Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Health Again" slogan is concealing the Trump administration's plot to do exactly the opposite, wrote Amanda Marcotte for Salon.
She claims it wants to turn health care into a luxury that only elites like Kennedy himself can afford.
Nothing better exemplifies this, she wrote, than Kennedy's Food and Drug Administration moving to restrict annual COVID-19 boosters to people over 65 or who have health conditions — a change that would mean anyone who wants the vaccine would no longer simply be able to ask for one at their local pharmacy and would need to get a prescription from their doctor.
"Forcing people to go to the doctor requires time and usually money," wrote Marcotte. "Previously, most people could get the vaccine, often with no copay, by breezing into a pharmacy while grocery shopping. The people who don't have the time or money to go through the onerous process of a doctor's appointment are more likely to be working class or poor.
"Even middle-class people who can afford a copay struggle to find the time to do so. This policy is turning what was once a 10-minute process into a half-day ordeal, if you're lucky. In effect, Kennedy isn't banning the vaccine — he's just making sure that only well-to-do people like himself have access."
This is, in essence, Kennedy's whole agenda, she wrote — under the guise of making people "healthier," he's really just denying modern medicine to people who don't have the resources to jump through hoops for it.
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"The 'Make America Healthy Again' slogan — shortened to 'MAHA' — has a lot of surface appeal. Worse, Kennedy is smart about floating attention-grabbing policy ideas, like banning artificial food dyes, that are unlikely to happen but snag a lot of headlines, misleading people into thinking he's serious about improving public health," wrote Marcotte.
"Looking away from Kennedy's empty, lie-laden rhetoric to his actions, however, and another narrative emerges: He's taking away health care, with a special emphasis on limiting access for women, minorities, children, and working people."
Kennedy, she noted, is an enthusiastic proponent of the GOP's new Medicaid work requirement proposal, though 92 percent of Medicaid recipients are already working, disabled, or in school. Of the remainder, almost all are extremely low-income women, many of whom serve as caregivers. The whole point of the requirement is to create a paperwork hell that will deny care to millions of qualified people, Marcotte wrote.
"This is where the GOP's traditional classism and racism meld with Kennedy's unsubtle eugenicist impulses. He speaks frequently of disabled people as if they are useless parasites," wrote Marcotte.
"During his confirmation hearing, Kennedy said this about people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, a category which includes anyone with diabetes or asthma: 'A healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person has only one.' That was his scripted remark, and even then, he was arguing that a person with any chronic health condition, from someone in a wheelchair to someone who needs daily medication to manage depression, does not have a life worth living.
"Punishing for the 'sin' of caring for disabled family members fits into this bleak, anti-human worldview."