There’s No Vaccine Against Crazy (Special Episode on Healthcare)
Talking Feds
Harry Litman
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing with our series of subject-specific episodes to gear up for Trump 2.0, a great panel of healthcare policy experts—Dan Diamond, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Kavita Patel—sizes up the critical series of issues about to confront the country. RFK Jr’s potential confirmation to head HHS is an issue in itself, given the huge challenges of the $2 trillion agency. Then there are a serious of potential overhauls in different medical areas to consider, especially vaccines but also ACA, abortion, more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials |
| 0:12.2 | and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. |
| 0:19.3 | I'm Harry Littman. |
| 0:21.2 | With just two weeks to go until Donald Trump takes his second presidential oath of office, |
| 0:27.2 | we continue our series of subject-specific episodes to gear up for Trump 2.0. |
| 0:34.4 | Our focus today is on health care. Whether or not the U.S. Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, |
| 0:44.3 | his nomination alone points to a potential seismic shift in federal health policy under a second Trump administration. |
| 0:53.3 | Kennedy has idiosyncratic views across a range of |
| 0:56.9 | health care areas, beginning of course with vaccines, where he at a minimum has entertained |
| 1:03.4 | non-scientific views, but says he is now not opposed. The chaotic experience of COVID-19 during Trump's first term underscores just how suddenly |
| 1:15.6 | a health care crisis can erupt and dominate an administration's agenda. |
| 1:21.3 | And setting aside Kennedy's eccentric views, is far from clear that he has the chops to run |
| 1:27.1 | the enormous agency with its multiple |
| 1:29.6 | technical missions. Trump, historically disengaged on health care policy, appears ready to hand |
| 1:36.7 | Kennedy free reign, saying, I'm going to let him go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. |
| 1:47.4 | I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on medicines, |
| 1:55.1 | which is exactly what millions of Americans are scared of. To understand what it looks to be a coming 180 degree reversal in federal health care policy, including a rejection of some of the medical |
| 2:02.8 | understandings that have informed it for years, and the potential costs in the health and |
| 2:09.8 | lives of Americans. We have a great roundtable of national experts in the field. And they are. |
| 2:20.5 | Dan Diamond, a national health reporter for the Washington Post, where he focuses on accountability, federal agencies, and public health. He previously |
| 2:26.7 | covered the Trump administration for Politico, where he won a George Polk Award for |
| 2:32.1 | investigating political interference in the pandemic response. |
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