Why are Congress, the media, and health bureaucrats so desperate to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fail?

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

All RFK’s done so far is make minor changes to the Covid jab schedule. Who cares? No one takes mRNA boosters anyway. Yet the hate he faces is off the charts. It’s not HIS fault healthcare is broken.

The American healthcare system is a disaster, and it’s getting worse.

That truth is inarguable. With 4 percent of the world’s people, the United States spends almost as much on medicine as every other country combined1. Yet our life expectancy badly trails other wealthy countries2, and the gap is growing.

The signal event of American healthcare this century is not the sequencing of the human genome. Nor is it the development of mRNA “vaccines” at Warp Speed. No, it’s the promotion of prescription opioid painkillers, which fueled a generation-long drug crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans.

Many threads of American dysfunction joined to weave the opioid catastrophe. But above all, the crisis shows how our medical system promotes the use of expensive, poorly tested and regulated treatments like Oxycontin, even when they kill patients.

The opioid disaster is no exception.

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies, hospitals, and yes, even many physicians all have hidden financial incentives that too often guide the care American patients receive. Regulators have little power to stop them. Patients rarely know they exist at all. (Meanwhile, insurance company executives pay themselves eight-figure salaries to keep the bucket brigade moving along.)

American healthcare has been in crisis for a long time. Generations, not decades.

In 1984, a doorstopper of a book called “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” won the Pulitzer Prize for explaining how the competing interests of physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies had made systematic healthcare reform impossible.3

Since World War 2, the political solution to high healthcare costs, infighting among medical providers, and the problem of patients who lack insurance has, paradoxically, been to buy off the various players by flooding more money into the system.

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(It slices, it dices…)

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First, the government subsidized employer-paid health insurance with tax breaks and increased federal biomedical research spending. Then it got directly into the insurance business with Medicare and Medicaid. Finally Democrats gave us Obamacare, subsidies funneled through private insurers and Medicaid.

In 2024, the federal government spent about $2 trillion on healthcare annually for Medicare and Medicaid alone — not counting the tax subsidy for employer-paid health insurance, or hundreds of billions of dollars more for veterans’ healthcare, medical and basic scientific research, and the maze of Obamacare subsidies.

That $2-plus trillion in federal loot is far more than any other country spends on its entire healthcare system. It is enough to keep the system afloat. Barely.

But along with the increased government spending on health care has come heavy regulation and bureaucracy, decreased competition as hospitals and insurers merge, and reduced autonomy for most physicians (many of whom hate what has happened, even though they remain well-paid).

Meanwhile, a small army of medical “entrepreneurs” look for ways to exploit payment loopholes. Drug and device companies charge unimaginable prices for new treatments, knowing that no one will – or can – stop them.

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Now the system has hit another crisis point, for two reasons.

First, rich as the United States is, it cannot tolerate this level of health care expense — roughly double what it should pay, based on what other rich countries spend.

Some of this additional spending is necessary because Americans are generally more obese and less healthy than people in other developed countries. But a back-of-the-envelope-calculation suggests we overspend by roughly $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion annually, $6,000 to $8,000 for every American.

Insurance bureaucracy and the back-office spending it drives wastes hundreds of billions of dollars. Overpriced drugs and treatments and overutilization of advanced technology cost hundreds of billions more. The high pay that American physicians and nurses receive compared to medical professionals in other developed countries accounts for hundreds of billions more (at least this money goes to the people who directly provide care).

Excessive payments to hospitals which are local monopolies or oligopolies add hundreds of billions more. Anyone who thinks insurance company executives are overpaid should look at the Form 990s listing the pay of the people who run “nonprofit” hospitals. The “defensive” care driven by lawsuit threats adds tens or hundreds of billions.

Put all those 11- and 12-figure sums together, and you have real money. At the same time every part of the system can correctly claim that pinching it won’t matter. A 50 percent cut in prescription drug spending would level Big Pharma (possibly for the good), but it would reduce overall spending by less than 5 percent.

So the buck-passing never stops. Neither does the spending.

The insane cost of healthcare is the top reason that middle-class Americans feel squeezed in ways that Europeans don’t, even though per-capita income in the United States is now significantly higher than that in Europe.4

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(Your tax dollars at work)

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Even more importantly, the massive spending and hidden financial incentives are now likely doing more harm than good — as the Oxycontin debacle shows.

In other words, even if the United States could afford its preferred solution of pouring another couple hundred billion dollars into the system (and it can’t), the fix no longer works. Yes, American healthcare is so messed up that more money will probably only make it worse.

This is a bad place to be.

What does all this have to do with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Well, as Health and Human Services Secretary, it’s his job to fix this unfixable problem. Never mind that he can’t.

Unlike, say, Alex Azar (HHS Secretary in the first Trump administration), or Xavier Becerra (HHS Secretary for President Biden), Kennedy wasn’t brought in to keep the trains running. He was brought in because the trains are running over a cliff.

Everyone in the United States — with the exception of a few lobbyists and executives — is frustrated and angry with a system that now costs more than $15,000 per person every year, overwhelms television with ads, and yet somehow fails to help Americans live longer.

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