Taking the hypocritic oath

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offers one flip-flop after another on his way to becoming the next Health and Human Services Secretary

Don’t believe what he said last month or last year or ten years ago. Believe what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said yesterday at a Senate hearing on his nomination to become the next Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.

That is what the public was asked to believe yesterday by the man who spent decades questioning the efficacy of vaccines and supporting a woman’s right to control her own body. Yesterday, Kennedy said he was never against vaccines and supported President Trump’s position on abortion.

The hearing was totally predictable. Every Republican praised President Trump’s nominee to head an agency whose $1.8 trillion budget and 80,000 employees is 11,250 times larger than his previous organization, the anti-vax non-profit Children’s Health Defense. He appears headed for a narrow victory in the full Senate, assuming no Republican breaks ranks.

Meanwhile, every Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee took him to task for his Olympic-quality flip-flopping since dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Trump for president. The man who led a two-decade-long crusade questioning the efficacy and safety of childhood vaccines said he would follow the science on the issue, offering as proof his own children’s vaccinations.

He went on to deny ever opposing the COVID vaccine. The news media last week widely reported that he and Children’s Health Defense petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw the COVID vaccine in May 2021, a month when thousands of Americans were dying each week from COVID and the new Biden administration was ramping up its efforts to get everyone vaccinated.

Advertisement on the Children’s Health Defense website, accessed yesterday.

The petition also called on the FDA to “immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of the chloroquine drugs, ivermectin, and any other drugs demonstrated to be safe and effective against COVID.” No drug at that point had been shown to be effective against COVID and there was zero evidence to show chloroquine and ivermectin, endorsed by Trump, were effective. Both were eventually proven to have zero impact on the disease.

Although his stance on abortion has received less media attention in recent weeks, Kennedy has reversed field on that issue as well. After reading one of his many statements supporting a woman’s right to control her own body, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked him why, given his long record of being pro-choice, Republicans were supporting him.

“When did you sell your values to get this position,” she asked.

“I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy,” Kennedy replied.

She then asked why he questioned the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone, an FDA-approved drug used in chemo-abortions, the safest and least invasive of all abortion methods. She waved copies of 40 studies demonstrating the drug’s safety before entering them into the Congressional Record. “President Trump has made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues and I will ask the NIH and FDA to look at that,” he said.

Stakeholders will paralyze MAHA

Senators from both sides of the aisle praised Kennedy’s support for the new administration’s “Making America Healthy Again” agenda. He repeatedly promised to focus the agency on addressing obesity and chronic disease and reducing use of processed foods and chemical additives in the food supply.

Yet under Republican questioning, he promised to engage all stakeholders, including the food industry. He promised to support farmers, who profit from selling grains to food processors. That was enough to win praise from Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).

Perhaps the most telling element of Kennedy’s testimony came in response to questioning by Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. He repeatedly said Medicaid beneficiaries were upset with the program because of high co-pays, deductibles and premiums.

Anyone who knows anything about the Medicaid program knows its beneficiaries, a large majority of whom earn poverty or below-poverty wages, are not required to pay for services. A few states have experimented with requiring low co-pays at the point of service, but they are typically under $5.

What was clear from yesterday’s hearing is that Kennedy is unqualified to run the agency. In the two months he had to prepare for yesterday’s hearing, he failed to master basic facts about the agency that oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and more.

A figurehead at HHS

Should Kennedy be confirmed – the likely outcome – he will not be calling the shots at the agency. Rightwing hardliners like Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget will be in charge. Neither Kennedy nor Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s nominee to run CMS, will offer any resistance to Vought’s plan, outlined in the Project 2025 blueprint he helped author, to strip away Medicaid benefits to help pay for renewing the Trump tax cuts, which expire later this year.

The fight to preserve Medicaid, which provides health insurance coverage for over 80 million Americans, will be the biggest health care fight of the 119^th Congress. If Republicans succeed in turning it into a block grant or using other methods to impose huge cuts, they will be financially harming nearly every American with private health insurance.

The math is simple. If poor people are denied coverage, they still use health care. They just don’t access it in a timely way. They don’t access it at a doctor’s office, but at the emergency room, where the cost of care is most expensive. They wait until they are so sick that they can’t avoid seeking care, which means their ER visit often involves very expensive emergencies.

And when they don’t pay for that care, who does? You, me and everyone else with health insurance, whose rates (whether in insurance premiums or out-of-pocket) must rise to cover the cost of uncompensated care. Gutting Medicaid is essentially a way to shift costs from government to the private sector, a prescription for a returning to the pre-Affordable Care Act era of rapidly rising health insurance premiums for employers and individuals alike.

Cutting Medicaid will not just be a pocketbook issue for the poor. It will affect the middle class, too.