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Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Must Immediately Release Months-Delayed 2024 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report
In a letter sent today to the director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Public Citizen called for the immediate release of the AHRQ’S 2024 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities report.
The National Healthcare Quality and Disparities report provides an annual snapshot of the performance of the U.S. healthcare system and the system’s overall quality and fairness in serving all Americans. The Public Citizen letter briefly highlights some of the important information in the report. Mandated by Congress, this essential public health resource had been released by AHRQ through 2023 for 21 consecutive years. The 2024 report should have been released in December of last year . It’s unclear why the Biden-to-Trump transition personnel failed to release this report.
“AHRQ must immediately make public this vital report card about the performance of the U.S. healthcare system,” said Michael Abrams, M.P.H., Ph.D., a senior health researcher at the Public Citizen Health Research Group, and the author of the letter. “The Trump Administration should not hide from the American public critical data about how the health care system functions. Policymakers and researchers rely upon these AHRQ-curated analyses and data to maintain and advance the wellbeing of all Americans.”
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Study Finds Cash Transfers Reduce Childhood Deaths by Nearly Half as Trump Cuts Threaten Direct Aid
"This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I've seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty," said one researcher.
Aug 18, 2025
With newly embraced direct cash assistance programs a casualty of the Trump administration's slashes to foreign aid, a study released Monday showed that such direct transfers had a "showstopping result" in reducing child mortality rates in low-income families in the Global South.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on Monday released a study of cash transfers given to more than 10,000 households in Siaya County, Kenya between 2014-17 by the nonprofit group GiveDirectly.
The group provided $1,000 in three installments—without conditions on how it would be spent—over eight months to the families, covering about 75% of their expenses.
Researchers examined the effects over a decade, completing census surveys and collecting data on households that received the funds versus those that didn't.
Unsurprisingly, and as numerous previous studies have shown, the NBER found that the cash transfers dramatically improved the families' lives, helping them to sustain themselves even amid a drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Economic activity in the 650 villages the researchers examined also improved.
But the dramatic decline in infant and childhood mortality rates "became obvious almost immediately," the New York Times reported, and surprised the researchers and other observers.
"This is easily the biggest impact on child survival that I've seen from an intervention that was designed to alleviate poverty," Harsha Thirumurthy, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, told the Times.
NBER found that the unconditional cash transfers led to 48% fewer deaths before a child reached age 1 and 45% fewer deaths in children under the age of 5.
The transfers appeared to help mothers take parental leave, with a 51% decline in women performing hard labor in the last months of their pregnancies and the three months after giving birth.
The direct infusion of cash also helped women receive prenatal care they might otherwise not have received.
"I have seen firsthand what it means when an expectant mother can't access timely care," said Dr. Miriam Laker-Oketta, a senior research adviser for GiveDirectly, in a video posted on YouTube by the group about the project's results. "I remember a time when a woman arrived after being in labor for three days. Sadly, by the time she arrived, her baby had already died. Our clinic was nearby, but she never had a prenatal visit where her condition might have been caught early."
Laker-Oketta told the Times that "when you come across an intervention that reduces child mortality by almost a half, you cannot understate the impact."
The research was released four months after US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a press briefing that the Trump administration was terminating a number of foreign assistance awards "because they provided cash-based assistance, which the administration is moving away from given concerns about misuse and lack of appropriate accountability for American taxpayers here at home."
That announcement came just six months after the US Agency for International Development (USAID) signaled a long-awaited shift and said it would "include direct monetary transfers to individuals, households, and microenterprises... as a core element of its
development toolkit."
"Critically, transfers respect the dignity of individuals, households, and microenterprises by allowing them to make spending and investing decisions, while also promoting efficient markets such that entire communities and regions, not just recipients benefit. In sum, direct monetary transfers provide USAID with a flexible and localized programming approach to achieve development objectives," said the agency in a position paper last October.
As Daniel Handel, a policy director at the foreign aid think tank Unlock Aid, told NPR this month, the embrace of direct monetary aid at the agency "was largely unheard of" a decade earlier.
"There was an amazing amount of handwringing about the idea," Handel told NPR, with officials concerned about families "misspending" the money. The shift last year was "a real sea change," he added.
As Common Dreams has reported, experts have warned that President Donald Trump's cuts to foreign aid will be a "death sentence for millions of people" in the Global South.
According to a study published in The Lancet last month, "projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4-5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years."
