The Left is hysterical over the prospect of a Trump administration in charge of the nation’s health policy.
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But life expectancy in the U.S. peaked in 2014 and has been shrinking nearly every year since then, an indicator that Americans’ health is declining. This despite trillions spent covering the uninsured. Expanding insurance is not the panacea it was promised to be.
A shakeup is needed.
Here’s what should be on the Trump agenda:
1. Focus on healthy eating to combat chronic diseases
President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial health adviser, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is targeting unhealthy eating, particularly processed foods. He’s on to something.
Findings in the journal Nature/Food suggest that switching from an unhealthy diet to a healthy one can add 8.9 years to a 40-year-old man’s life expectancy, and 8.6 years to a 40-year-old woman’s.
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Anti-smoking campaigns reduced smoking from 40% of the adult population in 1969 to 11% today. The same can probably be done for eating.
2. End mission confusion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
That’s the advice of Trump’s inner health circle, including Drs. Scott Gottlieb and Joel Zinberg. The agency now focuses on woke issues. Meanwhile, it flubbed its response to the biggest disease threat of our lifetimes, COVID-19, as I documented in my book “The Next Pandemic.”
The CDC’s unscientific guidelines on masking, social distancing and vaccines were the basis for draconian assaults on people’s right to assemble and to keep their businesses open. Americans should be relieved to hear RFK Jr. swear it will never happen again.
A CDC shakeup is also needed to reduce hospital infections, which kill more people (75,000 a year) than breast cancer.
If a previous occupant of a hospital bed had an infection, the risk that the next patient gets it soars 583% per Columbia School of Nursing research. Inadequate cleaning is the reason.
Yet instead of imposing rigorous cleaning standards, the CDC helps hospitals hide outbreaks from the public. You don’t want to be in a hospital overrun with a deadly germ, but the CDC calls it “Hospital A,” preventing you from knowing.
It’s an example of the cosy relationship between health companies and the government that RFK Jr. claims he wants to clean up.
3. Make insurance affordable
The price of health coverage — $25,500 for a family of four — is one of the public’s top worries, according to Pew Research.
The expansion of Medicaid to 80 million during the last decade is partly to blame.
Medicaid shortchanges hospitals, paying them 88¢ for every dollar of care delivered.
Hospitals keep profits up by shifting unpaid Medicaid costs onto patients who get coverage through a job or buy it themselves. The bigger Medicaid gets, the higher premiums go.
Republicans intend to rein in Medicaid enrollment, which will help anyone who pays for insurance.
Affordable Care Act rules require individuals to buy a long list of “essential” benefits. It’s like telling car buyers their only choice is a fully loaded SUV. Some car buyers just want wheels.
Trump will allow more affordable plans, as he did in his first term — before President Joe Biden barred them.
4. Close the border and tighten security
This health policy will yield the fastest results, halting the influx of contagious diseases, alleviating the crush of migrants in ERs and interrupting the flow of fentanyl.
Drug deaths alone are cutting U.S. life expectancy by two-thirds of a year.
When a young addict is arrested or overdoses, desperate family members often fork over life savings to unscrupulous addiction “recovery” outfits.
RFK Jr. is proposing a network of public “healing farms” where people struggling with addiction can go, try to heal themselves and obtain skills for a sober life. Any parent who’s gone through this with a child will say, “What have we got to lose?”
Also, the public’s worries about RFK Jr.’s vaccine views are likely overblown. Mandated vaccinations have enabled the U.S. to defeat polio, measles and other diseases.
RFK Jr. said this week, “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.”
But you don’t have to take his word. Neither RFK Jr. nor Trump will have the power to eliminate childhood vaccinations. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states have the authority to require vaccinations or not. Each state has its vaccine mandates.
During COVID-19, the court affirmed that, striking down Biden’s proposed national vaccine mandate on employees of large companies.
All in all, the Left is frantically defending a public health status quo that offers $25,000 premiums for family health coverage, declining lifespans, junk food, cover-ups of hospital dangers and unpreparedness for the next germ threat.
Trump’s health advisers insist we can do better. I agree.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York