Why are Congress, the media, and health bureaucrats so desperate to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fail?

All RFK's done so far is make minor changes to the Covid jab schedule. Who cares? No one takes mRNA boosters anyway. Yet the hate he faces is off the charts. It's not HIS fault healthcare is broken.

The American healthcare system is a disaster, and it’s getting worse.

That truth is inarguable. With 4 percent of the world’s people, the United States spends almost as much on medicine as every other country combined¹. Yet our life expectancy badly trails other wealthy countries², and the gap is growing.

The signal event of American healthcare this century is not the sequencing of the human genome. Nor is it the development of mRNA “vaccines” at Warp Speed. No, it’s the promotion of prescription opioid painkillers, which fueled a generation-long drug crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans.

Many threads of American dysfunction joined to weave the opioid catastrophe. But above all, the crisis shows how our medical system promotes the use of expensive, poorly tested and regulated treatments like Oxycontin, even when they kill patients.

—

(The big picture, and the small ones too. For pennies a day.)

—

The opioid disaster is no exception.

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies, hospitals, and yes, even many physicians all have hidden financial incentives that too often guide the care American patients receive. Regulators have little power to stop them. Patients rarely know they exist at all. (Meanwhile, insurance company executives pay themselves eight-figure salaries to keep the bucket brigade moving along.)

American healthcare has been in crisis for a long time. Generations, not decades.

In 1984, a doorstopper of a book called “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” won the Pulitzer Prize for explaining how the competing interests of physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies had made systematic healthcare reform impossible.³

Since World War 2, the political solution to high healthcare costs, infighting among medical providers, and the problem of patients who lack insurance has, paradoxically, been to buy off the various players by flooding more money into the system.

—

(It slices, it dices…)

—

First, the government subsidized employer-paid health insurance with tax breaks and increased federal biomedical research spending. Then it got directly into the insurance business with Medicare and Medicaid. Finally Democrats gave us Obamacare, subsidies funneled through private insurers and Medicaid.

In 2024, the federal government spent about $2 trillion on healthcare annually for Medicare and Medicaid alone — not counting the tax subsidy for employer-paid health insurance, or hundreds of billions of dollars more for veterans’ healthcare, medical and basic scientific research, and the maze of Obamacare subsidies.

That $2-plus trillion in federal loot is far more than any other country spends on its entire healthcare system. It is enough to keep the system afloat. Barely.

But along with the increased government spending on health care has come heavy regulation and bureaucracy, decreased competition as hospitals and insurers merge, and reduced autonomy for most physicians (many of whom hate what has happened, even though they remain well-paid).

Meanwhile, a small army of medical “entrepreneurs” look for ways to exploit payment loopholes. Drug and device companies charge unimaginable prices for new treatments, knowing that no one will - or can - stop them.

—

Now the system has hit another crisis point, for two reasons.

First, rich as the United States is, it cannot tolerate this level of health care expense — roughly double what it should pay, based on what other rich countries spend.

Some of this additional spending is necessary because Americans are generally more obese and less healthy than people in other developed countries. But a back-of-the-envelope-calculation suggests we overspend by roughly $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion annually, $6,000 to $8,000 for every American.

Insurance bureaucracy and the back-office spending it drives wastes hundreds of billions of dollars. Overpriced drugs and treatments and overutilization of advanced technology cost hundreds of billions more. The high pay that American physicians and nurses receive compared to medical professionals in other developed countries accounts for hundreds of billions more (at least this money goes to the people who directly provide care).

Excessive payments to hospitals which are local monopolies or oligopolies add hundreds of billions more. Anyone who thinks insurance company executives are overpaid should look at the Form 990s listing the pay of the people who run “nonprofit” hospitals. The “defensive” care driven by lawsuit threats adds tens or hundreds of billions.

Put all those 11- and 12-figure sums together, and you have real money. At the same time every part of the system can correctly claim that pinching it won’t matter. A 50 percent cut in prescription drug spending would level Big Pharma (possibly for the good), but it would reduce overall spending by less than 5 percent.

So the buck-passing never stops. Neither does the spending.

The insane cost of healthcare is the top reason that middle-class Americans feel squeezed in ways that Europeans don’t, even though per-capita income in the United States is now significantly higher than that in Europe.⁴

—

(Your tax dollars at work)

—

Even more importantly, the massive spending and hidden financial incentives are now likely doing more harm than good — as the Oxycontin debacle shows.

