Can America Afford To Be Healthy Again?
Proponents of MAHA
Along with the devious machinations of the Democrat party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unabashedly exposed the state of America’s corrupt and incestuous health and food systems in his speech announcing he would drop out of the presidential race in key swing states.
RFK Jr. pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a refrain that a handful of health advocates, journalists, and pundits have been imploring policymakers to do for the past decade. Doctors such as Peter Attia and Mark Hyman, and maybe lesser known but equally established doctors such as Stacy Sims and Gabrielle Lyons, have all offered keen insight into what true metabolic health looks like.
Food investigators and journalists such as Michael Pollan, Marianne Nestle, Nina Tiecholz, and Robert Lustig have worked to expose the insidious nature of big food conglomerates and implored us to change the way we eat and treat chronic health issues.
If MAHA succeeds in any significant way … a decent portion of the U.S. economy shrinks.
Most of these experts don’t get mainstream media exposure because most of their recommendations run counter to everything prescribed by government regulatory agencies like the CDC, FDA, and NIH.
Some of them recommend a diet that completely flips the food pyramid on its head, with fats and protein comprising the most abundant source of calories and nutrients. Many doctors and nutritionists now tout the benefit of eating a decent amount of non-industrial animal products like meat, butter, cheese, and dairy, challenging everything we’ve been taught for the past 50 years.
These professionals exposed the lies that have led to the fear of cholesterol and dietary fat. Others, like Pollan, would promote a more plant-centric remedy. Regardless, all would agree that the massive proliferation of packaged, processed, and highly addictive food has led to what is now known as SAD — the standard American diet. Not only is it sad, it is deeply corrupt.
Along with RFK Jr.’s speech, Caley and Casey Means’ interview with Tucker Carlson (which has over 2.0 million views on YouTube, snippets of which have inundated social media), has forced America’s chronic disease epidemic into the spotlight. It’s about time.
Show Me the Money
According to the CDC, 37.3 million people in the United States have diabetes (just over 11 percent), 8.5 million are undiagnosed, and 96 million have pre-diabetes, double the rates from 20 years ago. Diabetes is just one of several diagnoses characterized as chronic disease — a health condition that is persistent, requires ongoing medical care, and has a negative impact on daily activities. Others include cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases.
Chronic diseases and mental health conditions account for 90 percent of the nation’s healthcare spending, translating to nearly $4.1 trillion annually. Indirect costs such as missed work and reduced productivity more than doubles that number, making the total cost of chronic disease in the U.S. equivalent to around 20 percent of the American economy. A few months ago, a House GOP report found that obesity will cost the U.S. up to $9.1 trillion in medical costs over the next decade.
The earlier children get sucked into this whirlpool of expenditures, the more profitable the health care field becomes. In his podcast with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy stated, “There is nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child because all of these entities are making money on them — the insurance companies, the hospitals, the medical cartel, the pharmaceutical companies.” A sick child is job assurance. Like Kennedy said, “They have lifetime annuities. They want them sick for the rest of their lives.”
Given the size and complexity of the medical-pharmaceutical-food industrial complex, it seems unlikely that CEO’s are sitting in a dark smokey room somewhere plotting to keep our children sick. (Although, these days, that doesn’t seem completely implausible: some doctors condone cutting off healthy body parts of children and voluntarily sterilizing them.)
But it doesn’t require a belief in conspiracy to understand the gravity of the problem. A lot of people are making a lot of money off chronic disease in this country.
America Runs on Sick Care
According to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey (ACS), there were 22 million workers in the healthcare industry, accounting for 14 percent of all U.S. workers. This number is rising and it is by no means a comprehensive number. Some mental health counselors, those working independently outside the hospital system as nutritionists or health coaches, and other health related fields are probably not captured in this survey.
Employment in the healthcare industry has far outpaced the national average. However, most reports state that the number of primary care physicians is shrinking. That means the medical bureaucracy and administration is likely increasing, rather than those who actually treat health concerns.
The entire economies of some cities rely on the medical industry with major hospitals, healthcare systems, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies employing thousands of people in any given metropolitan region.
Furthermore, America’s top 15 food companies (think Kellogg’s, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Mars, Inc., etc.) employ somewhere upward of two million people in the United States. This does not include fast food workers. McDonald’s alone employs over 1,336,229 crew members in the United States. That’s a lot of people getting their paycheck from the processed food industry.
America has grown a decent portion of its economy on the back of constituents’ poor health. This is why many people say we don’t have a healthcare system — we have a sick care system. It seems morally reprehensible at best, unconstitutional at worst, with many NIH scientists accepting royalties from pharmaceutical companies and other medically related companies who in return, received kickbacks in the form of federal contracts and grants. Not to mention seven of the top 20 lobbying groups in the United States are health related, spending almost $84 million dollars to ensure their interests are protected.
If MAHA succeeds in any significant way, the well-established healthcare industry loses its best clients and a decent portion of the U.S. economy shrinks. If even a fraction of Americans gets off the processed food-disease-pharmaceutical merry go round, it will be worth it.
But make no mistake: walking this back when so many are profiting from the revolving door of disease and metabolic dysfunction, will not only be tough, but economically disruptive.
Still, our government has a moral imperative not to force people to eat a certain way, but to remove the roadblocks that prevent our country from being healthy. At the very least, they can stop erecting those roadblocks themselves.
Chronic disease poses an existential threat to this country. The question is, even with RFK Jr. by his side, will Donald Trump have the courage and political will to put an end to it? Is he serious when he claims he wants to leave a legacy of healthy children and a healthy environment? We may not find out if America doesn’t choose wisely in November.
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