During the vice presidential debate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested major changes to Republican health care policy. But if you weren’t looking for it, you might have missed it.
Republicans have for years pushed for a centralized system of paying for prescription drugs and services through a set of politburo-approved benefits, but the Republican vice presidential nominee said he wants states to experiment with health policy. proposed that the United States should become a federal government, suggesting a surprising shift toward federalism.
While states’ rights are generally promoted by the Republican Party, Vance’s language behind respect for states sounds a lot like Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.’s stump speech, in which he promised to “make America whole again.” are. RFK Jr.’s conservative American views on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic created a previously unimaginable partnership between MAGA and RFK.
Thought leaders like Tucker Carlson were drawn to Kennedy during the pandemic, when he was being attacked for defending the same positions that Carlson and other conservatives had adopted. In 2021, Kennedy wrote The Real Anthony Fauci, accusing Fauci of controlling the flow of funds to create a decades-long corrupt medical swamp in Washington, D.C.
Kennedy’s fight against corruption led him to seek the Democratic presidential nomination against the party’s weakened incumbent president, just as his father had done in 1968 and his uncle Ted in 1980. It became. The RFK party fought to get its name on the ballot as an independent and ultimately supported Trump.
Although specific roles were not discussed in the leaked phone call between President Trump and President Kennedy, President Trump’s former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told President Kennedy that he would lead pediatric healthcare reform. Suggested a post. If Kennedy had asked to join the team, he would likely be borrowing from President Trump’s question to residents of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods: “What do you have to lose?” Dew. If Trump is honest, the answer would be “not really.”
During a September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, Trump was criticized for claiming he only had a “concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare. That same week, Kennedy wrote: President Trump has told me he wants to make ending this chronic disease scourge a key part of his legacy, but Kamala Harris has shown no interest in the issue. His political courage and moral clarity about the dangers of a compromised system give us the best chance of a lifetime to restore America’s health. ” That sounds like a pretty conservative plan to reform the FDA and CDC and pull money out of the system by addressing the exploding costs of chronic disease, which are well over $4 trillion a year.
Republicans controlled Congress from 2017 to 2019. The Republican Party’s failure to fulfill its oft-repeated promise to repeal and replace Obamacare has cast a shadow on President Trump’s openness to state reform. Trump, a practical businessman and political novice, was frustrated by the health care standoff between Republicans and Democrats in Washington. He owed little to Big Pharma, the insurance industry, or the Chamber of Commerce, which reenacted the battle from familiar trench positions. President Trump sought and approved a waiver that would allow states to use federal funds to care for people in pioneering ways. While much of the focus reflected fraud prevention and work requirements, Vance hinted at a possible shift toward reform on the delivery side (traditionally a Democratic domain).
Vance said during the debate that President Trump “wants to allow states to experiment a little bit with how they cover both chronically ill and non-chronically ill people.” “It’s not just a plan. He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance continued. Although the plan is not fully fleshed out, these “experiments” will allow caregivers to treat patients for health management rather than simply allocating care and time for corporate profit. There is a possibility that it will become.
The failure of Democrats to fulfill their Obamacare promises and the failure of Republicans to repeal Obamacare creates an opportunity for Trump to take significant action if he is reelected. RFK is not trusted by congressional Republicans, but Vance is. If the two sides work together, they will be able to exert a powerful force in the narrow but important field of health care reform.
After his brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy Sr. pursued a war on poverty. That led him to eastern Kentucky in 1968, where RFK emphasized the devastating effects of poverty. Half a century later, J.D. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy, a first-hand account of the same poverty that occurred on the same streets and front porches. RFK’s words from the 1968 speech will be eaten up at the 2024 Trump rally. “This is the violence of the system, the indifference, the inaction, the corruption. This violence that afflicts the poor destroys the spirit of men, denying them the opportunity to stand as fathers and as men among other men.”
Under President Trump’s second term, RFK Jr. and Vance could very well be the right team to push for meaningful health care reform.
Matt Dean ([email protected]) is a senior fellow in health policy support at the Heartland Institute.
