The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., considers a press conference at the USDA headquarters in Washington, DC, on July 14. The main medical groups are alarmed by a report that Kennedy can delete another advisory panel.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP through Getty Images
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Brendan Smialowski/AFP through Getty Images
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can soon fire the members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force, an advisory panel of primary care experts, raising “deep conern” of the American Medical Association and other main medical groups.
The plan was first reported in The Wall Street Journal. “It is very worrying, and it is not the first time that we are worried,” says Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, president of the AMA. NPR has not independently confirmed the plan.
Last month, Kennedy dismissed the members of a different advisory committee, one about Vaccines for CDCs, and replaced them their own elections, which lacked the experience in vaccines, immunology and patient care for members.
Mukkamala worries that the same could happen now with the USPSTF. The Independent Expert Group focuses on primary care and is convinced of the Health Research and Quality Agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy is too much.
“When you have something good and you don’t know that it will be replaced by something good, it is a risk that nobody takes their shoulder,” says Mukkamala.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comments.
The USPSTF has been reviewing data and making recommendations to prevent all kinds of diseases since 1984.
“Probably every patient I see, I am using between five and 20 or their guidelines to make sure to keep that healthy person,” says Dr. Alexander Krist, a famous doctor from the University of Virginia Commonwealth and a former president of the task force. For example, these guidelines are used for mammography for breast cancer detection, colonoscopies for colon cancer or high blood pressure management, diabetes, obesity, depression or anxiety, he says.
In general, the USPSTF cures around 100 guidelines for preventive care, which addresses the attention of newborns to the elderly.
Many primary care doctors believe that the guidelines of the working group are the “most reliable source for their recommendations,” says Dr. Michael Barry, an internal medicine researcher and professor at the Harvard Medicine Faculty, also former member and president of USPSTF. “That trust is consistent of about 40 years, using the same rules over time, taking care that as the new members join, they are examined by conflicts of interest and that constantly the methods of the work group to make decisions.”
Shooting all current USPSTF members could lead to doctors to lose confidence in guidelines. “Doctors will be fighting to understand what they already do who should listen in terms of preventive care for the United States,” says Krist.
Since the Law of Health Care at a low price of 2010, USPSTF guidelines have also linked what most insurers cover.
Earlier this month, I love it, along with another 100 health organizations, sent a letter to the members of Congress, in response to Kennedy canceled a previously scheduled meeting of the USPSTF. The letter urged Congress to protect “the integrity of the USPSTF from intentional or involuntary political interference.” The signatories warned: “The loss of reliability in rigorous and non -partisan work of devastated patients, hospital systems and task force payers.”
The Ama continued with a letter to Kennedy on Sunday, expressing his objections to the informed plans. The 16 members of the working group “dedicat[e] His time to help reduce diseases and improve the health of all Americans, a well -aligned mission with the Make America Healthy Again initiative, “says the letter, urging Kennedy to retain current members and continue their regular meetings schedule.