Liz Borkowski
lborkowski
Posts by this author
October 27, 2017
A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Vox's Sean Illing interviews Nikole Hannah-Jones: “Schools are segregated because white people want them that way"
Roxane Gay in the New York Times: Dear Men: It's You, Too
Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post: ‘Let us do our job…
October 4, 2017
We made it to October without letting Congressional Republicans ravage our healthcare system, so that's a relief. However, the fact that it's October also means funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program and federally qualified health centers has expired ... and Congress has been putting…
September 24, 2017
Many of us were cheered by Senator John McCain’s announcement of his opposition to the horrible Graham-Cassidy bill that would gut Medicaid and wreck the individual insurance market. But Senate Republicans could still pass this bill, and will keep trying until the clock runs out at midnight…
September 17, 2017
Republican Senators have proposed one more bill to repeal the ACA. The Graham-Cassidy (or Cassidy-Graham) proposal would dramatically shrink the pool of federal money going to healthcare and revise how it’s distributed to states, in a way that is especially damaging to states that accepted the ACA’…
September 11, 2017
First, some important pieces related to hurricanes:
Cindy George in the Houston Chronicle: City's underserved population foresees uneven recovery
Aaron Caroll & Austin Frakt at the New York Times' Upshot: The Long-Term Health Consequences of Hurricane Harvey
Lisa Rein in the Washington Post:…
August 28, 2017
Last week’s New York Times featured a great article on a syphilis outbreak in Oklahoma. Reporter Jan Hoffman documented some of the impressive work state health investigators are doing to contain the outbreak, from using Facebook to discern likely transmission routes to showing up at the homes of…
August 25, 2017
As the Trump Administration proposes slashing federal agency budgets and calls for “deconstruction of the administrative state,” it’s worth reminding ourselves of the many valuable contributions federal employees make to public health. One good way to do that is to read about the honorees of the…
August 21, 2017
by Dominika Heusinkveld, MD, MPH Researchers at NASA and the University of Arizona, among others, are hoping to make real-time air quality forecasting a reality in the next few years. The NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, or HAQAST, is collaborating with health departments, county…
August 15, 2017
A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker: When Should a Child Be Taken from His Parents?
Brian Rinker at STAT: 32 churches and no methadone clinic: struggling with addiction in an opioid ‘treatment desert’
Renee Bracey Sherman in the New York Times: The…
August 7, 2017
In late July, while many of us were preoccupied with Republican Senators’ attacks on healthcare, the Trump administration released its first regulatory agenda (technically, the Current Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions). These routine updates are published so the public can see…
July 31, 2017
Like millions of others, I was hugely relieved to get the news early Friday morning that three Republican Senators had joined 48 of their Democratic and Independent colleagues to vote down the third Republican proposal to take healthcare away from millions of people. Now’s a good time to think…
July 24, 2017
Members of the public health community are aware of many of the ways the Trump administration and the 115th Congress are hindering and reversing evidence-based actions for public health – from an executive order requiring agencies to scrap two regulations each time they create a new one to…
July 16, 2017
Remember in the bad old days before the Affordable Care Act, when those who bought individual plans on the private market faced unpleasant surprises – like finding at out very inopportune times that their plans didn’t cover hospitalization or maternity care, or that they’d reached a lifetime limit…
July 10, 2017
While much public attention is (appropriately) focused on the Senate bill that would shred the Medicaid program, House Freedom Caucus members are pushing a proposal to shred other parts of the social safety net: welfare, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and food stamps, or…
July 5, 2017
The Congressional Budget Office’s initial score of the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” calculated that 22 million people, 15 million of them Medicaid beneficiaries, would lose health insurance by 2026. For Medicaid recipients, though, the picture worsens steadily after that ten-year…
June 30, 2017
Kim Krisberg has already ably described how the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” would gut Medicaid while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest, so I want to emphasize a few key points that are worth bearing in mind.
The Congressional Budget Office score of the Senate bill finds that…
June 19, 2017
We’ve written extensively (e.g., here, here, here, and here) about the problems with Congressional Republicans’ healthcare legislation, which would gut Medicaid and make it far harder for older people to afford individual health insurance plans, all in order to fund tax cuts that benefit the…
June 16, 2017
Because there’s so much at stake as the Senate considers the American Health Care Act, here are some important articles on healthcare legislation:
Andy Slavitt in the Washington Post: The Senate’s three tools on health care: Sabotage, speed and secrecy
Dylan Scott at Vox: Senate Republicans are…
June 6, 2017
Like Celeste, I'm appalled and ashamed that President Trump is withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement. Failing to take meaningful action to address global climate disruption has severe consequences for public health.
In addition to supporting the US entities and many right-thinking…
May 29, 2017
In early May, House Republicans rushed to pass an amended version of the American Health Care Act (HR 1628) without waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to give them an estimate of how it would affect health insurance coverage nationwide. Now, CBO has released a score that shows just how…
May 15, 2017
A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Nina Martin and Renee Montagne for ProPublica and NPR: The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth
Elizabeth Dawes Gay at Rewire: Could Increasing the Number of Black Health-Care Providers Fix Our Maternal Health Problem?
Vann R. Newkirk II in…
May 8, 2017
Last week, 217 Republican members of the House of Representatives passed a bill that, if it becomes law, will leave millions of people without health insurance. We don’t have a good grasp of how many millions will be harmed, because they were in too much of a hurry to wait for an estimate from the…
May 1, 2017
Back in March, House Republicans pulled the unpopular and highly problematic American Health Care Act from consideration, and House Minority Leader Paul Ryan declared “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Now, however House Republicans are trying again to undo the Affordable Care Act. Last week,…
April 24, 2017
In September 2016, Alex Campbell and Katie J.M. Baker reported on an in-depth BuzzFeed News investigation that found Baltimore County detectives often failed to investigate rape reports. They wrote:
The Baltimore County Police Department is one of a number of law enforcement agencies nationwide…
April 20, 2017
A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Michael Westerhaus, Amy Finnegan, Jennifer Goldsmith, Evan Lyon, Casey Fox, and Michelle Morse at STAT: Social justice should be a key part of educating health professionals
Scott Tong for Marketplace: Critics say HONEST Act undercuts EPA’s use of…
April 11, 2017
The House of Representatives has passed two bills that, if they clear the Senate and are signed by President Trump, will make it much harder for EPA to do the important work of analyzing, warning about, and regulating health threats in the environment. The HONEST Act, introduced by House Committee…
April 3, 2017
In the 18 days between House Republicans’ introduction of the American Health Care Act and its withdrawal, women’s health was in the spotlight. With House Speaker Paul Ryan now stating that he’s going to try again on legislation to “replace” the Affordable Care Act, it’s worth looking at some of…
March 27, 2017
Many of us breathed sighs of relief on Friday when House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the withdrawal of legislation to roll back the Affordable Care Act. The bill, the American Health Care Act, would have resulted in 24 million people losing insurance and $880 billion less for Medicaid over the next…
March 20, 2017
A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:
Sarah Kliff & Ezra Klein at Vox: The Lessons of Obamacare
Chris Ladd in Forbes: Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage in the US
Donelle Eller in the Des Moines Register: Iowa pollution enforcement could lose big under Trump EPA…
March 13, 2017
House Republicans have released –and rushed through two committees—the American Health Care Act, which would result in destabilized individual insurance markets and millions of people losing health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office hasn’t yet released its estimate of the likely impacts,…