A federal court ruled last week that Trump can move forward with the cuts, including nearly $4 billion in funding for global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs.
NBER's study suggested the State Department's plan to abandon cash transfers could be a driving cause of the "death sentence" caused by the cuts; the researchers found that "infant and child mortality largely revert to pre-program levels after cash transfers end."
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Israel Waging 'Deliberate Campaign of Starvation' in Gaza: Amnesty
A senior official at the global rights group implored members of the international community to "uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide."
Aug 18, 2025
Amnesty International on Monday published new testimonies of Palestinians suffering from Israel's "systemic and intentional" campaign of starvation in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of people—including more than 100 children—have died of malnutrition over 682 days of US-backed genocide.
Israel "is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life," Amnesty said in an introduction to the testimonies of starved and forcibly displaced civilians in the embattled enclave.
Amnesty said that the victims' accounts underscore the group's "repeated findings that the deadly combination of hunger and disease is not an unfortunate byproduct of Israel's military operations."
"It is the intended outcome of plans and policies that Israel has designed and implemented, over the past 22 months, to deliberately inflict on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction—which is part and parcel of Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," the group added. The statement used language found in the treaty under which the International Court of Justice is currently determining whether Israel is committing the crime of genocide.
Among the 19 Palestinians interviewed by Amnesty are Hadeel, a 28-year-old pregnant mother of two, who said, "I fear miscarriage, but I also think about my baby: I panic just thinking about the potential impact of my own hunger on the baby's health, its weight, whether it will have [birth defects], and even if the baby is born healthy, what life awaits it, amidst displacement, bombs, tents."
Aziza, age 75, told Amnesty: "I feel like I have become a burden on my family. When we were displaced, they had to push me on a wheelchair. With toilet queues extremely long in the camp where we stay, I need adult diapers, which are extremely expensive. I need medication for diabetes, blood pressure, and a heart condition, and have had to take medicine which has expired."
Nahed, who is 66 yearsc old, said that "people I knew were almost unrecognizable" due to the effects of famine, and that "the experience of hunger and war has changed Gaza completely."
Adding that the desperate scramble for food "has denied people their humanity," Nahed described what she saw at an aid distribution site. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while seeking aid, including more than 850 people slain at or near sites run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat.
"I had to go there because I have nobody to look after me," Nahed explained. "I saw with my own eyes people carrying bags of flour stained with the blood of those who had just been shot."
One emergency doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City—which has endured multiple IDF attacks, including the alleged execution of children in and around the facility—told Amnesty that many patients would be leading "reasonable lives" were it not for the "combination of starvation, destruction, and depletion of the healthcare system, unsanitary conditions, and multiple displacements under inhumane conditions."
Referring to Israel's imminent US-backed reoccupation of Gaza and plan to ethnically cleanse 1 million Palestinians from in and around Gaza City, Erika Guevara Rosas—Amnesty's senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns—said Monday that "as Israeli authorities threaten to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza City, the testimonies we have collected are far more than accounts of suffering, they are a searing indictment of an international system that has granted Israel a license to torment Palestinians with near-total impunity for decades."
Such impunity was implicit in a recording broadcast on an Israeli news channel Sunday in which former IDF Gen. Aharon Haliva said that for every Israeli killed during the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, "50 Palestinians must die," and "it doesn't matter" if "they are children."
Guevara Rosas continued:
To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel's inhumane policies and actions, which have made mass starvation a grim reality in Gaza, there must be an immediate, unconditional lifting of the blockade and a sustained ceasefire. The impact of Israel's blockade and its ongoing genocide on civilians, particularly on children, people with disabilities, those with chronic illnesses, older people, and pregnant and breastfeeding women is catastrophic and cannot be undone by simply increasing the number of aid trucks or restoring performative, ineffective, and dangerous airdrops of aid.
"In the face of the horrors Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian population in Gaza, the international community, particularly Israel's allies... must uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide," Guevara Rosas added. "States must urgently suspend all arms transfers, adopt targeted sanctions, and terminate any engagement with Israeli entities when this contributes to Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza."
The new Amnesty report came as the Gaza Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll from Israel's 22-month annihilation and siege of the strip topped 62,000—mostly women and children—although experts say the actual toll is likely far higher. The ministry also said Monday that at least 263 people, including 112 children, have starved to death since October 2023.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—deny Gazans are starving. However, even as staunch a supporter as US Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged that "little kids... are clearly starving to death" in Gaza.
