National Institutes Of Health (nih)

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s largest biomedical research agency and is made up of 27 different components called Institutes and Centers. Despite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was respon- sible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experiments, and gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.

Bioethics Reform

Research using fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions is immoral and obsolete. Research using human embryonic stem cells also involves the destruction of human life and should not be subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Good science and life-affirming, ethical research are not mutually exclusive. In fact, ethically derived sources such as discarded surgical tissue and adult stem cells (made pluripotent), not tissue obtained from elective abortions, have contributed the most successful treatments for a variety of ailments.

Congress authorized HHS to choose not to fund extramural abortion-derived fetal tissue research that fails ethics advisory board review, and in 2019, the Trump Administration’s HHS chose that course. Subsequently, however, the Biden Administration restored unrestricted funding of abortion-derived fetal tissue research. HHS should:

Promptly restore the ethics advisory committee to oversee abortion- derived fetal tissue research, and Congress should prohibit such research altogether.

End intramural research projects using tissue from aborted children within the NIH, which should end its human embryonic stem cell registry.

Aggressively implement a plan to pursue and fund ethical alternative methods of research in order to ensure that abortion and embryo- destructive related research, cell lines, and other testing methods become both fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.

In addition, the Administration should reconvene a new National Council on Bioethics (NCB) to discuss new and emerging areas of ethical concern, to assess whether the ends justify the means when it comes to the promise of therapies and cures, and to establish what limiting principles should guide research and health policy. Because the male–female dyad is essential to human nature and because every child has a right to a mother and father, three-parent embryo cre- ation and human cloning research should be banned. A new NCB should convene leading experts to examine these issues and provide policy recommendations for the new frontier of bioethical questions that our country will have to address in the coming years.

Finally, HHS should create and promote a research agenda that supports pro- life policies and explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls.

Conflicts of Interest. NIH maintains inappropriate industry ties that create serious conflicts of interest. In 2018, it was revealed that a $100 million NIH study on the benefits of moderate drinking was funded by the beer and liquor industry.19 More recently, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci’s division of the NIH, owns half of the patent for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, among thousands of other pharma patents.20 Rather than pro- viding grants to university-based investigators to run the clinical trials on their own Moderna vaccine, the NIH conducted this research internally—a clear conflict of interest. The NIAID will earn millions from this vaccine’s revenue with several NIH employees (and their heirs) personally receiving up to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.21

In May 2022, documents obtained pursuant to a FOIA request revealed that NIH Director Francis Collins, NAIAD Director Anthony Fauci, and Fauci’s Deputy Director, Clifford Lane, all received royalties from pharmaceutical companies between 2009 and 2014.22 Nonprofit watchdog Open the Books estimates that from 2010 to 2020, third parties paid more than $350 million in royalties to NIH and its scientists, who are credited as coinventors. Most problematically, in the years when they received payments, Collins, Fauci, and Lane were NIH administrators, not researchers, with no plausible claim to be scientific co-discoverers. Most of the world’s other advanced science countries have stricter prohibitions on such conflicts, which helps to explain why the most significant studies on COVID treatments, on natural immunity, and on vaccine efficacy have come mostly from outside the U.S. Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.

Term limits should be imposed on top career leaders at the NIH, and Congress should consider block granting NIH’s grants budget to states to fund their own scientific research. Nothing in this system would prevent several states from partnering to co-fund large research projects that require greater resources or impact larger regions. Likewise, the establishment of funding for scientific research at the state level does not preclude more modest federal funding through the National Insti- tutes of Health: The two models are not mutually exclusive. The CDC and NIH Foundations, whose boards are populated with pharma- ceutical company executives, need to be decommissioned. Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy.

Woke Policies

Under Francis Collins, NIH became so focused on the #MeToo movement that it refused to sponsor scientific conferences unless there were a cer- tain number of women panelists, which violates federal civil rights law against sex discrimination. This quota practice should be ended, and the NIH Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which pushes such unlawful actions, should be abolished. NIH has been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science. Instead, it should fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross- sex interventions, including “affirmation,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistence if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions.

CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES (CMS)

With the goal of being a societal safety net, Medicare and Medicaid touch more American lives than does any other federal program. While they help many, they operate as runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment, in addition to which their fiscal future is in peril. Both programs should be managed so that the individuals enrolled are empowered to make decisions for themselves and have quality options with affordable prices driven by competition and innovation. Providers who participate should retain (or have restored) the freedom to practice medicine and take care of their patients according to their patients’ unique needs.

Medicare. Medicare should be reformed according to four goals and principles:

Increase Medicare beneficiaries’ control of their health care. Patients are best positioned to determine the value of health care services, working with their health care providers. They also benefit from increased choice of doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans. Access to reliable information with respect to physicians, hospitals, and insurers is therefore essential.

Reduce regulatory burdens on doctors. Doctors must be free to focus on treating patients first, not entering codes on computers, and should not be tempted to change their medical judgment based on arbitrary or illogical reimbursement incentives.

Ensure sustainability and value for beneficiaries and taxpayers. Prices are best for patients when determined by economic value rather than political power and when they are known in advance of the receipt of services. Government’s use of non-market-based methods to determine reimbursement leads to overspending on low-value services and products and underpayment for high-value services and products, stifles beneficial innovation, and because of Medicare’s size distorts payments throughout the health care system. Intermediate entities that can manage financial risk and ensure quality of care are important in transitioning to value-based care within the Medicare program.

Reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, including through the use of artificial intelligence for their detection.

Regulatory Reforms. Medicare regulations restrict choice of coverage and care. The next Administration should reintroduce and restore regulations and demonstrations from the Trump Administration that were withdrawn, weakened, or never finalized by the Biden Administration, including:

The Medicare Coverage of Innovative Technologies (MCIT) rule;

The Risk Adjustment Data Validation (RADV) rule; The Medicare Advantage Qualifying Payment Arrangement Incentive (MAQI) demonstration; and The Global and Professional Direct Contracting (GPDC, rebranded as the Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health or ACO REACH) model.

Additionally, regulations should advance site neutrality by eliminating the inpa- tient-only list and expanding the ambulatory surgical center covered procedures list. Medicare generally pays more for inpatient hospital procedures and less for the same procedures performed in an outpatient setting. Whether a medical ser- vice is delivered in a physician’s office, a clinic, or a hospital setting, the Medicare payment for that service should be the same. CMS should expand the application of site-neutral payment options to more settings. Such a policy would level the playing field among providers and remove the financial disabilities for medical professionals who would compete with hospital systems.23

Finally, HHS needs to restore and enhance conscience protection regulations that allow medical practitioners to participate in federal health care programs without being compelled to provide sex changes or similar services.