News of the Week: Trump Administration freezes mental health treatment database
Each week we share articles on subjects that are important to NUHW and its members. Here are several must-read stories over the past week:
The Trump Administration has halted a program that has been the gold standard at evaluating substance abuse and mental health therapies, according to Scientific American.
President Donald Trump plans to nominate John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board, according to Reuters. The appointment would restore an anti-worker Republican majority on the five-member panel that referees labor disputes. Ring is a partner at Morgan Lewis and Bockius, a law firm that has advised him and the Trump Organization on taxes since 2005.
The federal health law’s efforts to get nonprofit hospitals to provide more community-wide benefits in exchange for their lucrative tax status has gotten off to a slow start, California Healthline reports.. And some experts predict that a recent repeal of a key provision of the law could further strain the effort.
With little hope of an immigration agreement this week, the New York Times is reporting that Republicans in Congress are looking to head off a government shutdown this weekend by pairing another stopgap spending measure with long-term funding for the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, daring Democrats to vote no.
The bill would leave in limbo hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. But Democrats would still be left with a difficult political decision: withhold their votes unless the plight of such immigrants, known as Dreamers, is addressed and risk a government shutdown, or vote to keep the government open and fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for nearly nine million children.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday said it would take the “rare step” of asking the Supreme Court to overturn a judge’s ruling and allow the Trump administration to dismantle DACA, the program that provides work permits to undocumented immigrants raised in the United States.