Perhaps what I appreciate most about RFK Jr. — a nominal liberal — and his very specific issue set (MAHA), which MAGA welcomed with open arms, is that the crux of the rot in the U.S. medical system is not about conservatism vs. liberalism, nor donkeys vs. elephants, nor even necessarily socialized vs. free market medicine; the entire system is a massive failure from top to bottom as viewed through any ideological lens— and objectively, demonstrably so.
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America is a sick place, metaphorically and literally, and it’s in large part (although not fully) due to the pharmaceutical, medical, and insurance industries that have been preying on desperate people and ripping off the public treasury with impunity for decades now, which they get away with because they bribe politicians not to do anything about it via “campaign contributions” (“bribes” in plain English).
This country, accordingly, needs a massive overhaul of not just the medical system but the medical paradigm it exists in, which is why RFK Jr. and the MAHA energy he brings to the Trump campaign are so compelling to so many people, many of whom are not ideological one way or the other, who see clearly that something fundamental has got to be done to overhaul the beast — not tweaking around the edges or this weaksauce Obamacare nonsense (which was actually just a giveaway to the insurance industry by mandating everyone buy their garbage policies or face tax penalties).
(Possibly one of the greatest cable news clips below, immediately in the aftermath of the passage of Obamacare.)
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The data is clear for anyone willing to take an objective look.
Via Children's Health Defense (emphasis added):
The U.S. healthcare system ranks last among 10 advanced economies, according to a report released today by the Commonwealth Fund.
One of the report’s key findings is that the U.S. lags behind its international peers considerably in terms of health system performance — yet the U.S. is also “an outlier on health care spending.”
In 1980, U.S. health expenditures were “comparable to outlays in Sweden and Germany (8.2% of GDP).” However, since then, “the U.S. has far outpaced other nations, spending more than 16 percent of its GDP on health care in 2022” — a figure “predicted to exceed 20 percent by 2035.”
According to the report, this finding reflects the “enduring U.S. dilemma of spending vast amounts for generally poor results — the very definition of a low-value health system.”
From the aforementioned study, via The Commonwealth Fund (emphasis added):
We compare the health systems of 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States…
In the aggregate, the nine nations we examined are more alike than different with respect to their higher and lower performance in various domains. But there is one glaring exception — the U.S… Especially concerning is the U.S. record on health outcomes, particularly in relation to how much the U.S. spends on health care.
Per the report, again, the United States spends a staggering 16.5% of its GDP on healthcare; the next-highest is France at 11.9%. Yet of the developed countries included in the study, Americans live dramatically shorter lives and die many more preventable deaths than any other nation.
If the industry were held to the same standards that any American worker is in his day job, it would’ve been summarily fired years ago. Instead, its bottom line grows year after year as the people whose health it’s supposed to benefit get sicker and sicker.
