Matthew Loftus
@matthew_loftus
I teach & practice Family Medicine at a mission hospital in Kenya. I also like to write about a bunch of different things.
Here's an unlocked link to the NYT essay I contributed to about why PEPFAR is so important. nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opi…
This from @WillowHealthKe is good but another huge issue is that people really struggle with the idea of paying premiums and then topping up at point of care. willowhealthmedia.org/why-kenyans-in…
I want to believe that there are no BAP-readers who think that it is better for Africans to die than live in positions of power at the State Department and elsewhere in the Trump administration. I want to believe that the VP is not among them. I suspect this is a fool's hope.
I gotta understand what the constituency for this is. Are people showing up to town halls across the country demanding that we take HIV drugs away from poor people? Is the Congressional switchboard flooded with calls from voters who hate PEPFAR? nytimes.com/2025/07/23/hea…
An American in 1964 (when this photo was taken) could give their child this lifestyle on one income. What happened (to make us so much more materially prosperous)?
A lot of conservatives seem to be under the impression that PEPFAR was briefly paused by mistake and will be back to normal soon. But no. The administration has repeatedly tried to destroy PEPFAR and Congress keeps telling them to stop and then they try again.
Out today: a piece I wrote about how slashing foreign aid can't fix the deficit and other common objections about U.S. foreign aid spending. thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/07/98438/
I gotta understand what the constituency for this is. Are people showing up to town halls across the country demanding that we take HIV drugs away from poor people? Is the Congressional switchboard flooded with calls from voters who hate PEPFAR? nytimes.com/2025/07/23/hea…
whoa. Such a great book, can't wait to see what they do with it!
Big news:
They've got to have a gang of 6 middle schoolers on the payroll who review every new name and make sure there are no double entendres.
I think we can all agree that we need a 6-part documentary series just following around the guys who figure out what the Pokemon names are going to be in different languages.
Hello Republicans, this is your political consultant speaking. Please keep saying "There is nothing that would damage our party or reveal that the president is a pedophile in these files, so you don't need to see them." The voters love it when you say that.
Breaking News: Speaker Mike Johnson said he would shut down the House until September to block a vote on calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. nyti.ms/4nZtblR
Politicians: How can we address the decline in public trust? Public: Stop doing the opposite of what we want. Columnists: What could explain the crisis of democratic legitimacy? Public: Stop doing the opposite of what we want. Think tankers: How to reverse the collapse in ...
When people can sell plasma, they commit fewer property crimes and become less reliant on high-interest loans.
comics are bad for this kind of thing, among many other storytelling sins, because the need to generate a new story that has some continuity with previous stories but also has to be different is just a really perverse incentive.
I'm always amazed at how Marvel Comics explains everything. There is a deity behind the alien symbiont Spiderman suit, there were symbyont dragons sent to earth in the past. The deity is related to the Celestials, etc. It's the Gnostic Theogony impulse.
Whoever keeps putting a microphone in Hunter Biden's face has got to be on the GOP payroll.
“Just build more and prices will go down.” It’s the theory dominating housing policy. Simple supply and demand. Deregulate, upzone, speed up permits—and affordability will follow. But here’s the question no one wants to ask: What happens when prices actually fall?