With the re-election of former President Donald Trump to a non-consecutive, second term, we are all aware, as preventive medicine and public health physicians, that politics and elections have consequences!
It is normal for elected politicians to come in and make the changes they believe that the people have put them in office to enact. The American people have voted and the Republicans are fully in control of the levers of power in the federal government – both the Senate and the House in Congress, and of course, the Presidency!Just about a week after winning the election, President-Elect Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. He declared that, “The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected.”
HHS Secretary-Elect Kennedy said that President Trump had given him three instructions:
- End the chronic disease epidemic, with measurable impacts within two years
- Return the agencies to empirically-based, evidence-based, science and medicine
- Take corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies
Our nearly 2,000 board-certified preventive medicine physicians are eager to lend their voice to help ensure that evidence-based, science, medicine, public health policy and decision-making is implemented. As the leading voice for the field of preventive medicine, ACPM will continue to demonstrate its pragmatism in working to find solutions for health challenges we face in this country. We will continue to educate, advance and showcase the value of preventive medicine, even as we look ahead to working with the incoming administration and 119th Congress.
Lastly, the incoming administration has a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate its stated desire to do things differently! They can start by providing the requisite funding for preventive medicine residency training programs to train the specialists who are at the forefront of public health crises, and who possess the expertise in population and public health to deal with such crises, including the chronic disease epidemic. There are serious inequities in how public health and preventive medicine residency programs are funded, compared to internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, etc., and for decades this has been allowed to continue.
Perhaps this change in administration, with a new HHS nominee, will see the wisdom of fully funding all the approved public health and preventive medicine residency programs to prevent the terrible shortage of such physicians in the coming decade. ACPM welcomes the opportunity to engage these incoming health officials and provide evidence-based, peer-reviewed, scientific guidance as part of our larger mission to improve the health of the American population.
We look forward to working with the elected leaders and the incoming HHS Secretary to ensure that the public health is protected to the best of our abilities.
Mirza I. Rahman, MD, MPH, FAAFP, FACPM
ACPM President