WASHINGTON — Republicans are intent on repealing a public health fund created by the Affordable Care Act — but with President Trump also pursuing a dramatic reduction in domestic spending, lawmakers admit they don’t know if they could make up the losses at one of the nation’s most critical health agencies.
The latest version of the GOP health care bill would end the law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, which provides nearly $1 billion annually, in 2019. Those dollars have become an integral part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget, accounting for one-eighth of its funding and providing more than $300 million for immunizations alone.
Assuming the fund is repealed, the CDC would have a big hole to fill. But Trump has also signaled he wants to boost defense spending and reduce spending for domestic programs by the same amount, potentially more than $50 billion.
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Hmmmm, have we never seen taxpayer money wasted, “lost”, frittered away? Where’s the billion Obama gave them for Zika? According to the CDC, a rather harmless little virus, similar to a cold in the US that had a correlation with microencephaly…in a population that was very poor, and had many contacts with pesticides and other agricultural chemicals, as well as other risk factors. They haven’t come up with this correlation anywhere else, even in neighboring Columbia. Correlation is not necessarily causation. Having friends who grew up in Brazil, who all had Zika and knew of no cases of microencephaly was the first clue. This is the reality of being a government agency, dependent on taxpayer money. The folly is in thinking that only the government agencies can be effective, when so much of the foundation of modern science was funded privately.
“The CDC received . . . $126 million for awareness programs focused on the harms of tobacco use.”
Eliminating this funding would greatly benefit public health (and save taxpayers lots of money) because Obama’s CDC Director Tom Frieden spent much of those funds deceiving the public about, and lobbying to ban the sale and use of lifesaving vapor products to/by 5 million adult smokers who vape and to/by 2.5 million vapers who already quit smoking (according to CDC’s 2015 NHIS data).
During the past 8 years, CDC has done very little to reduce cigarette smoking. Instead, the CDC focused its tobacco control efforts (and wasted a lot of taxpayer money) to manufacture public panics about the negligible risks of nicotine (which is similar to caffeine), vapor products and smokeless tobacco products (which are 99% less harmful than cigarette smoking, and have helped millions of smokers quit), cigars (which are about 90% less harmful than cigarettes), hookah (which is a college fad that has created no known daily hookah smokers), and flavorings in tobacco and vapor products (which CDC wants to ban).
Since 2009 (when Obama’s FDA appointees unlawfully banned vapor products, and when US Customs Agents seized nearly 1,000 shipments of e-cigarettes at US Ports), Obama’s CDC has falsely claimed that e-cigarettes are target marketed to children, are addicting “an entire generation of youth” to nicotine, are gateways to cigarette smoking, are renormalizing cigarette smoking, do NOT help smokers quit smoking, and may be as harmful as cigarette smoking. All of those claims are as false today as they were in 2009, but CDC, FDA, NIDA, and recently SG Murthy continue to repeat those same falsely fear mongering claims over and over and over again, while CDC has given hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local health agencies, to ANR and many other vaping prohibitionists to repeat those false claims to lobby for FDA’s vapor ban and state/local vaping bans.
All of those actions by CDC protect cigarettes, and threaten the lives of addicted cigarette smokers and vapers who have already quit smoking by switching to vapor.
Since none of the facts and evidence about vaping (and our many communications) changed CDC’s anti vaping (and anti tobacco harm reduction) propaganda and lobbying campaigns, perhaps the best way to end CDC public health malpractice is to reduce its budget.
The new version of the ACA: defund any abortion care, get rid of the CDC no more vaccines. Just for starters. Can’t you people stop this? (I’m a Canadian). I don’t want your people to suffer from this mismanagement, and I haven’t read it all. I can say that I don’t want mosquitoes to fly from your country to mine.
On behalf of our Executive Director, Gary Cox and the OKC-County Health Department, we would like to thank Congressman Cole for his work in protecting the health of the public.
On behalf of our Executive Director, Gary Cox and the Oklahoma City-County Health Department we would like to thank Congressman Cole for his support of the protection of the public’s health.