The Trump administration celebrated the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services by rolling out the creation of the Make America Healthy Again Commission.
Make America Healthy Again arose as a slogan after RFK Jr. joined the Trump campaign. While some of Kennedy’s ideas about health could be classified as “exotic,” he asked questions that no one else seemed interested in talking about. Like why, with our enormous national investment in biomedical research and health care, is our nation a crap hole of health outcomes, particularly from chronic diseases?
This is from the introduction to the executive order creating the MAHA Commission:
American life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries, with pre‑COVID-19 United States life expectancy averaging 78.8 years and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years. This equates to 1.25 billion fewer life years for the United States population. Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases. An estimated one in five United States adults lives with a mental illness.
These realities become even more painful when contrasted with nations around the globe. Across 204 countries and territories, the United States had the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021, nearly double the next-highest rate. Further, from 1990-2021, the United States experienced an 88 percent increase in cancer, the largest percentage increase of any country evaluated. In 2021, asthma was more than twice as common in the United States than most of Europe, Asia, or Africa. Autism spectrum disorders had the highest prevalence in high-income countries, including the United States, in 2021. Similarly, autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis are more commonly diagnosed in high-income areas such as Europe and North America. Overall, the global comparison data demonstrates that the health of Americans is on an alarming trajectory that requires immediate action.
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This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. Seventy-seven percent of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy, and our security.
These are the main items in the commission’s charter.
1. Our system is beset with s*** science. Over half of published biomedical research findings can’t be reproduced. As reproducibility is a foundational element in the scientific method, most of our “scientific research” money would have been better used snorting lines off a Russian hooker’s belly. There can be a lot of reasons for this failure; none speak highly of the scientists, the “peer review” process, or the journal publishing the studies. Sometimes, it is just slovenliness, but there is widespread fraud driven by the importance of publishing to career advancement and log-rolling with peer review panels. To get an idea of how bad the situation is, take a look at Retraction Watch – Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process. In most cases, no one cares, but it is not cost-free. Alzheimer’s and cancer research have wasted billions of dollars and been set back decades because of a small number of fraudulent papers.
The MAHA Commission takes aim at that.
We must restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.
2. There is no money for anyone in keeping you healthy. As someone much wittier than me has said, we don’t have a healthcare system; we have a sick-care system. No one in the research, pharmaceutical, or healthcare industries cares if you are healthy because they only get paid if you are sick. They do care about putting you on as many drugs as possible for the rest of your life. If you can reverse Type II diabetes with diet and exercise (and the data show that you can), that doesn’t buy your doctor a bass boat. If Alzheimer’s is Type III diabetes driven by insulin resistance, and it may be avoided by intervening before disease onset to modify diet and exercise programs, then no one gets paid billions to find a drug to cure a disease.
It shall be the policy of the Federal Government to aggressively combat the critical health challenges facing our citizens, including the rising rates of mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. To do so, executive departments and agencies (agencies) that address health or healthcare must focus on reversing chronic disease.
3. Data paid for by federal grants is not private property. This should go without saying. Data produced by scientists operating under a federal grant should be open-source. But, because data is career advancement in biomedical research, it is treated as proprietary. I find this just as insane as government employees getting royalties from patents they developed working in a government lab.
[A]ll federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust.
4. Find out what is causing this explosion of chronic diseases. If we can’t figure out why this is happening, and right now, there is no one with a vested interest in answering that question, nothing else matters.
[T]he National Institutes of Health and other health-related research funded by the Federal Government should prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick;
5. Incentivize doctors to keep people healthy. I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do this because if the doctor is billing the insurance company for 15-minute visits to write a prescription, then he’s not going to spend 30 minutes to an hour with you trying to make sure he never sees you again.
[A[gencies shall ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
6. Focus on the children. Childhood is when we learn habits and behaviors that drive us for the rest of our lives.
[S]tudy the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism.
Breaking the cronyism will be a major challenge as there is a revolving door between the people who make drugs (Pharma) and the people who evaluate them (FDA and CDC). Less talked about is food processors’ influence in controlling what you eat. Corruption of science led to replacing nutritionally necessary saturated fats with chemical compounds. Because, guess what? There is no money made if we are deep-frying with lard and tallow and eating real butter. There is a ton to be made in producing alternatives that are nutritionally suspect but have “scientists” saying they are good for us.
The commission is not strictly focused on the research and consumption side of the equation: “[A]gencies shall work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world.” I don’t know how this will work, but I hope Tyson, ADM, Cargill, and the rest of the usual suspects are not involved.
This may end up being just another do-nothing commission. Still, if it is aggressively managed, it could do wonders to break the stranglehold on our national health created by crap science, self-dealing bureaucrats, and rapacious industry executives and Make America Healthy Again.
