Posted on 03/05/2020 7:42:22 AM PST by Zenyatta
The Trump administration has rolled back a Food And Drug Administration rule instituted by President Barack Obama that has stalled coronavirus testing at the state level.
The rule in question previously required state-run laboratories to only run medical tests pre-approved by the F.D.A.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
To 9YearLurker,
Oh Shut Up!
(I have greatly restrained myself)
right, at this point the fact it wasn’t reversed months ago looks terrible.
I well believe in completely bureaucratic incompetence in these agencies that never really had to perform their emergency function before (FEMA/katrina, for example) but some of this stuff (the entire testing failure including this) had to be addressable a while ago at the executive branch level and obviously wasn’t.
that is a terrible non-response. maybe he didn’t realize the rule was a problem or maybe they told him they would fix matters much sooner than they did, but this isn’t a situation you get political flexibility on.
In other words, the FDA and CDC was/are trying to kill us.
Even if he’d done nothing but read through federal laws and regulations the past 3 years, he probably would be less than 1% through the list. I agree, he probably wasn’t aware of this rule until it came up.
“that is a terrible non-response. maybe he didn’t realize the rule was a problem or maybe they told him they would fix matters much sooner than they did, but this isn’t a situation you get political flexibility on.”
this is a tempest in a teapot ... the rule never prevented the development of the testing and it didn’t prevent labs from performing the tests: Quest, LabCorp and others perform non-FDA-approved tests all the time ... the only issue is that CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, whose reimbursement policies also act as a template for most private insurers) will not reimburse a patient for non-FDA-approved tests, meaning the patient has to pay the cost of the test themselves ...
the rule change simply allows the Feds to reimburse the labs directly for these new tests BEFORE the tests are actually FDA-approved, though the labs are still ultimately required to go through FDA validation and approval ...
btw, a separate and under-reported rule change by CMS added coroanvirus testing to the list of essential medical services automatically reimbursed by CMS ...
it continues to dismay me regarding the amount of ignorant speculation that abounds on FR, not you particularly, but just in general ...
He’s not required or expected to know every rule or law passed just because he was elected President.
Remember when Obama said he was smarter than all of his advisors and cabinet members.
A great leader knows what his resources are and how to find the answers. A leader that tells you they know everything and a have all of the answers is foolish and that’s how they make a mess out everything they touch.
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