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State Dept Shuts Down Temporary Visas for Injured Gaza Kids After Tirade From Racist Influencer Laura Loomer
"This goes far beyond 'wrong side of history,'" said journalist Ryan Grim.
Aug 18, 2025
The US State Department announced Saturday that it would halt the issuing of visas to children from Gaza in urgent need of medical care.
The decision came after a frenzied campaign by the racist online provocateur and close Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who raged over the weekend about the arrival of badly injured Palestinian children in Houston and San Francisco earlier this month.
The arrival of these children had been arranged by the US nonprofit group HEAL Palestine, which has helped at least 63 children "receive lifesaving surgeries, prosthetics, and rehabilitative care in the US."
In what she claimed was an "exclusive" report, Loomer—who has described herself as a "Proud Islamophobe," and as "pro-white nationalism"—shared a video posted by HEAL Palestine of children on crutches and wheelchairs arriving with their families at a US airport.
She falsely claimed that the children's shouts of joy were "jihadi chants" and that they were "doing the HAMAS terror whistle" and referred to the children as "Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone."
Loomer tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department in another post: "How did Palestinians get Visas under the Trump administration to get into the United States? Did @StateDept approve this? How did they get out of Gaza? Is @SecRubio aware of this?"
The day after Loomer's tirade began, the State Department announced that "all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days."
HEAL Palestine issued a statement Sunday saying it was "distressed" by the State Department's decision. Contrary to claims by Loomer that the children would become "like leeches on welfare," HEAL clarified that the children in the country were here "on temporary visas for essential medical treatment not available at home."
"After their treatment is complete," the organization said, "the children and any accompanying family members return to the Middle East."
Rhana Natour, the director and producer of All That Remains—a documentary for Al Jazeera's Fault Lines on a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who traveled to the US to receive treatment after losing her leg in an Israeli airstrike—told Drop Site News that the humanitarian visas canceled by the State Department are granted "exclusively to burned and disabled children and their parents."
(Video: Al Jazeera English)
Loomer took credit for the department's cancellation of the visas, thanking Rubio and calling it "fantastic news."
"Hopefully, all GAZANS will be added to President Trump's travel ban," Loomer wrote. "There are doctors in other countries. The US is not the world's hospital!"
In response, the X account for Drop Site, which has frequently highlighted the work of HEAL Palestine, responded to Loomer, saying that "Your taxes aren't funding the care for these Palestinian children," and that their treatment was being funded entirely through private support from donors.
"The only role of US tax dollars in the picture," Drop Site said, "is the costly review the State Department will now be forced to conduct because of a deranged racist's ravings to block children from lifesaving treatment."
Loomer later suggested that the wounded Palestinian children were being treated "for free," at the expense of US taxpayers, while "US Veterans are homeless on the street, unable to get healthcare."
Journalist Ryan Grim, Drop Site's co-founder, responded: "Trump slashed Medicaid, slashed the [Department of Veterans Affairs], slashed [Affordable Care Act] exchange subsidies, and increased the military budget to over a trillion dollars but Loomer wants people to think that the reason they don't have healthcare is that a Palestinian child got treated thanks to donations from people heartbroken at what Israel is doing to children."
"The trillion dollars being spent to blow the arms and legs off of children is the problem," Grim continued. "Not the children themselves."
In July, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that since October 2023, at least 17,000 children have been killed and 33,000 injured across Gaza, many of them attacked by Israeli forces "as they [lined] up for lifesaving humanitarian aid."
The UN reported Friday that "10 children were losing one or both legs every day," making Gaza "home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history."
Despite having no formal position, Loomer is one of the most influential figures in the Trump administration—reportedly having spearheaded the hiring and firing of aides for key roles, including in the National Security Council.
Loomer has said that the US is a "Judeo-Christian ethnostate" being "destroyed" by immigration, and—following the opening of Trump's immigrant detention camp "Alligator Alcatraz"—joked that the "alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals," a number referring to the total population of Latinos in the United States.
Following news of the State Department's decision to cancel visas for injured Palestinians, Grim wrote that it "looks like [Loomer] is also setting visa policy."
"So we want to arm Israel to the teeth, allow them to block food and medical aid from getting into Gaza, and also condemn those facing medical emergencies to death," he said. "This goes far beyond 'wrong side of history.'"
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