Former President Donald Trump stands accused of inciting a riot that left at least five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured.
But according to a new report from The Lancet, a respected medical journal, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the harm that Trump did to public health during his time in office.
Released today, the 49-page report ticks off the health effects of Trump’s policies on everything from the environment to taxes to Covid-19. And the results aren’t pretty.
Soon after Trump took office in 2017, The Lancet established the Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era to study the health impact of his decisions in the White House. Over the past four years, the commission analyzed his policies as they took shape while seeking to place them in a broader historical context.
They found that Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic caused tens of thousands of deaths that might have been avoided if the country’s response had been more effectively coordinated.
“I think the huge number of deaths from Covid, compared to the other G7 wealthy nations, was striking,” said Steffie Woolhandler, a co-chairman of the committee and a distinguished professor at Hunter College in New York.
But even before the pandemic, the report found, Trump’s attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act had increased the number of uninsured Americans by two million to three million people.
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His trillion-dollar tax cuts primarily benefited high-income Americans, while stripping the federal government of resources that it had used to pay for social-welfare programs.
“Even prior to the pandemic,” said Woolhandler, a physician, “the United States’ policies had so thoroughly failed to provide the conditions to protect health that 461,000 people who died in 2018 would have survived if our death rate were the same as other healthy nations.”
Yet she noted that many of the United States’ public health problems predated not only the pandemic, but also the Trump administration. In many cases, the authors wrote, the health decline under Trump was only a continuation of a broader trend — one that seems to have begun in the early 1980s.
“In 1980, life expectancy in the United States was the same as in all our developed nation counterparts — Germany, France, Japan,” said Kevin Grumbach, a member of the commission and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “Every year since 1980, the U.S. started falling farther and farther behind these other nations. So now we are three or four years behind the average life expectancy of these other nations.”
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Grumbach, who is also a physician, said that over the same period, the cost of health care had risen far more quickly in the United States than in other nations — a trend that Trump contributed to. The report found that his administration increased the privatization of government health programs like Medicare, most likely leading to a rise in costs for consumers.
The report also concluded that by loosening scores of regulations, Trump caused environmental harm that led to the deaths of over 22,000 people in 2019 alone. That was significantly more than had died for similar reasons in 2016.
“That was very surprising, because it’s one area the United States has been improving on in recent decades,” Woolhandler said. “And Trump very quickly managed to reverse the progress.”
The New York Times
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