Trump Can Make America Healthy Again
Chronic diseases have reached crisis proportions, and Kamala Harris seems uninterested in the issue.
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sept. 5, 2024 1:45 pm ET
In my speech endorsing Donald Trump, I said we need to love our kids more than we hate each other. That means coming together to address common problems, and few are more urgent than the chronic-disease crisis. Americans are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system isn’t addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy and our global standing.
Among American teens, close to 30% are prediabetic. More than 18% of young adults have nonalchoholic fatty liver disease. More than 40% of adults 22 to 44 are obese, according to a 2023 study. In 2020, 77% of young adults didn’t qualify for the military based on their health scores, forcing the military to lower its standards.
Six out of 10 adults in America are living with a chronic illness. Seventy-four percent of American adults are overweight or obese. Rates of kidney disease and autoimmune conditions are going up. Cancer rates among young people are rising. This is despite Americans spending more and more to treat many of these conditions. U.S. life expectancy is markedly lower than in every other developed country, with wide disparities between income classes.
This crisis is the product of broken incentives. There is nothing more profitable for much of the healthcare system than a sick child. Americans with chronic conditions are often put on medications or treatments for the rest of their lives. Nearly 30% of teens have reportedly used prescription drugs in the past 30 days, according to data from the prescription discount service SingleCare.
Mr. Trump has made reforming broken institutions a cornerstone of his political life. He has become the voice of countless Americans who have been let down by our elites. He could unite the country by making it his priority to make America healthy again. Here are some specific policy ideas:
• Reform the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Pharmaceutical companies pay a fee every time they apply for a new drug approval, and this money makes up about 75% of the budget of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug division. That creates a barrier to entry to smaller firms and puts bureaucrats’ purse strings in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry.
• Prohibit members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee from making money from food or drug companies. Ninety-five percent of the members of a USDA panel charged with most recently updating nutrition guidelines had conflicts of interest. This is from the same government that brought you a National Institutes of Health research finding that Lucky Charms are healthier than ground beef.
• Review direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ad guidelines. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the public. News channels are filled with drug commercials, and reasonable viewers may question whether their dependence on these ads influences their coverage of health issues.
• Change federal regulation so that NIH funds can’t go to researchers with conflicts of interest. A 2019 ProPublica analysis of disclosures going back to 2012 found that over 8,000 federally funded health researchers reported significant financial conflicts of interest.
• Level the playing field for Americans internationally on drug costs. Today in Germany, Ozempic costs less than a tenth of what it does in the U.S. because while Berlin negotiates prices on behalf of all Germans, Washington can’t do the same. Legislators should cap drug prices so that companies can’t charge Americans substantially more than Europeans pay.
• Stop allowing beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to use their food stamps to buy soda or processed foods. Nine percent of all SNAP funding goes to sweetened drinks, according to 2011 data. It’s nonsensical for U.S. taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing junk that harms the health of low-income Americans.
• Revisit pesticide and other chemical-use standards. As of 2019, the U.S. allowed 72 pesticides that the European Union bans. We also allow chemicals in food and skin care that the bloc doesn’t. Some of these chemicals are quite common to our daily lives. Though glyphosate isn’t currently banned EU-wide due to disagreement between member states, it’s approved for use only through the end of 2033, when the issue will be revisited. Meanwhile in the U.S. the University of California, San Francisco, in 2015 found the chemical in 93% of the urine samples it studied.
• Require nutrition classes and functional medicine in federally funded medical schools. Today, 7 out of 10 of the leading killers of Americans are chronic diseases that are preventable, sometimes through improved eating habits. Yet about 80% of medical schools don’t require a course in nutrition.
• Reform crop subsidies. They make corn, soybeans and wheat artificially cheap, so those crops end up in many processed forms. Soybean oil in the 1990s became a major source of American calories, and high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Our subsidy program is so backward that less than 2% of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.
• Issue new presidential fitness standards. My uncle John F. Kennedy was right in 1960 when he wrote, “The physical vigor of our citizens is one of America’s most precious resources.” The Presidential Fitness Test that President Obama ditched should be reinstated.
• Devote half of research budgets from the NIH toward preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health. In the current system, researchers don’t have enough incentive to study generic drugs and root-cause therapies that look at things like diet.
• Increase patient choice by giving every American a health savings account. HSAs are a bipartisan healthcare policy that saves Americans money and gives them financial support in healthcare outside insurance. In many cases, food and exercise interventions are clinically the best medicine. With an HSA, a pre-diabetic can choose with his doctor whether to devote medical dollars to a drug like metformin or a root-cause intervention like a gym membership.
Mr. Trump has told me he wants to make ending this chronic-disease calamity a key part of his legacy, while Kamala Harris has expressed no interest in this issue. His political courage and moral clarity about the danger of our compromised institutions give us the best opportunity in our lifetimes to revive America’s health.
Mr. Kennedy is an environmental lawyer and public health advocate.
