Here's What Scares Doctors About The Trump's Latest Health Order

There is certainly room for improvement when it comes to the health of Americans, but focusing on so-called “threats” of medications and an “over-reliance on treatments” isn’t a great starting point.

“We want to make Americans healthy, but we’re not going to provide the funding to do it,” said Young-Mercado, who is referring to health insurance access in this country. “I think … when we’re looking at who’s writing these documents, we have to assume that having access to health care isn’t actually an issue for them, so it may not be something that they’re really thinking about.”

Access to health care includes having health insurance at all, but also being able to afford an expensive bill that isn’t covered by insurance and being able to access government health care programs for those who are eligible.

For instance, more than 70 million Americans get their physical health care and behavioral health care through Medicaid, but currently, Republicans have their eye on the state-federal health care program and want to cut billions of dollars in funding to Medicaid.

“If we want to be able to address chronic diseases and increase life years in the U.S., then we have to maintain and improve Medicaid for our population. That’s not something that we can get rid of,” said Young-Mercado.

The executive order also compares America’s negative health outcomes to Europe’s positive health outcomes, which is not a fair assessment. 

When someone says that Europeans are so much healthier than Americans, Burnett points to two things — “A, they have walkable cities, right? They have cities where their infrastructure is such that people can walk around. They don’t have to drive a half an hour to get to the supermarket. And B, they may have access to universal health care. They don’t have to worry that if they go to their doctor for, you know, for something, that they’re going to be in six figures’ worth of medical debt.” 

“I think that there’s also a disconnect in the realities of how we want to create this program, how we want to envision making America healthy without the underlying funding to make it happen. That’s our major problem,” said Young-Mercado.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.