There are many intriguing mansions in the big house of Maga, but perhaps the most intriguing of all has its own name: Maha, or makes America healthy again.
America is unmistakably suffering from a serious health crisis: almost half of the Americans have high blood pressure, three -quarters are obese or overweight and 15% have type 2 diabetes. Previous attempts to improve these figures are frustrated, despite the liberal application of the world’s best brains. Can the eccentric new health and human service secretary of America succeed where so many of his wise predecessors have failed?
There are obvious reasons for doubt. The choice of Donald Trump for the track is, to say the least, a strange ball: a scion of the kennedy -dynasty, a reformed heroin and womanizer, a dedicated of strange diets such as raw milk, and a manchild given to rugged, jokes such as a dead bare jr
He is a vaccine skeptic who repeatedly claimed that vaccines are linked to autism, a claim for which there is no generally accepted evidence. This can be considered as a disqualification for even an entry ride at the US Department of Health and Human Services, since vaccines have done just as much as everything to tackle terrible diseases such as polio and improve life expectancy. He is also more skilled in annoying gigantic organizations than running them, let alone run one that spends more than $ 1.7 trillion a year.
Kennedy repeatedly insisted in his confirmation hearings that he is not a vaccine denier and that his skepticism is aimed at mercury. He promised to enforce good practices. But his first few weeks at the office were disappointing lethargic, in contrast to the focused energy that comes from the White House. He has spent a lot of time defending his questionable handling of a serious outbreak of measles in a district in Texas populated by anti-vaxxers. He has nevertheless found an elusive figure in his department to visit and pose Florida for a photo with Russell Brand, a embarrassed British comedian. Kennedy remains curious, given the absence of Zon in the capital.
The slowness forces are huge. These start with the organization of Washington.
The US Department of Agriculture is among the thumb of Big Food, which, due to design and habit, maximizes the production of basic foods, including foods that can be very bad for you, such as sugar, corn syrup, salt and fat, and that offer the building blocks of ultra-processed food.
The Kennedy department focuses on producing medicines and research.
The result is a perverse balance: one department creates sick people and the other solves them, maintaining the underlying health problems of America: a system “sick care” instead of a “health care” system. The most important tools that Kennedy needs to achieve his goals are in the hands of the Secretary of Agriculture.
The special interests also have an uninterrupted record of resistance to reforms. Food and soft drinks have impeded attempts to improve the diets of Americans with ruthlessness that would impress the National Rifle Association. Coca-Cola Co. and Pepsico Inc., working via the American Beverage Association, have blocked attempts by Central-Reformers to impose higher taxes on sugar or to limit the size of the drinks offered for sale.
Nevertheless, Kennedy’s very eccentricity can prove to be a great asset in view of the failure of his wise predecessors. Recording the status quo is the leitmotif of the life of Kennedy. He is also right about one big thing: the best chance of America to improve health care lies in tackling chronic diseases such as heart disease and hypertension, both of which are linked to poor diet and exercise. HHS tends to concentrate on a high level research, because that is where the status lies in the medical profession. But the big profit lies in improving the American diet and the lifestyle instead of making more research documents.
Kennedy also has something that none of his predecessors has: a movement. For Centrists, health care reform has been a matter of experts telling the people what they should do, a model that was tested for destroying by Anthony Fauci during the pandemic. RFK is the head of a movement where ordinary Americans are promised to improve their own health on the left and the judge, often in response to serious health problems. His Maha crusade was originally left among left-wing activists, in particular ‘crispy mothers’, who concluded that the American food and health system had been broken. Now Maha also has enthusiastic supporters in deep red America such as the Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The combination of institutional and motion force gives RFK two ways to achieve its goals.
He can use his responsibility for food safety to combat the chemicals that are nonchalantly adding to food. (Visiting Europeans are often surprised by how brightly colored American food is, only to become furious when they discover that some standard ingredients in the EU are forbidden.)
He can also get the full weight of Maha back steps behind movements to prevent people from spending food vouchers on soft drinks and other forms of junk food, despite the formal control used by the Ministry of Agriculture about food stamp programs.
For too long, good health is associated with Liberal Do-Goody and top-down expertise and Red America has seen Big Macs and Big Gulps as weapons against digestion elitationalism rather than as threats for their cardiovascular systems. The Maha movement is a good health in a bottom-up tradition of self-help to be re-created-one tradition that has sustained a long line of benevolent cranks, such as the Kellogg brothers, who started the grain companies of the same name, and which is currently flourishing on the internet. Vani Hari, the ‘Food Babe’, an internet effort with more than 2 million followers on Instagram and an ally of RFK, has warned food companies that ‘if you are an American company that will poison us with ingredients that you do not use in other countries, we will come for you.’
It also clambers the battle lines in American politics. Sanders is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of preventing people from using food vouchers to buy soft drinks, although such purchases are significant income for Walmart Inc., the flagship employer of its state. Trump has told RFK to ‘become wild’ on food despite its own enthusiastic consumption of the president of Cola Diet and Big Macs and the high correlation between places dominated by chain restaurants and Trump voters.
With the Maga on the right and the crispy left on the side of RFK, the most stubborn resistance to Maha comes from the center, in particular of the certified class that HAAT and the health care complex dominate. For example, more than 15,000 doctors signed an open letter that lobbyed against his confirmation by the Senate, for example.
RFK’s anti-vax history should certainly be convicted. And some of his WOO-WOO beliefs deserve contempt.
But is it logical to spend the next four years, or no matter how long he is in office, consider his shortcomings and failures? Or should Centrists now have the opportunity he offers to tackle the dysfunctional status quo of America?
RFK is right to concentrate on chronic diseases, where the health of America is far behind that of other advanced countries. He is confronted with an exhaustion war with malignant troops, especially large food and large soft drinks, which have blocked so many sensible reforms in the past, and who do everything they can do to influence the president. It is time for central Americans to hold their nose and to join Maha’s fight against chronic diseases.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is the author of “The Aristocration of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
Originally published:
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