If At First You Can't Get Your Grifter Surgeon General Nominee Confirmed, Well, Here's This Lady From Fox!
She was a real treasure during the pandemic, if you recall.
This week, Donald Trump withdrew his nomination of “Dr.” Casey Means for Surgeon General of the United States, probably because of how severely she tanked during her congressional hearings. That’s the good news! The bad news is that his next nominee is yet another MAHA “wellness” grifter, Dr. Nicole Saphier.
Naturally, she is also a Fox News contributor.
Nicole Saphier is not an expert in public health. She is a breast radiologist. And that’s great, that’s a lovely profession to be in, no judgment to her on that. But, in her many appearances on Fox News, she has presented herself as an expert on public health, a subject she has no formal training in. Also, a subject one should really be an expert on, if one is to be the Surgeon General of the United States, as that is pretty much the whole job.
We are, mind you, quite familiar with Dr. Saphier and her nonsense here at Wonkette.
There’s my personal favorite, the time she helpfully explained that if people don’t have health care, they will be “incentivized” to take better care of themselves.
Let’s revisit that one, shall we?
She said:
“Americans are dying younger, from largely preventable disease and bad health policy decisions. And the problem that I have with this is heart disease alone costs about $230 billion to the United States, and the Affordable Care Act did nothing to help that except take away — they took away the incentivizations for good behavior choices, by saying that however you act, whatever you do, everything's going to be covered. And so preventable illness is running rampant across the United States.”
Saphier is a breast radiologist. That is her area of expertise. In fact, early detection of breast cancer is her area of expertise. What is it that she would prefer people do, other than getting breast cancer screenings, to prevent themselves from dying of breast cancer? Take her herbal tinctures? Because people need insurance to get breast cancer screenings.
Does she think everyone would be healthier if they didn’t see doctors, or just poor people? That’s definitely a take for a person who is a doctor to have. It wasn’t the first time she had it, either. In 2016, she blamed a brief dip in life expectancy on the ACA causing doctors to burn out due to having too many insured patients.
“What has happened with the implementation of the ACA is we’re in the midst of a physician burnout and shortage crisis due to all of these newly insured patients. […]
“What we need to be doing to improve healthcare in America is, we need to foster the doctor/patient relationship. We need to make our doctors happier. We need to treat them better. But we also need to start holding patients accountable for some of their lifestyle choices that are negatively affecting their health.”
How? By putting them in the stocks and letting passerby throw tomatoes at them and yell at them to quit smoking or eat healthier foods?
This take reminds me of that stupid riddle that people claim “only psychopaths” can get right: “This woman goes to her mother’s funeral and meets the man of her dreams but forgets to get his info. The next week she kills her sister. Why?” and the answer is that she wanted to see the guy again and if you can deduce that, then maybe you are also someone who goes around murdering people in hopes of getting a date.
But really — if you see that we don’t have enough doctors for everybody and you think the solution is fewer people having health care as opposed to increasing the number of residencies and making medical school free so we can have the doctors we need, then I’m pretty certain you are a psychopath. And way more of one than someone who can figure out that “riddle,” because you happen to be good at riddles.
Going along with all of this, Saphier really wants to bring back allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to people for having pre-existing conditions.
“And the reason that insurance has gotten so expensive is because under these ACA plans, they require coverage for so many things.
“They require that preexisting conditions are entirely paid for. You don’t pay more if you have a lot of chronic medical conditions. You pay the same as your healthy counterpart. So it’s cost sharing, and that really is a stretch of socialized medicine.”
Yes, because someday that “healthy counterpart” may get hit by a truck, or shot, or get cancer or get a chronic medical condition themselves. The thing about health is that you never fucking know. Running guru Jim Fixx died of a heart attack at 52. The South Beach Diet guy died of cancer at 66. Meanwhile, my Nonnie smoked and drank wine and ate a whole lot of carbs her whole life and lived to 101, with very few health problems along the way. Keith Richards is 82. Hell, Trump himself is almost 80 and he lives off of McDonalds and does not believe in exercise. You never, ever know.
Republicans want health to be entirely about “personal responsibility” because it only makes sense to do health care the way they want to do it if it is something within one’s personal control. It feels okay to them for someone to die from not being able to afford treatment if they can believe that person brought it upon themselves and is being punished. They can justify that. That is why people like Saphier, Casey Means and other “wellness” dipshits are so very popular on the Right these days.
In another heartwarming appearance on Fox, Saphier blithely commented that the people who are on ventilators will have to get off of them “at some point” and will, you know, either live or die, thus freeing up the ventilators for other people.
Then there was the time she tried to blame AOC for the spread of COVID (back when Fox News still believed it was a thing) because young people were protesting things, despite the fact that she had literally just told said young people to be better about staying the fuck home.
She would later compare COVID to “the sniffles.”
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Then there are a whole lot of other things we have learned about her that we haven’t covered. Like how she’s used the fact that she had a baby at 17 to argue against abortion rights, because surely if something was the best choice for her, it’s the best choice for everyone. Or how she has a podcast called “Wellness Unmasked” and sells “herbal tinctures” because why not just lean into the whole “snake oil” thing?
Her record on vaccines is a little more murky. She’s not entirely anti-vaccine, but she “questions” the vaccine schedule and says the evidence that vaccines cause autism is “inconclusive.”
Is it actually that hard for these folks to just find a normal ass, boring doctor with an actual background in public health? Do all of their Surgeon General nominees have to be influencers? At this point, I really am starting to think that they don’t want to appoint anyone normal because a normal person would make everyone else look even more crazy.
Trump watches Fox, sees a semi-hot female doctor, nominates her. That's the thought process.
Senator Kelly is correct.
Will bet anything.
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