With policy developments in health and science coming fast and furious these days, it can be hard to suss out what’s happening in the now — Is Obamacare being repealed? Revised? Maybe just renamed? — let alone the long game.
But a good source list can go a long way toward answering those questions. These Tweeps have their ears to the ground about what Donald Trump and congressional colleagues have in store for the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, health care, and more.
In no particular order, here are 10 people to follow — and in handy list form here.
The party insider: @Avik
A longtime GOP adviser, Avik Roy served as health policy adviser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and has also worked with former Texas Governor Rick Perry and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Now he runs a newly launched think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, which in its first white paper took aim at health care reform.
The policy wonk: @ScottGottliebMD
Dr. Scott Gottlieb is one of the foremost conservative thinkers on all sorts of issues important to pharma: health care pricing, the FDA, and more. He’s fair-minded — oh, and also rumored to be informally advising the Trump transition team.
The one-man aggregator: @charlesornstein
ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein is an avid tweeter, but perhaps more importantly, he follows the right people, surfacing key insights from the Twittersphere before they make it to the headlines.
The long-timer: @newtgingrich
The former House speaker and Trump adviser isn’t a frequent tweeter, but now that his man is in the White House, expect more tweets indicating policy stances — and fewer calling for Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The pharma diviner: @DonnaYoungDC
Donna Young has been covering biotech and pharma in D.C. for years, currently as a senior reporter for S&P Global. She’s an endless stream of info, especially for those watching for news affecting the FDA, Health and Human Services, and other agencies, which can be harder to find amid the stream of Obamacare updates these days.
The money man: @StephenMoore
Stephen Moore, a Trump economic adviser, is former president of the Club for Growth, ex-chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, and vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act who is expected to be in the loop as Trump “repeals and replaces” it.
The loyalist: @RealBenCarson
The former Republican candidate has remained close to Trump and told journalists back in March that he’d been promised a role in the administration, “certainly in an advisory capacity,” if Trump won. In recent days his name has been whispered as a potential secretary of HHS.
The sharp mind: @lanheechen
Part of Lanhee Chen’s work at the Hoover Institution focuses on health care policy, and he knows his stuff: He was an adviser to Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and before that the policy director for the Romney-Ryan presidential campaign in 2012.
The provocateur: @mfcannon
Michael Cannon is the director of health policy studies for the libertarian Cato Institute, a voluminous tweeter on everything from insurance companies to Veterans Affairs to the ACA, and not afraid to call people out when he disagrees with their take.
The explainer: @chrisjacobsHC
As the founder of Juniper Research Group, Chris Jacobs gets paid by people to write policy explainers (among other things) — but he does a lot of that for free on Twitter, as it turns out, fact-checking the ins and outs of Obamacare repeal.
This story originally misstated Donna Young’s affiliation. It has been updated.
I’m disappointed in STAT. This is a list that includes a handful of conservative experts, but also a few hyper-partisan users who distort the facts. Why not more down-the-middle journalists, like your own Dylan Scott? It reads as a very sychophantic way to welcome the new administration.
Except for Charles Ornstein, this list is saturated with individuals with a strong conservative/libertarian bias. Although that may fit with the views of the incoming administration, shouldn’t there be some representation of views that would better define the problems with the changes to be made?