President-elect Donald Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his pick for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and tv personality Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump and Kennedy have pledged to “make America healthy again,” but what could the nation’s health and health care system look like under these two new appointments?
RFK, Jr.: A spreader of medical misinformation
HHS is an enormous federal department, encompassing the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with an allocated budget of $1.7 trillion. The Secretary of HHS not only manages these bodies but also serves as a public health advisor to the president. Kennedy is an environmental lawyer who has spent years earning hundreds of thousands of dollars spreading anti-vaccine conspiracies.
Kennedy has been a prolific spreader of medical misinformation, claiming that vaccines cause autism; herbicides are the “cause” of transgender people existing; water fluoridation results in arthritis, neurodevelopmental disorders and even “IQ loss;” and even going so far as to say that COVID-19 was engineered by China to “ethnically target” white and Black individuals, with future “ethnically targeted bioweapons” supposedly in the making.
Kennedy lives in a world in which scientific evidence is make-believe. Even so, his nomination has already made an impact, with politicians in Arkansas; Winter Haven, Florida; and Lebanon, Oregon already moving to remove fluoride from drinking water. As a result, Wall Street has seen a rise in the value of dental stocks, as billionaires prepare to reap even greater profits from an increase in tooth decay and cavities.
Kennedy’s ability to influence public perception of health, in part, relies on his appeal to the working class’s massive distrust in the U.S. health care system. According to a 2023 Gallup Poll, only 11% of respondents had a “very positive” view of the health care system, while 51% had a somewhat or very negative view of it. This distrust naturally arises out of a health care system that prioritizes profit for the rich over the health and well-being of the working class.
Despite more than $4.5 trillion spent annually on health care through public spending, private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, the United States ranks last in preventable mortality, infant mortality, access to care and overall performance compared to other “high income” nations, and 60th in life expectancy in comparison to the rest of the world. In fact, the only thing the United States ranks first in is military spending and the sheer number of people incarcerated across the nation.
When Trump declares, “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to Public Health [sic],” this understandably appeals to the desire working people have for real change in our health care system. Kennedy falsely claims that he will work to shift the health care system from one that manages illness and chronic diseases to one that prevents them.
The reality, though, is that neither Trump nor Kennedy are likely to make any changes to benefit the health and well-being of working-class and oppressed individuals. Kennedy and Trump want to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, limit the types of food that can be purchased with SNAP (also known as food stamps) with no stated proposals on how to make healthy and nutritious food affordable or how to eliminate food deserts, and reduce regulations which will only give the pharmaceutical industry and health care corporations further freedom to cut costs for greater profit while taking greater risks with our lives.
Dr. Oz: Another peddler of pseudoscience
The claim that the Trump administration will work to improve the health care system is further refuted by the selection of Dr. Oz to serve as the future administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Oz has promised Trump that he will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency,” by which he really means that he will slash federal spending on an agency that provides health care to more than 150 million people — almost half the country.
Oz’s plan to do so would likely build off his past proposal to create Medicare Advantage for All. Medicare Advantage, or the privatized version of Medicare, takes public money from taxpayer dollars and gives it to private insurance companies. Rather than using that money to provide quality care to patients, the private insurance companies skimp on costs, repeatedly deny claims, falsify diagnoses, reduce the number of doctors you have to choose from (in some areas, leaving patients with no doctors in their town), and funnel billions into their own pockets.
Oz, like Kennedy, has used his celebrity status to spew misinformation and peddle pseudoscience for his own profit. Oz has claimed red onion, endive and sea bass reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, pushed hydroxychloroquine (an antimalarial that can cause eye and nerve damage) as a treatment for COVID-19, and peddled a device to treat leaky heart valves that has since been associated with more than 1,000 reports of patient deaths and thousands of reported injuries to patients. For Trump, Kennedy and Oz, their plan to tackle the “illness industrial complex” and “make America healthy again” is only one more opportunistic scam they are selling to the public.
What would a health care system under socialism look like?
Ultimately, the proposals of the capitalist class will do little to serve the real issues the working class is facing: a Black maternal mortality crisis, bans on transgender health care in 26 states, bans on abortion in 13 states and restrictions in more than two-thirds of the country, and an unaffordable health care system that only continues to see rising prices. Reducing the public health workforce, slashing health care spending, and privatizing public health insurance will only worsen already existing inequities. What we need is a complete restructuring of the health care system, beginning with seizing health care corporations, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry and turning them into public property.
There is no reason insurance plans need to exist when free health care could be provided from the profits of the top corporations and their shareholders. Medicine should be free, ending the exorbitant prices of medications, saving billions in the process. Providing free housing, childcare, education and health care (including dentistry and optometry) to all will prevent many serious health problems for people all over the U.S.
Healthy and nutritious food should replace the toxic, overly processed food that fills our grocery stores today. Rather than being more expensive than “junk food,” healthy and nutrient-dense groceries could be subsidized by a socialist government. Urban areas, currently dominated by concrete and skyscrapers, could be redesigned to incorporate green space, running trails and public space to spend time outdoors.
Public transit systems could be fully funded, redesigned and expanded to reduce the amount of vehicles used throughout cities, vastly decreasing the amount of pollution in our air. All spaces, including sidewalks, grocery stores, community centers and workplaces could be universally designed to be accessible for disabled individuals.
A women’s health department could be formed to educate and train a large number of primarily Black women doctors, nurses, midwives and doulas to end the Black maternal mortality crisis. Similarly, an LGBTQ health department could be formed to expand access to gender-affirming care across the nation, by educating and training physicians, punishing discrimination and increasing the number of LGBTQ health care workers.
There is no excuse for working people to continue to suffer and die due to the greed and avarice of billionaires and corporate politicians. We can flourish as a society, and we can share our advances freely with the rest of the world. We have the power to determine our future if we organize and fight for it.
Feature photo: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking at a campaign rally at Legends Event Center in Phoenix, Arizona, on Dec. 20, 2023. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 20)
