Will Trump Achieve The Longtime GOP Dream Of Privatizing Medicare?
I don’t watch Fox, so I don’t know how good or bad Dr. Janette Nesheiwat is as a TV personality. But Trump does and he decided to add her to the menagerie. She’ll be the next surgeon general. Currently, she hocks vitamins online and works for an urgent care chain in NYC called CityMD. And she’s the sister-in-law of Rep. Mike Waltz, the national security advisor-to-be. The surgeon general isn't able to do the kind of damage to the health system that Trump has RFK, Jr and Dr. Oz getting ready to do.
But, of course, the Trump regime’s attitude towards public health is best viewed through the lens of his higher-level appoints: anti-vax conspiracy theorist RFK, Jr and anti-Medicare crackpot Dr. Oz, both media figures, rather than public health experts. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe published an OpEd by Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Senate Must Reject Kennedy As Health Secretary. Auchincloss warned that “If Kennedy is charged with overseeing the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he will fuse his personal brand with organs of state to pump out quackery and conspiracy. Kennedy won’t only attack vaccines. Other targets include fluoride, which he pledges to “remove from public water” although it has drastically improved children’s dental health; new medicines for cancer and Alzheimer’s, which he impugns as pharmaceutical poison; and high-speed internet, which he speculates causes “leaky brain… The Senate must reject him.”
He wrote that “The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will vet Kennedy, and it must provide cover for reasonable Senate Republicans to vote him down on the floor. The next chair, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, is a physician and a respected health care policy maker. Americans need Cassidy to look at the evidence, not the politics… When children die of measles, their lungs inflame and fill with fluid. They die gasping for air. It’s a tragedy all the more awful for being preventable. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. consigned scores of children to this death in 2019. On tour in Samoa for anti-vax road show, he spread enough fear and confusion to derail its vaccination campaign. What happened next is history— and biology. Measles infected thousands. Eighty-three people, the majority of them children, died in pain. Kennedy called it a ‘natural experiment.’ He moved on to COVID-19. Using his famous last name as a platform, Kennedy claimed the virus was ‘ethnically targeted’ to protect the Jews and Chinese and harm white and Black Americans. This kind of conspiracy theorizing was not new for him— he’s a 9/11 skeptic who doesn’t believe AIDS is caused by a virus— but the notoriety was. He cashed in with a bestselling book while the pandemic killed millions.
Kennedy claims that “no vaccine is safe and effective.” The evidence indicates that vaccines have saved the lives of 146 million young children in the past half-century. Measles, smallpox, diphtheria, mumps, pertussis, rubella, and polio used to infect hundreds of thousands of American children every year. Polio, in particular, haunted families, and mid-century hospitals filled up with children enclosed inside metal ventilators. Today, iron lungs are displayed in museums. Science triumphed.
… Kennedy tries to mask this agenda with hand-waving about holistic health. Healthier school lunches and less ultraprocessed foods were good ideas when former First Lady Michelle Obama promoted them, and they’re good ideas now. There are thousands of respected health experts, though, who could execute that agenda without also bringing back polio.
His defenders claim Kennedy is speaking truth to the power of special interests. As the author of bipartisan legislation to take on both Fortune 20 drug-pricing middlemen and social media platforms, I find that risible. His campaign for president was the most cynical example yet of dark money in politics. Tellingly, his donors wanted him to “sow chaos.”
Chaos is what America will get unless Senate Republicans actually do speak truth to power. They must tell Trump that Kennedy is dangerous, and reject his Cabinet nomination.
On CNN, former Kansas Governor and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Kennedy is not qualified for the job. “To have someone coming into a scientific agency that is a vaccine skeptic and may well undo decades of public health work, I think, is terrifying for the American public who rely on HHS from cradle to grave for resources, for information, for public health, for oversight of our food and medicines… He has no organizational management experience, and HHS is one of the largest domestic organizations.”
His cousin, Caroline Kennedy, Ambassador to Australia and daughter of JFK agreed RKF Jr is not the right person for the job. “I grew up with him, so I’ve known all this for a long time. Others are just getting to know him. I would say that our family is united in terms of our support for the public health sector and infrastructure and has greatest admiration for the medical profession in our country, and Bobby Kennedy has got a different set of views.”
Ryan Quinn interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he’s dean of that institution’s National School of Tropical Medicine and theca-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. And not an RFK Jr fan. Explain his history with Kennedy, he told Quinn that “In 2017, he had said that he was going to be appointed in a leadership role in vaccines with the Trump administration, and I got asked by the leadership of the National Institutes of Health to speak with Bobby, to explain to him why vaccines don’t cause autism based on the experiences of my daughter and my research. So it was a series of discussions … I’m concerned that in [the health and human services secretary] role, he will bring his antivaccine activism to Health and Human Services and promote a decline in vaccine infrastructure… He still talks about vaccines causing autism, which has been completely debunked. There’s not even a plausibility at this point. But he’s also made other statements about vaccines.”
As for Dr. Oz, he’s pretty much always been, a 2-bit hustler and carnival barker. Over the weekend, NPR reported on his conflicts o interest if he gets confirmed to run the agency that oversees Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplace. “Oz,” wrote Darius Tahir, “recently held investments, some shared with family, in health care, pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the health care sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz's holdings totalled tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat. This includes a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000.”
The agency Trump nominated him to run, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service, administers Medicare. Largely because of aggressive TV advertising, “about half of new enrollees now choose Medicare Advantage, in which commercial insurers provide their health coverage, instead of the traditional, government-run program, according to an analysis from KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. Proponents of Medicare Advantage say the private plans offer more compelling services than the government and better manage the costs of care. Critics note that Medicare Advantage plans have a long history of costing taxpayers more than the traditional program. UnitedHealth, CVS, and Cigna are all substantial players in the Medicare Advantage market. It's not always a good relationship with the government. The Department of Justice filed a 2017 complaint against UnitedHealth alleging the company used false information to inflate charges to the government. The case is ongoing.”
What we’re talking about here is privatizing Medicare, a long-time Republican goal of which Oz is a proponent. Last week, Arianna Coghill reported that “Oz’s remarkable lack of qualifications does not appear to have dimmed Republican excitement. In fact, they seem thrilled. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he was ‘very excited’ about the nomination; Sen. Tommy Tuberville went as far as to call Oz an ‘all-star’ candidate. Here’s what to know about Oz and why he could be the perfect vessel to help achieve the party’s long-sought goal of dramatically gutting safety net programs… [H]e has been a vocal supporter of the privatization of health care programs. In 2020, he wrote an op-ed supporting Medicare Advantage, a private coverage option supported by Trump and Project 2025… In 2017, academics wrote a paper titled The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?, in which they called the media personality ‘a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor.’”
Let's keep in mind that any senator who votes to confirm Dr. Oz, is voting to privatize Medicare. We'll see what it looks like once the new members get sworn in but during the 118th Congress the members of the Health, Education and Labor Committee, chaired by Bernie and now about to be chaired by Bill Cassidy, were Democrats Patty Murray, Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, Maggie Hassan, Tina Smith, Ben Ray Lujan, John Hickenlooper, and Ed Markey and Republicans Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Braun, Roger Marshall, Mitt Romney, Tommy Tuberville, Markwayne Mullin and Ted Budd. Romney and Casey won't be on the committee next year.