CITY JOURNAL – In his confirmation hearing as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argued that U.S. health-care spending represents a “20 percent tax on the entire economy.”
Rather than engage in a “divisive debate about who pays,” he suggested the nation ask, “Why are health-care costs so high in the first place?”
Kennedy offered his own answer: “chronic disease,” to which “90 percent of health-care spending” is devoted.
He specifically pointed to rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and cancer, as well as “autoimmune diseases, neurodevelopmental disorders, Alzheimer’s, asthma, addiction,” and more besides. He blames poor diets and environmental toxins for the rise in chronic disease rates.
In truth, the growing burden of chronic disease owes mostly to increased affliction by the diseases of old age. In 2019, the year before Covid hit, U.S. life expectancy was 78.8—a hair’s breadth below 2014’s all-time high of 78.9, and well up from 47.3 in 1900.
This owes much to progress in medical science and increased spending on health care; but it also reflects improvements in urban sanitation, widespread vaccination, and reduced consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Obesity remains a problem. The U.S. obesity rate is twice the average for developed countries, which accounts for America’s higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. It also explains America’s higher death rate from Covid-19.
Though Americans’ diets are more varied and fresh than a half-century ago, they also consume more sugars, soda, and processed foods.
Kennedy blames these, along with additives and dyes, for much of the nation’s ill health, telling Congress that “we shouldn’t be giving 60% of the kids in school processed food that is making them sick.”
Americans have always eaten a lot. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed over 1,000 calories more per day than the English and French …
Chris Pope is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute
