If RFK Jr Wants Healthier Kids, He Should Ignore All Advice He Gets From RFK Jr

The man has no idea what's going on.

If you watched any of the recent congressional grillings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, you would get the impression that the man has zero idea about what is going on anywhere in the Health and Human Services department that he allegedly oversees. Fired scientists? He hasn’t fired any scientists! (He has fired lots and lots of scientists.) Closing the federal Safe to Sleep program that prevented scores of SIDS deaths? He didn’t close that program! (He totally closed that program, and it was part of an HHS department named after his own damn aunt.)

So it is zero surprise that his “Make Our Children Healthy Again” plan is so fully contradicted by the policies the administration is in the process of getting Congress to pass that our brain, absolutely furious that we chose to expose it to the document, said “Fuck it” and shut down, flouncing into sleep mode like Scarlett O’Hara flouncing out of the parlor in a swirl of hoop skirts because Ashley Wilkes married his cousin instead of her.

RFK Jr unveiled the report on Thursday at the White House to much fanfare and nonsensical babbling on live television. (Which, to be fair, is how anything and everything gets unveiled in the Trump administration, since time before time, forever and ever, amen.) Let’s look at a couple of the claims in it, followed by pointing out how the administration is undercutting the urgency of those claims by defunding the solutions!

For example: on page 20, the report informs the reader that “90% of medical costs in the United States are tied to chronic conditions, many of which are tied to diet.” That seems bad. In the context of helping children to be healthier, what are some possible palliatives here?

Well, access to healthcare in the first place so conditions can be diagnosed and treated before they cause major medical problems seems like an obvious one. Make it easy for parents to take their kids for annual check-ups, so pediatricians can yell at them to go outside more, or whatever.

Except whoops! The administration and Congress are slashing Medicaid. The budget bill passed by the House of Representatives this week cuts $715 billion from the program that is often the only mechanism by which millions of people can even access that health care. Nearly half of American children rely on Medicaid or the related CHIP program for their healthcare. Some estimates suggest over 13 million people are going to lose medical coverage. Rural hospitals and clinics are likely to close, which will exacerbate the problem by making getting health care harder for people who live in those areas.

So that right there seems a wee bit contradictory, we must say.

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Since diet is such an issue, improving access to healthy foods would seem like a necessity. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs), we are told again and again, have deleterious effects on children’s health. But convenience and economics means that kids eat lots of UPFs. Unfortunately, UPFs tend to be cheaper and starchier, and poor families have limited resources to buy fruits and veggies. Maybe government could help supplement their grocery budgets?

Oh sorry, no, the government is actually slashing the Supplemental Nutrition and Aid Program (SNAP) that so many families rely on. This means that people will have even smaller food budgets that they will have to stretch even farther. States already restrict what people can buy with SNAP, so we’re having trouble seeing how cutting the benefit will help people find healthier options, seeing as they struggle so much to find them now.

The report actually trashes SNAP, claiming that it leads to worse health outcomes. Miranda Yaver, a political scientist who specializes in health policy, has a list of ways in which this is wrong, based on a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. SNAP actually does all of this:

· Reduction in the prevalence of food insecurity by as much as 30%

· Higher likelihood of reporting being in good or very good health than low-income non-participants

· Improved birth outcomes for pregnant women who received SNAP benefits beginning early in pregnancy

· Higher likelihood of seeing a physician for a regular check-up

· Elderly SNAP recipients are less likely to ration prescription drugs

· Low-income SNAP incur an average of 25% less in medical costs than low-income non-participants

And on and on and on and on. So while RFK Jr sat next to Trump on Thursday and all but gave him a blowie for his alleged leadership on behalf of the health of the American people, one could fairly ask what he thinks of the administration’s push to roll back environmental regulations on pollution that is harmful to health. Or what he thinks of cutting school meal programs that make sure kids get healthy lunches, which are often the only semi-healthy food they eat in a day.

You know what would improve everyone’s health? Keeping charlatans like RFK Jr and Trump out of power. So unless the MAHA movement includes a Manhattan Project to solve time travel so we can go back in time and tell Anthony Weiner to get his habit of sexting teen girls under control, we’ll continue to follow RFK Jr’s advice and not take any medical advice from him.

[MAHA report / Miranda Yaver / American Academy of Pediatrics]

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