Donald Trump has destroyed US public health with breathtaking speed. Here’s what’s coming next, and how Canada can prepare.
Since the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, the greatest health sciences organizations in the world have been first silenced, then frozen or outright destroyed. The scale, speed and stupidity of the destruction have been breathtaking.
The Trump regime is doing this to its own people, especially those in states that voted for Trump, but the shock is being felt around the world.
It is a safe prediction that Trump’s attack on health science will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. And millions of lives will be diminished.
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And how will Canada fare when Trump’s tariff wars affect the costs of drugs and vaccines? We’ll be bombarded with fake news on social media platforms, and Canadian researchers will be under intense pressure to develop domestic equivalents to the immense pharmacopoeia the United States has built up in the past 80 years.
No, actually this is the benefit of collective bargaining. When you have a single entity that represents millions of customers, you can say “we’ll take this, but only if you drop the price by half and not raise it for ten years” versus an insurance company that is not only incentivized to take a cut, but often only represents thousands, with the biggest that represents hundreds of thousands being able to point at the little guys and say “we’re still cheaper than them” even if they still charge a hundred dollars a month for insulin.
This is one of the advantages of public healthcare, and why it’s so important we preserve it. Hell, it benefits those that go to private hospitals as well, as everybody benefits from the lower drug prices, not just those who go to public hospitals. Well, except those that sell the drugs, but that’s why so many conservative leaders try to cut public healthcare, because they’re in bed with somebody in the distribution chain, and even if they’re not, they’re easy to bait into taking such measures.