health agencies led to the loss of 50,000 front line staff vital to fighting epidemics between 2008 and 2016. The fragmented and profit-oriented health-care system was ill-prepared to prioritize and coordinate pandemic response. Nearly 11% of Americans suffered food insecurity, increasing their risk of obesity and diabetes, and hence death from COVID-19. And housing crowding due to poverty helped spread infection in communities of color with poor access to medical care.
The report notes that prior to the pandemic, midlife mortality for Native and Black Americans was 59% and 42% higher, respectively, than for non-Hispanic white people. The pandemic has widened the Black:white mortality gap by 50%, and has cut Latinx life expectancy by more than 3.5 years. Mortality rates from COVID-19 for people of color are 1.2-3.6 times higher than for non-Hispanic white people. Opioid deaths, a leading cause of death prior to the pandemic that was increasing fastest among middle-aged Black men, have increased in 40 out of 50 states since the emergence of COVID-19.
The report also condemns Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) and defunding of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) – bodies critical for pandemic response globally – and his undermining of global health efforts prior to the pandemic.
“While the USA ranks highly in its global health security index, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how woefully inadequate the country’s health care and public health system has been in protecting the nation’s health. The COVID-19 pandemic has exploited existing health and social inequalities and nowhere is this more apparent than in the USA. At moments of instability, the world needs a strong USA, bolstered by a healthy population, to lead a global response,” says Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief, The Lancet. [2]
“Americans’ health was deteriorating even as our economy was booming,” says Dr Steffie Woolhandler, who co-chairs the Commission with Dr David U. Himmelstein, and who both serve as Distinguished Professors at the City University of New York at Hunter College and Lecturers in Medicine at Harvard. “This unprecedented decoupling of health from national wealth signals that our society is sick. While the wealthy have thrived, most Americans have lost ground, both economically and medically. The Biden administration must reboot democracy and implement the progressive social and health policies needed to put the country on the road to better health.” [2]
President Trump exploited chronic ill health and deeply entrenched inequalities
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
