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.
