Talking the talk but walking nowhere
Watching, to the degree I could bear it, the Senate Finance Committee hearings with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was more like a “new edition of the Spanish Inquisition” (for Kennedy) than it was any kind of remotely enlightening experience.
And this Inquisition failed miserably in its intention, if it was to discredit HHS secretary in some way.
The junior league Torquemada’s—almost exclusively Democrats–display of uncontrolled anger was particularly a head scratcher since most Americans agree our healthcare system has serious problems that need fixing. That Kennedy—a former Democrat himself—is trying to do just that either eludes or outrages them, often both.
The bottom line on our healthcare failure is the rather well known fact that our life expectancy lags at least four years behind a host of peer nations including, among others, Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, the UK, Netherlands and, of course, Japan ( where female life expectancy is six years longer than ours) while we spend the most of any nation on that same healthcare. That’s disgraceful
Other issues abound like the still ongoing debate about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and why many third world countries did better than we did with off-the-shelf medicines, the prices of Big Pharma drugs in general and why they cost more in the US, the astonishing growth of autism that cannot only be ascribed to increased diagnosis, the ubiquitous prescribing of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for the slightest depression that might cause more harm than good, the epidemic of overweight children amplified by food additives and sugary foods, the escalating number of vaccines, useful and not, given babies. The list is endless, much of it contributing to the initial point that our longevity is shorter.
