It takes a village to sabotage a healthcare system. Just this week, the GOP has worked diligently to make the unpopular GOP health bill even more heartless by effectively taking away the nearly universally supported ban on pre-existing conditions, which Margot Sanger-Katz at The New York Times points out would create the impressively cruel joke of setting cancer patients up to buy an insurance plan that (surprise!) doesn't have to cover chemotherapy.Meanwhile, Scott Gottlieb, a long-time critic of the FDA's pesky safety regulations, testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee in order to lead the agency. All the while, Tom Price and Seema Verma, heads of the Health and Human Services (HHS) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), respectively, await a vote to require the poor to work for Medicaid in Kentucky, something that's been tried with welfare before and failed to do anything but increase human misery.Who will survive in Trump's America? The answer will be decided not only by elected officials, but appointed ones—Scott Gottlieb at the FDA, Tom Price at HHS, and Seema Verma at CMS. Together, this trio will shred the health care safety net.Read more on Tonic.
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