Republicans have finally found their new answer to Obamacare.
After the GOP failed to successfully replace Democrats’ signature 2010 health care reform during the Trump administration, a renaissance in nutrition has catalyzed a new political movement finding a home on the right. A Senate roundtable on Monday led by Sen. Ron Johnson was the latest evidence of that transformation within a party that has been damaged by its seeming lack of a presentable alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
“America’s national health is not good,” opened the Republican senator from Wisconsin, “even though America’s health care system spent $4.5 trillion dollars in 2022, or over $13,000 per person.”
To put those numbers in perspective, American health care spending was just 5 percent of GDP when John F. Kennedy was president. That number soared to more than 17 percent in 2022, just a year before Kennedy’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would launch his own White House run.
“If America fails,” Kennedy said at the Monday panel, “the chief reason will be because we let our country get sicker, more depressed, fatter, more infertile at an increasing rate while crippling our national security, bankrupting our national budget with health care costs.”
“Every major pillar of the U.S. health care system as a statement of economic fact,” Kennedy added, “makes money when Americans get sick.”
Obama’s Boondoggle
Kennedy went on to highlight Obamacare’s failure to fundamentally reform the health care system that in reality was a sick care system.
“Obamacare actually incentivized insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15 percent of a larger pie,” Kennedy said. “This is why premiums have increased 100 percent since the passage of Obamacare, making health care the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. life expectancy fell two years in a row between 2020 and 2021 and still remains below pre-lockdown levels. Americans remain crippled by an epidemic of chronic disease that affects a government-estimated 129 million U.S. residents. Forty-two percent suffer from at least two chronic diseases, and roughly 12 percent suffer from five or more.
The Obama administration tried to tackle the crisis in a two-pronged approach: legislatively, with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and educationally, through Michelle Obama’s initiative on childhood obesity. One part would deal with the health care system at large, while the first lady’s campaign would aim to raise an appetite for healthier lifestyles, complimented by legislation of its own. Both programs failed to turn the tide of chronic disease and poor eating habits.
Big business manipulated Obamacare into a corporate-friendly package that continues to enable lifestyles that are exploited by the sick care industry, while Republicans dismissed “Let’s Move” as a caricature of nanny-state finger-wagging.
Michelle Obama’s legislation to reform school lunches, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, is credited for covering more children with government-subsidized meal programs but made no progress in reducing the amount of sugar kids were eating in school. The Center for Investigative Reporting wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune three years after the law’s passage that “sugar levels in school meals are more than double what is recommended for the general public.” A 2014 paper from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health concluded the dietary guidelines for school meals “may also be perpetuating eating habits linked to obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases,” given that these guidelines recommended whole grain foods, which can drive spikes in blood sugar.
When the Obamas came into office, nearly 17 percent of children aged 2-19 were obese, representing a more than threefold increase from just 5 percent in 1971. In 2017, the number had grown even higher, with more than 19 percent of children in America, or nearly 1 in 5, struggling with obesity in the wake of the first lady’s “Let’s Move” program. While half the country refused to take the campaign seriously, corporate America interfered by intimidating the West Wing. California pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig wrote about his frustration with the initiatives in his 2021 book, Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine.
“In May 2011, I shared the dais at a Culinary Institute of America meeting with Sam Kass, Michelle Obama’s personal chef and her point person for her Childhood Obesity Task Force,” Lustig recounted. “I got twenty minutes in the Green Room alone with him, and he admitted to me that everyone in the White House, including the president, had read the April 2011 New York Times Magazine article ‘Is Sugar Toxic,’ in which our [University of California San Francisco] research was featured.”
The article, written by author and nutrition journalist Gary Taubes, pointed to sugar as the primary root cause of obesity and chronic disease after decades of Americans embracing the catastrophic low-fat diet.
Kass and the Obama White House “wished me well,” Lustig wrote, “but they would do absolutely nothing to help. No endorsement, mention, not even a wink or a nod. They didn’t want the fight with the food industry; the Obama administration had enough enemies.”
A New Movement Ready for Enemies
The panelists at Monday’s Republican-led Senate forum emphasized that the dynamic needs to change if Americans are determined to make a dent in the health care crisis.
“We can continue managing symptoms and watching this crisis worsen,” said Dr. Christopher Palmer, author of Brain Energy, “or we can choose a new path, one that addresses the root causes of mental and metabolic disorders.’
That new path will require a colossal movement from a new administration not easily intimidated by corporate interests, and one that also identifies high-carbohydrate diets as the primary driver of chronic illness. Nina Teicholz, a nutrition journalist whose 2015 book, Big Fat Surprise, was cited by Kennedy last month for cracking the low-fat diet myth, wrote in a recent Substack column that only ketogenic-based solutions to the chronic disease problem enjoy the support of “rigorous, clinical trial evidence.”
“Other currently popular ideas such as eliminating seed oils, food dyes, toxins, or ultra-processed foods also aren’t backed by the kind of clinical trial evidence we need to advocate for them as public health interventions,” Teicholz wrote. “Your health may improve greatly by avoiding these substances; nixing these industrial products certainly seems like a good idea, but the evidence is lacking to make broad proclamations that these measures will reverse disease.” Teicholz emphasized the “need to remain humble.”
“As another cautionary tale,” she wrote, “remember that 20 years ago, nearly every health expert told us that eggs caused heart disease. Now we (mostly) find that advice absurd.”
The new movement doesn’t need to be partisan, nor should it be. In fact, the issue offers a unique opening for a member of the Trump family to pick up where Michelle Obama left off, courting the favor of Democrats who were previously supportive of campaigns to end childhood obesity as an effort to unite the country. The left’s increased dismissiveness toward alternative medicine as a feature of esoteric right-wing activism, however, has politicized what should easily be a bipartisan effort. The reality of polarization today gives good reason to be skeptical that Democrats will embrace a Trump campaign to eliminate childhood obesity and chronic disease.
Johnson’s roundtable was a follow-up to a forum the senator held that addressed the deficiencies of the coronavirus vaccines impulsively thrust on the American public as a form of government blackmail of those who wanted to escape dystopian lockdowns. In 2021, the Wisconsin lawmaker was raked over the coals by a corporate press that is hostile to opponents of the medical establishment. Senator Johnson went on to hold another roundtable on the corruption of federal agencies ostensibly committed to public health.
Now, Kennedy-led skeptics of the pharmaceutical industry have turned toward reexamining food as medicine to tackle the root causes of obesity and chronic disease. It’s a paradigm shift with a real opportunity for success, given the momentum of the new Republican coalition. While the GOP is hindered by its past failure to deliver a successful rebuttal to Obamacare, a newfound vision for American health care presents the Republican Party with a ripe opportunity to drive change and bipartisanship in a divided era.
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