Source: Med Page Today
Healthcare was something of a bit player in President Trump’s address Tuesday night window to a joint session of Congress.
A few mentions of healthcare and related topics came early into the speech, which took place in the House chamber. For example, the president said that the U.S. “withdrew from the corrupt WHO [World Health Organization];” he issued an executive announcing the withdrawal on his first day in office, although it hasn’t been completed yet. He also lambasted HHS for spending $22 billion to provide “free housing and cars for illegal aliens” and the Biden administration for spending “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which no one has ever heard of” and $8 million for “making mice transgender.”
Cultural issues related to healthcare were the most prominent during the speech, especially transgender issues. “I signed an order making it the official policy of U.S. government that there are only two genders: male and female,” the president said, to applause from the Republicans in the chamber. “I also signed an executive order ban men from playing in women’s sports.” He spotlighted Payton McNabb, who was in the gallery; McNabb is a female volleyball player who was injured by a transgender player on an opposing team when she was in high school.
And, Trump noted, “I signed an executive order window banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology. I also signed an order to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in sexual mutilation of our youth.” The latter sentence referred to hospitals and health systems that provide gender-affirming healthcare to minors.
The president added that he wants Congress “to pass a bill banning sex change operations on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body. This is a big lie. Our message to any child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you,” he said, to loud applause from Republicans.
The war on drugs also got a mention during the speech. Mexico and Canada “have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and … destroying families,” Trump said. The two countries, with whom the U.S. has trade deficits, “are, in effect, receiving subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars … the United States will not be doing that any longer.”
Other healthcare topics came up more than an hour into the speech, which lasted about 1 hour and 40 minutes. During his introduction of 13-year-old cancer patient DJ Daniel, Trump said that “Doctors believe his cancer likely came from a chemical he was exposed to when he was younger. Since 1975, rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40%. Reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new Presidential Commission to Make America Healthy Again, chaired by our new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr.” Kennedy was in the audience, along with most of the other cabinet secretaries.
“Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong,” said the president, who also boasted during the speech about “ending all of Biden’s environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.” (Prior to the speech, multiple news outlets reported that the Trump administration was planning to drop a lawsuit against a rubber manufacturer whose Louisiana plant was accused of releasing carcinogens into the air and increasing the cancer risk of local residents.)
Trump noted that “not long ago — you can’t even believe these numbers — one in 10,000 children had autism, and now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong, and we’re going to find out what it is. And there’s nobody better than Bobby and all of the people working with [him] to figure out what is going on.”
On the autism numbers, the president “appears to cite figures from the CDC’s autism monitoring studies, which estimated around 1 in 36 children had autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2020, up from 1 in 150 in 2000,” according to CBS News. But the article said that the rise in estimates may not stem from an increase in cases. The CDC says “it is unclear how much this is due to changes to the clinical definition of ASD (which may include more people than previous definitions) and better efforts to diagnose ASD (which would identify people with ASD who were not previously identified).”
Trump did not refer in his speech to Medicare or Medicaid, although he previously said he wouldn’t cut either program in order to pay for tax cuts. Several Democrats who attended the speech held up small signs reading “Save Medicaid,” a reference to some Republican House members’ proposals to trim the Medicaid program in order to pay for the cuts.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who gave the Democratic response, mentioned healthcare only once, saying that “Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on [Trump’s tax cut] proposals doesn’t work without going after your healthcare.”
