John McConnell

The Senate HELP Committee has jurisdiction over NIH.

GOP members of the committee represent AK, AL, IN, FL, KS, KY, LA, ME, MO, OH, and SC.

Research universities and hospitals in those states need to be extra loud.

08.02.2025 01:24 — 👍 708    🔁 381    💬 13    📌 22

Three Maryland Democrats urged the Trump administration Monday to reverse a directive that has frozen some operations at the National Institutes of Health, saying they have “grave concerns” about the effect on the nearly $50 billion agency’s medical research and other operations. “Without quick corrective action, the consequences of further disruption could be disastrous for both medical progress in America and our nation’s overall standing and competitiveness on the world stage,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks wrote in a letter sent to Dorothy Fink, the acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and shared with The Washington Post.

Democrats are calling on Trump officials to “restore full operations at NIH,” warning that it’s threatening medical research.

“Without quick corrective action, the consequences of further disruption could be disastrous,” @raskin.house.gov @vanhollen.senate.gov and Sen. Alsobrooks write.

27.01.2025 13:10 — 👍 304    🔁 96    💬 19    📌 16

Health researchers alarmed as Trump administration pauses travel, communications The halt has frozen research grants, meetings and key health updates. “Everything is basically in chaos,” said one cancer researcher.

Cancer researchers said grants were on hold.

Health briefings were abruptly canceled.

The CDC’s famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report didn’t publish as scheduled.

Our look at the sweeping consequences of the Trump admin’s “pause” of health communications.

with @lenasun.bsky.social + pals

23.01.2025 22:11 — 👍 569    🔁 280    💬 41    📌 29

Guest column: Vaccines have saved lives. Beware those who sow distrust in them. Guest column: Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The new anti-vax movement risks undoing some of that progress.

www.nola.com/opinions/gue...

13.12.2024 22:08 — 👍 1096    🔁 174    💬 38    📌 11

Exploring America's social safety net and the political fights around it Our new series, "America’s Safety Net," is focused on the complex web of programs meant to help Americans in need. Over the coming weeks, we’ll take an in-depth look at the different forms of welfare ...

Check out the first episode of this PBS NewsHour series on the social safety net. I’m always eager to see this kind of important information shared with the public. I’m glad I could contribute my perspective (my comments begin around 2:49 mins) www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

05.03.2024 20:11 — 👍 19    🔁 13    💬 0    📌 0

1/ @vinisingh.bsky.social and I have heavily updated our NBER working paper, now titled "Rationing by Race": www.nber.org/papers/w30380

The paper is about how system stressors - here #hospital capacity shocks - lead to *consequential* #rationing of resources by race rather than need.

29.02.2024 17:34 — 👍 17    🔁 11    💬 1    📌 0

This letter to CMS from AcademyHealth about the data access debacle is quite good I think

academyhealth.org/sites/defaul...

27.02.2024 18:16 — 👍 7    🔁 4    💬 0    📌 0

Lots of other issues to address too: (1) unclear if you can use Stata or R without it being cost-prohibitive (current use a "credits" system which can get blown through quickly); (2) looks like you can't use GitHub; (3) user-defined packages in or Stata may be cumbersome/impossible to implement. Etc

13.02.2024 14:45 — 👍 5    🔁 1    💬 2    📌 0

"Researchers incensed over CMS data access change" (accurate), with quotes from @asacarny.bsky.social and @aschwartz.bsky.social

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

13.02.2024 12:59 — 👍 17    🔁 13    💬 0    📌 4

If you're an R shop like ours, with lots of TAF data and projects, it looks like the annual fees could be over $200K (e.g. 5 projects *$13K + 10 analyst seats*$15K). It also upends 5 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create an efficient software/hardware infrastructure to manage TAF.

12.02.2024 20:02 — 👍 4    🔁 2    💬 2    📌 1

Additional issues:
1) ridiculous cost to have additional users peek at data. so a strong incentive for PIs to never touch data at all
2) hard for institutions to set up data infrastructure for folks, e.g. make harmonized files many projects can reuse

12.02.2024 18:58 — 👍 2    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 0

At a time when we should be democratizing access to data, CMS appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

This policy change will have a disproportionate impact on students and researchers at less well-resourced institutions.

12.02.2024 19:01 — 👍 1    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 0

This policy change from CMS will do much to degrade the quality and timeliness of health policy research in the US.

While I understand the security concerns that motivated it, there has to be a middle ground that will efficiently balance security and access.

12.02.2024 18:23 — 👍 8    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0

Access, Utilization, and Quality of Behavioral Health Integration in Medicaid Managed Care Explore the latest in national and global health policy, including health care pricing, delivery, access, quality, safety, equity, and reform.

Does carving-in behavioral health lead to better outcomes for Medicaid enrollees? Our new paper published in JAMA Health Forum leverages a staggered rollout of integration, finding mostly null effects. Financial integration: perhaps necessary, but not sufficient. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

03.01.2024 01:22 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0