Mike the Mad Biologist

A longtime Republican goal has been to eliminate funding for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and last week the forces of evil made significant advances (boldface mine):

The agency’s justification was essentially that his research now didn’t align with its priorities, which the letter noted includes “solution-oriented approaches in health disparities research.” Yet Grant’s project focused on how to better coordinate care for people with multiple chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure, who face social barriers to care—such as not being able to afford transportation or food.

Similar terminations of ongoing grants went out this week to dozens of other scientists funded by AHRQ, a small federal agency focused on studying the quality of U.S. health care. The projects’ topics ranged from better coordinating kidney transplantation to reducing delays in diagnosing blood clots.

As of Friday afternoon, more than 70 projects that had won an estimated $185 million in funding commitments had received these “nonaward” notices, according to AcademyHealth, a research advocacy group that has been tracking them. That’s roughly half of all the active grants AHRQ had listed this week.

“This does not make sense,” says AcademyHealth CEO Aaron Carroll. The funding for these grants has already been appropriated for this fiscal year, in a “budget that was passed by both houses of this Congress, signed by the current president of the United States,” he says. “If I were Congress, I’d be livid.” Although AHRQ has recently been a target of Republicans who see its work as wasteful, the Republican-controlled Congress had approved $345 million in funding for the agency for this fiscal year….

Asked about the notices sent out this week, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversee AHRQ, said the grants “were not terminated” but “they were not awarded continued funding.”

Data scientist Scott Delaney of Grant Witness, a group formed to track the termination of grants by President Donald Trump’s administration, says these “non award” notices are “terminations in different clothes.” He suspects the notices are worded this way because the administration is looking for other legal strategies to effectively cancel grants. “They were really bad at terminating grants in a lawful way … last year,” he says.

(there’s more information on the American Carnage here)

Now, you might be wondering why Republicans would oppose figuring out how to practice medicine better. Well, the answer is the same as I noted fourteen years ago–ridiculous concerns over “death panels”:

One of the many insanities that movement conservatives possess is their fervent belief that research exploring medical outcomes will lead to death panels. I have no idea how figuring out how to reduce medical errors or if one procedure yields better outcomes than another leads to state-run medical care. I would think insurers and doctors, not to mention patients, or in other words, you and I, would want to know this. Then again, this is the same base that fears light bulb vigilantes and smart electric meters.

Some of the insanity, such as Trump’s desire to conquer Canada, are unique to Trump, but much of what his administration is doing is just what many Republicans and movement conservatives have wanted to do all along, even the stuff that seems like a mass communicable psychotic break.

Same as it ever was.