Anti-Woman, Anti-Weed Health Secretary Tom Price Now Set to Dismantle Healthcare

Below is what happened on Trump's fifteenth day in office. You can find out what damage was done every other day so far on the Saddest Calendar on the Internet.

At around 2:30 AM this morning, phones across the country vibrated. It's likely that the oscillation awoke a few of those phone owners. It's also likely that some of those phone owners flipped over their phone. On a Thursday night? Some probably thought. A "U Up?" already? Alas, no—just a breaking news notification that Trump had garnered the approval of yet another one of his unprogressive cabinet picks. In the early hours of the morning, it came in the form of Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and six-term House member from Atlanta with an interest in undermining health insurance for millions of people.

"Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price was confirmed early Friday as Health and Human Services secretary after an acrimonious Senate debate that focused on his conservative ideology and expected future role in tearing down Obamacare," read POLITICO's breaking news email.

This approval comes after a hellish week of cabinet votes. On Tuesday, Betsy DeVos cinched Secretary of Education, and the following day Jeff Sessions became the new Attorney General. As an act of resistance toward both of the previous candidates, Senate Democrats delayed voting by holding a floor debate for 30 hours—the longest that Senate rules will permit. Preceding Price's vote, they employed the tactic yet again. And then, just past 2 AM this morning, the Price vote came in a 52-47, falling along party lines.

In 2009, Price wrote an op-ed in POLITICOin which he argues that "nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare." According to his stances as reported in The Cut, it's also legitimate to say that the new health secretary is virulently anti-woman.

He's also a marijuana opponent, according to the Washington Post.

Because it's the weekend, though, a time during which Americans were previously able to do things like "relax" and "not spiral from crushing anxiety," it's time for the silver lining. In the past few days, videos of town halls in some of the most conservative parts of the country have been surfacing of people who are enraged over the GOP's plan to dismantle the ACA, which has been covered by various media outlets like, CNN. While small, a glimmer of hope lies in the increase of political activism from constituents all across the US.

"Carol McCracken, a 65-year-old Salt Lake City paralegal, said she is 'a child of the '70s—this is not my first rodeo' in Democratic activism," reads the above CNN article. "But she said she hasn't seen the party's base as engaged as it is now since then and that she has never seen such high attendance at a congressional town hall."

That's Bleak. Who's Fighting Against It?

Medical students and faculty members across the country have been staging "die-ins" to protest the repeal of the ACA. Those at Northwestern, Yale, and various universities in New York City are among the opponents.