Media Hit

“As humans change the landscape through urbanization, the mosquito populations also change, favoring those feeding on humans, which also appear to be major disease carriers,” said Matthews. “DDT was used heavily in the 1940s to the 1960s because it was cheap and very effective, and it apparently decimated some U.S. mosquito populations so they are only just now recovering. But even though several countries are using DDT, at least in a restricted way, there remains heavy international pressure for them to not do so.”

Although legislative efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have stalled, the Trump administration can make regulatory modifications to the health care reform law to keep insurance companies in the individual exchanges and strengthen the markets, observers said.

As Institute for Policy Innovation scholar Merrill Matthews recently noted in these pages, a number of states have tried to impose single-payer health plans on their citizens and failed.

The GOP plan could just repeat the same ACA mistakes, said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews. "Instead of letting health insurers do what insurers do underwrite Republicans are retaining Obamacare's guaranteed issue provision."

Leaders on the Hill, in industry and some in public health praised Trump's pick of Gottlieb — a former FDA and CMS official, who's also a physician and a prominent health policy commentator — to run the agency. "The reason I voted through my objections with Trump is that a presidential election selects a team, not one person," said Tom Giovanetti, head of the conservative Institute of Policy Innovation. "Scott Gottlieb is another example."

Political pressure from environmental groups likely trumped science in the agency’s latest report examining fracking and its risks to drinking water, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a Texas-based think tank. 

Free-market oriented groups urged the FCC to reverse its ISP privacy rules, approved in October. The FCC posted thousands of public comments this week on the rules, many of them urging the agency to better align its rules with those of the FTC.

"In the past week or two, Republicans apparently abandoned actuarial principles — just as Obamacare did," said the Institute for Policy Innovation's Merrill Matthews. "So Democrats included the mandate to have health insurance to keep people from gaming the system. However, it didn't work because the penalties were fairly low."

“I’ve tried for 10 years to explain this to Republicans; it is a big problem,” said Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, which focuses on free-market solutions to policy problems. “Just because a good affordable policy is available in another state doesn’t mean that I would be able to get the network of physicians and the good prices that are available in that other state.”

Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at right-leaning think tank the Institute for Policy Innovation, expressed skepticism at the notion that "getting rid of state lines," as Trump puts it, is effective.