Why couldn't he be the Sec of Agriculture? Like Earl Butz. He'd do less damage over there and help improve the food chain.
Oh, wait a minute, Earl once said if housewives did not have “such a low level of economic intelligence,” they would understand that the price of everything had gone up and “you can’t get more by paying less.”... and he was a raging bigot with a big mouth. What was his famous quote? Ah, he described blacks as “coloreds who wanted only three things satisfying sex, loose shoes and a warm bathroom",
Never mind...maybe RFK isn't such a great idea. Who appointed Earl, Tricky Dick another great president.
What RFK Jr.’s Confirmation Means
How a scalawag came to symbolize the dilemmas of the welfare state.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., WSJ
Feb. 21, 2025 4:37 pm ET
Before he voted the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nomination out of committee, Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor and the Senate Finance Committee chief, told a story. An 18-year-old patient had to be helicoptered off for a high-risk, $250,000 liver transplant. The operation could have been avoided with a $50 hepatitis B vaccine.
The part he didn’t mention: It likely wasn’t the girl or her parents who paid.
How did Mr. Kennedy get confirmed as the nation’s health secretary despite his vaccine apostasy, despite his dubious dealings with trial lawyers, despite his history of drug abuse? He got a big boost because of a left-right MAHA coalition (Make America Healthy Again) that we hardly knew existed until he became its maypole. “Man, ultra-processed food, obesity, we are simpatico. We’re completely aligned,” gushed even Sen. Cassidy.
Mr. Kennedy, the moms and the medical payment complex are all, at least in part, fumbling toward a problem known to the insurance industry as moral hazard. Unless every economics textbook is wrong and incentives don’t matter, a factor in the obesity crisis isn’t just the accessibility of tasty but unhealthy food. It isn’t just the high cost of exercise (which people once got free from their jobs).
It’s also the fact that they can shove their health-care costs onto fellow taxpayers.
When then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg took aim at New Yorkers’ trans fats, big gulps and cigarettes, many laughed but he earned a surprising endorsement from tea-party types. One reader complained to a local tabloid: “I realize for some people, especially those with beer bellies, that a cup of coffee loaded with milk and sugar, a bagel with two pats of butter and a cigarette really gets the morning off to a quick start. But honestly, I am sick of paying for their Medicaid bills.”
Two decades later, the nation’s obesity crisis couldn’t come up in the Kennedy hearings without somebody mentioning the cost to health-care payers. Mr. Kennedy himself testified: “In Medicaid and Medicare we need to focus more on making [patients] accountable for their own healthcare, so they understand the relationship between eating and getting sick.”
Americans would likely be happier and certainly healthier if they ate better. The Joint Economic Committee estimates obesity will cause upward of $8.2 trillion in “excess medical expenditures” in the next 10 years. Outside medical care, prices are the incentive for consumers to regulate their behavior to avoid such costs. Businesses are known also to pay attention to price signals. The food industry would certainly adapt if the prospect of a doctor’s bill suddenly made that bag of chips seem prohibitive to consumers.
But prices are nonfunctional in medical services, where Soviet-style allocative decisions are made over the heads of patients by giant, battling, self-interested institutions.
Try wading into the acrimonious debate between Medicare Advantage insurers and hospital chains over the former’s refusal rate for proposed treatments. It’s impossible to say which side is right and a fool’s errand to try. Wherever they draw the line, it definitely falls shy of optimizing the public’s cost-benefit trade-off from the dollars it shovels into the payment complex as taxes and insurance premiums.
Where this megatrend ends, besides in a fiscal crisis for America, nobody knows. In 2016, looking realistically at federal programs and tax policy, researchers calculated that government already accounted for two-thirds of health spending, and that was before the Covid-sponsored expansion of Medicaid. Mr. Kennedy signals one possibility: As chattels of the health-care state, Americans will increasingly be regulated as to the foodstuffs they consume just as they are now regulated with respect to smoking, seat-belt wearing, helmet wearing, etc. Expect another run at making health insurance mandatory, as ObamaCare attempted. Down the road, expect to be advised of the benefits of assisted suicide when the cost of keeping you alive doesn’t match the computed benefit.
The problem is, as sensible as some of this may be, it leaves intact the basic incentive for Americans to consume more healthcare than they’d be willing to pay for if the price tags were directly attached.
Mr. Kennedy is a Trumpian figure—bombastic, untrustworthy and self-interested. Through some virtue not apparent to me, he has become a messenger of the colliding concerns of our poorly designed health-care system. It costs a lot more than it needs to. It does less well for patients and payers than it should. The system is a threat to Americans’ fiscal survival. If it isn’t fixed, it may become a threat to their personal autonomy.
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