WiseOne wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 8:31 pmOn the topic of "what has Trump done that was good", here's a big one:
https://reason.com/2020/08/21/its-time- ... elehealth/
Reason magazine is very much anti-Trump, so they're very careful not to credit him in this article. However, I remember clearly that it was Trump who signed the executive order to wipe away the regulatory barriers that had been choking telemedicine efforts. The result was a revolution in outpatient medicine, and it will be very hard for the bureaucrats to put everything back into their Pandora's box.
I'm not sure how many Republicans would have done this. For sure no Democrat would ever have signed such an order; they only make new rules, they would never take them away. If Hilary Clinton had been elected, I can only imagine what would have happened with the lockdowns in place and hospital ERs mostly overwhelmed with COVID cases. Literally, no one would have been able to get a doctor visit, unless their doctor was willing to return a phone call. Most aren't because phone calls (pre-executive order) could not be billed, i.e. they were a free service. So without Trump and his executive order on telehealth, there would have been an even more serious lack of routine medical care during the worst of the pandemic, the financial hit to outpatient practices would have been far more devastating, and we would not now have this terrific new way of practicing outpatient medicine.
Well, in another version of whataboutism, the Senate report on President Clinton's "disastrous" response to COVID-19 would be coming out about now.
"The President's overblown, unneeded and yet ineffective steps to combat Covid-19 shall not go unexamind. The untold billions of financial losses and the deaths of almost 1,000 american lives will not go unremarked or unpunished" from a joint statement by the Republican Speaker of the House and Senate majority leader.
If it had gotten as bad as it has, I don't think can say for certain that regulations on TeleDoc wouldn't have been lightened. If nothing else, the Republican legislature sure would have pushed for it, and Clinton IMO likely would have gone along, if for political if not other reasons