highercosts...lowerlife expectancy
Perhaps the single biggest indictment of the U.S. healthcare status quo is simply this: Americans on average perish four years earlier than their counterparts in comparable wealthy nations, including Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
1980 2022
United States 73.7 77.5
Germany 72.9
80.7
Japan 76.1
84.1
Sweden 75.8 83.1
United Kingdom 73.6
80.9 SOURCE:
healthsystemtracker.org
treasure into a healthcare system that seems itself to need CPR. Treating chronic disease
now accounts for 90% of all U.S. healthcare costs. The share invested in preventive healthcare: a paltry 3.5%. In his August speech, Kennedy made it clear that he and Trump had agreed to upend mainstream medicine’s status quo. “These agencies — the FDA,
USDA, and CDC, all of them — are controlled by giant for-profit corporations,” RFK Jr. said. Kennedy noted that “pharma
executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies.” And he went on to pledge: “With President Trump’s backing, we’re going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors who are free from industry funding. We’re going to make sure the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.” Kennedy joined Trump on the hustings during the closing months of what was an extraor- dinarily emotional and hard- fought campaign. It was then that many Americans first heard the acronym “MAHA” — Make America Healthy Again. And the message was hugely echoed across social media by Trump’s faithful followers. So well did grassroots health
populism complement Trump’s populist movement that the two movements effectively merged. Seemingly overnight, MAHA and MAGA were one.
THE ‘MEDICAL -INDUSTRIAL’
COMPLEX Big Pharma
Cozy Regulators Fake Science
the term “medical- Industrial Complex” is used more and more often to characterize the cozy, mutually profitable institutions that control U.S. healthcare: the global pharmaceutical giants, massive insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, the medical schools, the professional as- sociations, and the captured politicians and regulatory agen- cies dominating U.S. healthcare. Their reaction to
the Kennedy-Trump alliance? Fear and loathing. “It scares the beje- sus out of me,” biotech investor and CEO John Maraganore told the health-industry website StatNews. Maraganore went
on to slam Robert Kennedy Jr. as “one of the big leaders in an anti-science philoso- phy that we see in this country — which is really, deeply concern- ing.”
PBS, meanwhile,
reported, “The pros- pect of Kennedy’s influencing a wide ar- ray of federal policies has raised alarm bells among advocates of sound science.” Former Teva Phar- maceuticals CEO Jer- emy Levin went even further. He indicated Kennedy was “a seri- ous danger to health- care overall,” based on published reports. For MAGA pro-
ponents, the attacks on Kennedy sounded familiar, an echo of the vituperation hurled at Trump ever since his
ride down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. One factor driving the medical es- tablishment’s aversion: Big Pharma’s determi- nation to protect the $318 billion in revenues it raked in from U.S. drug sales in 2023. As Kennedy would
frequently spotlight, consumers in other countries fork over just a small fraction of what Americans pay for the same drugs. Ac- cording to HHS, other nations’ consumers spend only about a third of what Ameri- cans pay for the same drugs — a disparity generally attributed to laws that limit fed- eral officials’ power to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceuti- cal companies. This year, for the
DECEMBER 2024 | NEWSMAX 61
FDA/OLIVIER LE MOAL©ISTOCK
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