Better in their words…

President-elect Trump dropped a bomb on the medical world on Thursday with his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees almost all government health agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH) and funds and regulates a substantial portion of US health care through CMS.

The selection is likely to provoke strong reactions in the medical and public health establishment, as RFK threatens to upend a system under which they have succeeded. He plans to turn over the moneychangers’ tables in the medical temple.

How should sensible practicing physicians respond to these events?

I argue that we should embrace the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda and try to convince our medical leaders to work for major changes in our dysfunctional health agencies and deteriorating health care system.

RFK Jr has tapped into a strong sense among the public that government health agencies, and the health system at large, have been corrupted by corporate interests that have become increasingly misaligned with the public interest, a fact that was exposed by the disastrous authoritarian covid response.

In March 2020, US public health leaders advised federal, state, and local governments to impose lockdown, an unprecedented, radical, and unethical public health and social science experiment without the informed consent of the public and without any consideration for the adverse medical, economic, and societal effects. In order to protect our health, public health leaders effectively told us to hide fearfully in our houses, binge watch Netflix, eat GrubHub, and dissolve human connections. They closed beaches, parks, schools, churches, and gyms, while keeping liquor stores and marijuana shops open. They required us to wear rags over our faces as a condition for entering public places. It is hard to imagine a series of measures that could be less conducive to good health.

The first rationale given for these extraordinary measures was to “flatten the curve” and prevent hospitals from “collapsing.” When that did not happen, the rationale shifted to “crushing the curve” – eliminating covid as China seemed to have done.

When zero covid failed, the rationale shifted again to “saving lives” until Big Pharma produced magic vaccines that would “end the pandemic.” When the magic shots failed to end the pandemic and the masks went back on, and the virus surged again, public health leaders decided to vilify and scapegoat the minority of people who chose not to take them and attempted to mandate the shots for nearly everyone, a program that proved to be illegal and unconstitutional. Despite clear evidence that the covid shots were less effective and less safe than initially claimed, US health agencies then proceeded to authorize a program of annual “boosters” for everyone in perpetuity in the absence of any clinical evidence of safety or efficacy.

In short, the US public health system led the US public to damage their health during the pandemic and bet the farm on an expensive Pharma solution that failed to deliver the promised results. They never suggested to the public to take charge of their own health and reduce their risk of adverse covid events by going outside, breathing fresh air, getting sunshine, eating healthy food, exercising more, losing weight, getting high blood pressure and diabetes under better control, and enhancing wellbeing through social connections to friends, family, and community.

This is RFK Jr’s thesis on health care in brief: that the system has been co-opted by malign corporate influences (Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food) to keep the public unhealthy and then prey upon them to upsell an escalating number of expensive daily/weekly/monthly pills and shots for life. RFK argues that they have captured the health agencies and the medical research ecosystem to support their business model.

It is a thesis that is resonating with the public and has been amplified by the recent Tucker and Rogan podcasts of Casey and Calley Means and their book, Good Energy The US public is paying a fortune for this corporate health care system while the public’s health and life expectancy are flatlining.

Indeed, corporate influences have had unhealthy effects on the medical profession as well. We can all see that consolidating health systems have consolidated more money and power at the expense of physicians, who seem to work harder and harder for less and less on a demoralizing productivity treadmill that just gets faster. Increasingly powerful health insurers grow their profits and stock price through gimmicks like prior authorization that waste physician and staff time and consume resources with no return on health. An array of middlemen, such as pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) and Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs), also loot the health care system while contributing nothing to human health.

This is the choice that physicians are going to have to make in the coming months: stand with the corporate interests that the public and many doctors increasingly see as harmful to their health and their lives or stand with patients and public for major reform.

The right choice should be clear to everyone.

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