In other words, even if the United States could afford its preferred solution of pouring another couple hundred billion dollars into the system (and it can’t), the fix no longer works. Yes, American healthcare is so messed up that more money will probably only make it worse.

This is a bad place to be.

What does all this have to do with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Well, as Health and Human Services Secretary, it’s his job to fix this unfixable problem. Never mind that he can’t.

Unlike, say, Alex Azar (HHS Secretary in the first Trump administration), or Xavier Becerra (HHS Secretary for President Biden), Kennedy wasn’t brought in to keep the trains running. He was brought in because the trains are running over a cliff.

Everyone in the United States — with the exception of a few lobbyists and executives — is frustrated and angry with a system that now costs more than $15,000 per person every year, overwhelms television with ads, and yet somehow fails to help Americans live longer.

—

(I can’t help you live longer. But I can give you the truth while you’re still around.)

—

So the medico-public health-industrial complex, which these days includes most of the media, is terrified — of Kennedy himself, and of what he represents.

The mere fact that he was given the job is proof that big changes, changes that will cost money, are on the horizon. The best way for the system to dodge those changes, as it always has before, is to demonize Kennedy.

And so the demonization has begun.

Reporters won’t give ground even to Kennedy’s most reasonable viewpoints, such as his dislike of amphetamines for kids with “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” — also known as nine-year-olds.

—

(Yes, she put “overprescription” in quotation marks, as if the fact that the United States has 10 times the per-capita stimulant drug prescription as Germany, and 30 times as much as France, doesn’t suggest a problem.)

—

Inevitably, vaccines have become the center of the fight.

Why? Vaccines play an outsized symbolic role in health care.

By definition, vaccines are a treatment that people receive when they’re healthy and the doctor-patient relationship is most equal. That is, people can decide whether to take them rather than feeling pressured to accept the recommendation of a physician because they are ill and need immediate care. Further, they are mostly given to children, and parents are particularly protective of the health of their kids.

So vaccines function as a proxy for the overall trust that people have in medicine. They are a Rorschach test. Both Kennedy (and many Unreported Truths readers) and his opponents are focused on them in a way I believe is unproductive.

Vaccine opponents believe they are responsible for all manner of evils — the increase in autism diagnoses in particular. Their supporters, including most doctors, believe they are a bulwark against millions of childhood deaths.

As I have written before, vaccines for diseases such as measles and mumps have been studied for generations. They provide near-lifetime protection at low risk. Most kids who get measles won’t die from it, but if we can protect them, we might as well.

The problem is that the vaccine fanatics will not compromise, as they have proven with their unwillingness to admit the failure of the mRNA Covid shots, which offered a few months of protection in return for a lifetime of unknown risks — the opposite of the calculus vaccines should offer.

Their push for hepatitis B shots for all newborns is equally myopic. As the Free Press tartly wrote this morning:

People who are intravenous drug users, or who have many sexual partners, have a higher chance of contracting hep B, which they can pass on to their babies. And it’s too rude to ask people if they shoot heroin or sell their bodies for sex after they’ve given birth… So to avoid things getting awkward, everyone has to be treated as if they. . . shoot heroin and sell their bodies for sex. Hep B–vax that baby.

—

Or maybe don’t.

We aren’t going to fix healthcare in the United States easily, or quickly. In fact, the more I learn about the system, the more I wonder if we can ever fix it.

And I don’t agree with every proposal RFK Jr. has made.

But I know this much: the hate that he’s generating isn’t about any of his specific proposals. It’s about the system. It’s easier to yell at him about hep B and measles — at a time when measles vaccination rates remain near all-time highs — than admit that fixing our broken $5 trillion medical system will require goring a lot of very wealthy and well-connected oxen.

—

(And maybe even some very wealthy veterinarians, like Dr. Albert Bourla.)

—

I just hope RFK keeps cool, and — to misquote the serenity prayer — focuses on the parts of the system that so badly need change, instead of spending all his political capital on a fight over vaccines he cannot win.

Because that’s just what guys like Dr. Albert Bourla are hoping he will do.

1. In 2021, the United States spent $4 trillion, the rest of the world $5.8 trillion, per the World Economic Forum. This year, we will pass $5 trillion.

2. This is true even when black people, who historically have shorter life expectancies, are factored out.

3. At the time, drug and device companies were less important.

4. The cost of education is second, and the cost of housing is third, although housing cuts both ways, since people who own homes benefit from supply restrictions and rising prices (at least until they want to trade up).