So Much for the ‘Best Health-Care System in the World’

We used to trumpet the innovation of the American medical sector. Now we're taking a meat axe to it.

Excerpt: "But now the party has turned sharply against innovation too. Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in federal support for medical research, including canceling a promising HIV-vaccine project. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for mRNA-vaccine research, one of the most promising avenues in all of medicine.

The United States is going to forfeit its role as medical pioneer even as it recedes further behind every other wealthy country in access.

Kennedy has made the party’s pivot explicit. He does not boast about the American health-care system. Instead, he calls it a disaster. “We spend two to three times what other countries pay for public health, and we have the worst outcomes—and that’s not acceptable,” he said on Fox News earlier this year.

Kennedy is not wrong about the bottom line; American health care is costly, and the results are poor. But he is almost completely wrong about the cause of this failure.

There are many reasons for Americans’ poor health, and shutting down vaccines and medical research, while depriving millions of access to basic care, will make all of those problems far worse."