SPONSORED BY: COALITION TO STRENGTHEN AMERICA'S HEALTHCARE

Behind many dangerous delays in care are insurer practices that prioritize administrative hurdles over patients. Excessive prior
authorization requirements and AI-assisted coverage denials pull clinicians away from the bedside and bury care decisions in paperwork. While hospitals work around the clock to deliver timely, life-saving treatment, insurer delays and denials slow access, disrupt clinical judgment, and increase costs. When approvals take days or weeks, patients wait longer for critical care, conditions worsen, and risks rise, putting paperwork and process ahead of the care patients urgently need.

SPONSORED BY: COALITION TO STRENGTHEN AMERICA'S HEALTHCARE

When access to care depends on administrative approval, patients pay the price. Excessive prior authorization requirements and AI-assisted
coverage denials delay treatment and shift decisions away from doctors and toward paperwork. These insurer-driven practices add an estimated $83 billion in administrative costs alone. While hospitals work to deliver timely, affordable care, administrative barriers slow treatment, increase risk, drive up costs, and undermine trust—especially when care is time-sensitive and patients need medical decisions guided by clinical judgment, not process.

And now, the main event…

Donald Trump’s shameless crusade for the Nobel Peace Prize—premised on false claims that he
has ended eight wars—has done little to win over the people who actually award it. Not even close. After Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the most recent Nobel winner, handed over her prize to Trump in a herculean display of ass-kissing earlier this month, the Oslo-based committee was forced to state repeatedly that the prize “cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time.”
Translation: Sir, you don’t stand a chance. (Hopefully they can send Machado a new one in the mail.)

But it isn’t just a bunch of polite, bespectacled Norwegians resisting Trump’s pleas. Americans don’t think Trump deserves the honor, either. We had our polling partners at Echelon Insights ask voters about that last week, just as Trump was
in Davos threatening European allies with troops and/or tariffs if they didn’t fork over Greenland to the United States. By a 67-27 margin, voters say Trump does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, with 56 percent of them saying “definitely not.” The only partisan group that says he does deserve one is, naturally, Republicans. But while Trump-first Republicans say this by a 74-14 margin, Republicans who align with the party rather than Trump say the opposite, by a 52-40 margin.

Of course it’s possible that Americans aren’t fully up to speed on the particulars of the Trump-brokered
peace declaration between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or the shaky deal he struck in an attempt to end the decades-old conflict between Rwanda and the Congo. Maybe voters are just waiting for Trump to follow through on his big campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine. But the Echelon data hints at a more likely reason they’re skeptical of Trump’s Nobel credentials: widespread unease with disorder back home. After all, the United States itself doesn’t seem very peaceful these days.

A major driver of the discontent appears to be the growing outcry over ICE and Trump’s deportation dragnet as
the ugliest incidents overwhelm our feeds every time we open an app. Echelon found that 56 percent of voters now oppose ICE’s enforcement efforts, with 52 percent saying that ICE is targeting people who are not a threat to public safety and a 45 percent plurality saying that ICE raids make them feel less safe.

Indeed, I’ve been writing for many months that Americans have been souring on ICE, with independent voters driving the downturn in public surveys. In the new poll, Echelon found
that a majority of independent voters (52 percent) say that ICE raids are making them feel “less safe.” Read that line again. Trump was elected as a law-and-order president, but these days, the most crucial bloc of voters say his administration is putting them in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, Echelon found that 58 percent of Americans now say the country is heading in the wrong direction—the highest percentage recorded on that question since Trump returned to office last year. And just 33
percent say the country is headed in the right direction, a new low for his second term. That wrong-track, right-track gap has widened by five points in just one month, since last December’s poll. It’s no surprise the White House is now backpedaling on ICE so furiously.

Our new poll also found that Trump’s blustering pursuit of Greenland probably didn’t help his Nobel cause
with Americans. It’s unclear what Trump extracted from our NATO partners in Davos, where he claimed that the United States had won “total access” to Greenland with “no end” and “no time limit.” When asked about this “framework of a future deal” by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wouldn’t provide details, either. “I promise you, the deal is not what we had before,” Bessent said. “It is much more fulsome for
the United States.”

However fulsome it may be, by a 60-22 margin, voters say that the U.S. should not seek to acquire Greenland from Denmark. That number includes 67 percent of independents. When pressed on the details of a Greenland acquisition, only 27 percent agreed with the statement, “The U.S. should acquire Greenland to strengthen U.S. national security, and better counter China and Russia in the Arctic region,” which is essentially Trump’s message on the issue. But far
more voters—62 percent—agreed with the statement, “The U.S. should prioritize maintaining strong alliances with European NATO partners, even if that means not pursuing control of Greenland.”

Still, while voters are plainly skeptical of Trump’s negotiating tactics, they’re more open to the idea of taking control of Greenland if it could be somehow obtained without military or financial cost. Indeed, asked whether it would be a good outcome or bad outcome if the U.S. were to
acquire Greenland at a reasonable cost without military intervention, voters were split. About a third (36 percent) said it would be a good outcome, with 37 percent saying it would be a bad outcome and 27 percent unsure.

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