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The left is hysterical at the prospect of a Trump administration in charge of the nation’s health policy.
But life expectancy in the United States peaked in 2014 and has been shrinking nearly every year since then, an indicator that Americans’ health is declining — despite the trillions spent covering the uninsured.
Expanding insurance is not the panacea it was promised to be.
Our health policy needs a shake-up.
Here’s what should be on the Trump agenda.
Focus on healthy eating to combat chronic disease.
Trump’s controversial health adviser Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is targeting unhealthy eating, particularly processed foods.
He’s on to something.
Findings in the journal “Nature/Food” suggest that switching from an unhealthy diet to a healthy one can add 8.9 years to a 40-year-old man’s life expectancy, and 8.6 years to a 40-year-old woman’s.
Anti-smoking campaigns reduced tobacco use from 40% of the adult population in 1969 to 11%.
The same can probably be done to change the dire American diet.
End mission confusion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s the advice of Trump’s inner health circle, including Drs. Scott Gottlieb and Joel Zinberg.
The CDC now makes woke issues its top priority.
Meanwhile, it flubbed its response to the biggest disease threat of our lifetimes, COVID-19, as I documented in my book “The Next Pandemic.”
The CDC’s unscientific guidelines on masking, social distancing and vaccines were the basis for draconian assaults on people’s right to assemble and to keep their businesses open.
Americans should be relieved to hear RFK Jr. swear it “will never happen again.”
CDC must act to reduce hospital infections.
This stealth threat kills more Americans each year than breast cancer— 75,000 annually.
If a previous occupant of a hospital bed had an infection, the risk that the next patient gets it soars 583%, Columbia School of Nursing researchers found. Inadequate cleaning is the reason.
Yet instead of imposing rigorous cleaning standards, the CDC helps hospitals hide outbreaks from the public.
You don’t want to be in a hospital overrun with a deadly germ, but CDC reports will only refer to it with a term like “hospital A,” preventing you from knowing. Outrageous.
It’s an example of the cozy relationship between health companies and the government that RFK Jr. says he wants to clean up.
Make health insurance affordable.
The price of health coverage — $25,500 for a family of four — is one of the public’s top worries, according to Pew Research.
The expansion of Medicaid to 80 million recipients during the last decade is partly to blame.
Medicaid shortchanges hospitals, paying them 88 cents for every dollar of care delivered.
Hospitals keep profits up by shifting unpaid Medicaid costs onto patients who get coverage through a job or buy it themselves.
The bigger Medicaid gets, the higher premiums go. Something lefties will never tell you.
Republicans intend to rein in Medicaid enrollment, which will help everyone who pays for health insurance.
Close the border and tighten security at ports of entry.
It’s the one reform that will yield the fastest health results — by halting the influx of contagious diseases, alleviating the crush of migrants in emergency rooms and interrupting the flow of fentanyl.
Drug deaths alone have cut overall US life expectancy by two-thirds of a year.
When a young addict is arrested or overdoses, desperate family members often fork over their life savings to unscrupulous addiction “recovery” outfits.
RFK Jr. has proposed a network of public “healing farms” where addicts can try to cure themselves and obtain skills for a sober life.
Any family who’s gone through this agony will say “what have we got to lose?”
Finally, concerns about RFK Jr.’s vaccine views are likely overblown.
His vaccine skepticism has the public worried, for good reason: Mandated vaccinations have enabled the US to defeat polio, measles and other diseases.
Kennedy said this week, “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.”
But you don’t have to take his word: Neither he nor Trump will have the power to eliminate childhood vaccinations.
The US Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states have the authority to require vaccinations or not. Each state has its own vaccine mandates.
During COVID, the court affirmed that precedent, striking down Biden’s proposed national vaccine mandate on employees of large companies.
All in all, the left is frantically defending a public health status quo that gives us $25,000 premiums for family health coverage, declining lifespans, unfettered junk food, cover-ups of hospital dangers, and unpreparedness for the next germ threat.
Trump’s health advisers insist we can do better.
I agree.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.