Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: Lessons From Wuhan On How To End The Pandemic; Postponing Abortions Is Medically Negligent
Xinyan Yu is a journalist from Wuhan based in Washington.Patients waiting to be tested, health-care workers making masks and face shields made from scratch, people getting laid off as the economy stumbles and government leaders struggling to assuage the panic. This is what New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, looks like today. And this was what my hometown Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China, looked like two months ago. (Xinyan Yu, 3/26)
As attempts to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic go, here鈥檚 a reprehensible one: the effort by some conservative states to halt abortions by arguing that they are 鈥渘onessential鈥 medical procedures. Sounds ridiculous, but that鈥檚 the way officials in Ohio and Texas have interpreted emergency health orders intended to conserve medical equipment and gear needed for hospitals during the crisis. It should be obvious that an abortion can鈥檛 be 鈥減ostponed鈥 until the pandemic clears up like a facelift or cataract surgery or routine dental work. If a woman doesn鈥檛 get an abortion in a timely fashion, she can鈥檛 get it at all. (3/27)
After watching so many on the right deny the science of climate change for so many years, I am not remotely surprised to now see so many 鈥渃onservatives鈥 denying the reality of the novel coronavirus. I am, however, shocked to see that the 鈥減ro-life鈥 movement is so willing to sacrifice the lives of the elderly and ailing in a sick attempt to restart the U.S. economy while we are struggling with more coronavirus cases than any other country. Apparently, the right-wing devotion to life ends at birth. (Max Boot, 3/37)
In the time of coronavirus, it may be difficult to find things to be thankful for. But we know of one:聽the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Highly controversial, though it should not be, and the subject of much emotion, though it should not be, the law is pretty much solely responsible for approximately 26 million people, or about 8% of the population, having health insurance today. And, oh yes, it turned 10聽this week. (3/26)
Ten years have passed since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and the law has been more or less fully deployed for six. In practice, although it may have made health care more accessible to some, it did so at the cost of making it less affordable and worse quality for many others. (Adam Brandon, 3/26)
Mistakes were made. Lies were told. The body count kept rising. President Lyndon Johnson knew the war in Vietnam was a fiasco. But he believed American 聽prestige was on the line. And he didn鈥檛 want to be the first president to lose a war. 鈥淚 know we oughtn鈥檛 to be there,鈥 he told Senator Eugene McCarthy in a February 1966 phone call. 鈥淏ut I can鈥檛 get out.鈥 ...Johnson may have misjudged Vietnam, but at least he was acting, in part, on behalf of what he perceived to be the national interest. Trump鈥檚 response to Covid-19 runs strictly on personal pathology. The failure to obtain basic equipment, including masks and ventilators, is akin to sending soldiers off to war without rifles. His initial falsehoods about the imminent spread of the virus, like his consistent inconsistency, reflects Trump鈥檚 perception of his self-interest as well as his lifelong recourse to make-believe. (Francis Wilkinson, 3/26)
Sure, it鈥檚 fun to be an 18-year-old, high on $2 margaritas and your own sense of immortality, swearing that COVID-19 won鈥檛 kick you off the beach during spring break. I guess it鈥檚 also fun to be Sen. Rand Paul and have easy access to a COVID-19 test, unlike millions of Americans, but then decide you don鈥檛 need to quarantine while you wait for the results to come back, so you can possibly spread the virus around the aged Senate. Paul, as he鈥檚 fond of telling people, is a doctor. A self-licensed eye doctor, but someone more or less medicine-adjacent, who voted against the first coronavirus aid package because he was piqued that it didn鈥檛 include plans to get out of Afghanistan. What a statesman, right? The campaign commercials against him in 2022 will write themselves. (Linda Blackford, 3/25)
Those of us who served in the intelligence community knew this day was coming. The day when President Donald Trump's near total disregard for intelligence professionals would eventually affect every American. Personally, I thought Trump's willful blindness might manifest itself in a failure to heed signs of an imminent terrorist strike, military assault or state-sponsored cyberattack. Instead, the missed warnings pointed to a pandemic that has so far resulted in over 82,000 infected Americans and over 1,100 dead here at home. (Frank Figliuzzi, 3/27)
Acting Port Everglades Director Glenn Wiltshire faces a terrible choice. Should he allow a cruise ship with sick passengers to dock Monday in Broward County, which already is a coronavirus hotspot? Or should he refuse and leave the 1,243 passengers 鈥 305 of them Americans 鈥 to an uncertain fate? (3/26)
For people reckoning with the possibility of adored elders dying alone, it might seem irrelevant what, exactly, causes them to draw their last breath. But it isn鈥檛 irrelevant. We know from life experience that people care very much about the minute details of every element of a serious illness, from the day of diagnosis to the moment of death. Today, families and friends of 200,000 seniors living in Florida鈥檚 eldercare facilities are barred from visiting, because Gov. DeSantis closed these places to visitors to protect residents and their caregivers from exposure to the coronavirus. It was a wise and proper public safety measure for which the governor is to be commended. (3/26)
