President Trump References at HHS Website

This past week, I ran across several HHS/CMS press releases or quotations specifically praising President Trump's vision and leadership, and I wondered how this compared to the Obama era.

See for example:

“Hospitals would be required to post all their payer-specific negotiated rates, which are the prices actually paid by insurers,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said on a conference call with reporters. “Hospital pricing has been a mystery, but thanks to the leadership of President Trump, those days are over.”

 At: MedCityNews, July 29, 2019, here.

Once in a while this may be OK, but if it ever becomes mandatory in each press release, it would be a little eerie (sort of like, "Thanks to Comrade Stalin's leadership, the wheat crop has increased by 2%.")

Searching CMS.gov

I used the built-in search function on the CMS website to search for citations to Trump, and there were 101 (that's 40 per year).   Searching for Obama, there are 270 (that's 33 per year).  But large numbers of the Trump citations are from public comments on rulemaking where "trump" is used as a verb (rule A trumps rule B), so at least with this simple quantitative measure, Trump occurs less at HHS than Obama, although the Trump citations are sometimes more bold and colorful, as in the Verma quote above.

"Trump" As Part of Headlines

While I haven't done a systematic review of press releases, I did notice that an October 7 press released "headlined" the Trump Administration on a policy update.  Here.  "Trump Administration Empowers Nursing Home Patients, Residents, Families, and Caregivers by Enhancing Transparency about Abuse and Neglect."  Opening sentence, "Today, the Trump Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a major enhancement of the information available to nursing home residents, families, and caregivers..."