Jacob Hornberger recently
rightly questioned the federal government’s role in MAHA, shorthand for
the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
(RFKJ). An inveterate statist, RFKJ may very well employ state power to
seek retribution against those responsible for Covid vaccination
mandates and other causes of the excess deaths that have plagued the U.S. and other wealthy nations since 2021.
Unfortunately,
if Americans are to live longer, healthier lives, the government will
have to be involved, in a sense. It will have to reverse the many
policies that it put into place that cause so many untimely deaths and
so much disability, which has also increased markedly since 2021. To achieve MAHA, in other words, Americans need Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and private market innovation more than they need RFKJ.
For
starters, the government should not be in the same business as
nutritionists. It should stop telling Americans what is “healthy” and
what is not because government bureaucrats do not know and have no
incentive to provide good advice, which must be highly tailored due to
innate human heterogeneity (“diversity” in Woke parlance). The Food
Pyramid alone kills more Americans than the Civil War did.
The
government should also get out of the life annuity business or the
health insurance business (or better yet, both) because forcing older
Americans into both Social Security and Medicare creates perverse
incentives: one part of the government wants retirees dead, while
another is in charge of keeping them alive. Nobody in their right mind
would buy both an annuity and health insurance from the same company but
yet Americans are forced into the unnatural arrangement with Uncle Sam.
Obamacare
clearly failed. Instead of a new government-led “plan,” let’s let
market forces work, as they do in the many areas of the economy that
make our lives better. Sean Masaki Flynn makes a powerful argument for
moving towards a market-based system like that of Singapore in his 2019
book, The Cure that Works.
Singaporeans are much healthier than Americans, and indeed almost
everyone else in the world, but spend only a quarter of what Americans
do on healthcare. The most telling stat in the book is that in the US,
each healthcare provider (HCP) needs on average four administrators to
do paperwork. In Singapore, HCPs outnumber administrators four to one.
Americans
do not even need a government-funded “public health” apparatus or
research funding system like that long run by Anthony Fauci. Before the
rise of the administrative state in the postwar period, life insurers
did the sort of outreach and research that is the basis for MAHA – don’t
smoke or use alcohol or drugs to excess, wash your hands after using
the bathroom, and watch what you eat and drink is like 90 percent of it.
They backed up their claims with higher premiums, incentivizing people
to follow through or to pay for the greater risks they imposed on
themselves and others.
Today,
unfortunately, life insurers tend to shy away from such activities for
fear of regulatory reprisals. That is unfortunate because life insurance
regulations are unnecessary because the their reinsurers carefully
monitor their financial health and the market is competitive. Moreover,
life insurers, not the government, are the large institutions most
interested in MAHA and the ones best equipped to induce Americans to
make healthier choices at the table and in the gym.
In
fact, life and health insurance arguably ought to be covered in the
same policy, with insureds who use more health insurance getting a
smaller payout when they die than those who remained healthier (all
other factors constant, of course). Regulators, though, stymie
experimentation with such innovative new approaches, the suppression of
which allows other statists to push for Medicare-for-all and other forms
of socialized medicine.
In short, to achieve MAHA, the MAGA movement should look more to DOGE and private market incentives than to RFKJ.
