Politico reporter ddiamond investigated how mismanagement and infighting within the Trump administration — as well as the need to flatter President Trump — impeded attempts to combat the coronavirus outbreak. Listen to the full interview on nprfreshair:
We're going to talk about how President Trump and some members of his administration have mismanaged the coronavirus outbreak, helping fuel the crisis. My guest Dan Diamond is a reporter for Politico who investigates health care policy and politics, including the Trump administration's coronavirus response.
The president said that health insurers had waived the cost of treatment for coronavirus. That's no small thing. Patients who are afflicted can end up in the hospital for weeks. That could have been a multibillion-dollar decision. But as my Politico colleague Sarah Owermohle first reported, insurers had only waived the cost of testing, and that had already been established in White House meetings.
DIAMOND: Well, in many ways, the World Health Organization was just confirming what public health experts have said now for days or even weeks. This virus is here. It is around the world. It is spreading. It is putting many people at risk. DIAMOND: At this point, there is guidance coming from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, to help hospitals, help health care workers figure out who to diagnose, who to treat, who should be tested. Those guidances have been a work in progress and consistently behind where they probably need to be - running behind.
DIAMOND: As one official has said, Terry, the question might not be what went wrong; it's what went right? The Trump administration and health officials knew back in January that this coronavirus was going to be a major threat. They knew that tests needed to be distributed across the country to understand where there might be outbreaks.
DIAMOND: I think at this point, Terry, South Korea, in the past 24 hours, has probably done more tests for coronavirus than the United States has done in the past two months. South Korea can do 10,000 tests per day. At last count, we have done somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 tests.DIAMOND: I think it's been a shame for public health writ large, and I think it's been horribly concerning for local leaders. We are flying blind, as the coronavirus threatens the United States.
DIAMOND: I don't use this word lightly, Terry, but I'd say that this testing failure and the broader response to the coronavirus has been a catastrophe. The reasons it is a catastrophe, some are on the Trump administration itself; some are simply bureaucratic breakdowns. And if I'm apportioning blame - in the middle of a crisis, it's hard to tell at all times who made what decision when, but certainly, the Trump administration failed to plan for this moment.
DIAMOND: When President Trump went on air and did a press conference talking about his concern over the, quote,"numbers" and didn't want a cruise ship with infected Americans to necessarily dock and have the passengers evacuated because he was worried about the numbers, it was a remarkable statement for a president to say. The president has been obsessed with the numbers, obsessed with the optics of how this looks, which is not what you want the U.S. president to be focused on.
GROSS: Something I found very interesting - and I'd love to hear your take on this - is that Tucker Carlson, who, of course, has a show weekday nights on Fox News - he has been one of Trump's strongest advocates. And Trump seems to listen, you know, to watch Tucker Carlson's show. So I don't know if he said this on the air, but I was on the Fox News website, and he had something in print on the website that was headlined,"The Coronavirus Will Get Worse.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Dan Diamond, a political reporter who has been investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus. Diamond has been covering health care policy and politics for about 10 years. He's been writing about how President Trump and some members of his administration have mismanaged the coronavirus outbreak, helping fuel the crisis.
GROSS: My impression is that he is anti-abortion. He has described HHS as the department of life. He described the Trump administration as the most pro-life administration in the country's history. He said that in a very admiring way. How has that affected him as the leader of HHS? And was he appointed in part because of his anti-abortion position?
DIAMOND: President Trump has made it clear through his actions, through his tweets, that an official's place in his administration can be decided in a moment.
GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dan Diamond. He's a reporter for Politico who investigates health care policy and politics, including the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus. We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear - the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.
Those views, Redfield has said more recently, are things that he has broadened from. He has walked away from some of those earlier, stricter positions. But Redfield is still seen in some corners as a suboptimal leader of our public health agency, and it's not just because of these views; it's because of his lack of high-end management experience. If you're looking at some of the breakdowns in fighting the coronavirus outbreak, they may not be because Dr.
So it seems like Mike Pence has been very influential on several levels in dealing with the coronavirus and in working with the people and maybe even helping appoint the people connected with fighting the virus now. Let's look at Pence's own health care policy in terms of epidemiology when he was the governor of Indiana. So tell us a few key things about Pence in Indiana.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dan Diamond. He's a reporter for Politico who investigates health care policy and politics, including the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus. We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR. And the reason those emails crashed was because Seema Verma's part of the department had run this massive email test at the exact same time without telling anyone, and it took down the system. This was the latest in a series of different IT decisions that Seema Verma and her team had made.
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