The most damning moment in Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s confirmation hearing happened when Bernie Sanders asked him a very simple question: “Is health care a human right?”
Two years ago, RFK was running against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Today, after several twists and turns in his political journey, he’s Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary. He’s shifted in many ways over the course of that journey. When he was trying to appeal to disenchanted progressives in the Democratic primary, for example, and later when he was running as an independent candidate, he (correctly) excoriated Trump as a foreign-policy hawk. Later, when he dropped out to endorse Trump, he cited their common “antiwar” stance as part of his rationale. But one constant throughout the whole bizarre saga is that RFK has positioned himself as an “antiestablishment” figure, in large part on the basis of his alleged opposition to “Big Pharma.”
Bernie’s question cut right to the core of that stance. Is the primary problem with “Big Pharma” that the pharmaceutical companies, like the health insurance companies, are rent-seeking middlemen standing between ordinary people and the medicine they need? Or does RFK just object to some of the products themselves (as with the conspiratorial nonsense he’s often promoted about COVID-19 vaccines)? If he truly wanted to slash and burn their profits, instead of letting drug companies negotiate with a multitude of providers, they would face a public “single payer” with unilateral price-setting power. Better yet, this could be combined with Sanders’s long-standing proposal to abolish pharmaceutical patents in favor of one-time cash prizes for…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
