The healthcare conversation often centers on cost to consumers.
Chronic disease costs us more than 75 percent of the country’s $4 trillion annual health care expenditure.
That’s a sobering statistic.
Where it starts
It starts with our children.
More than 40 percent of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition according to the National Survey of Children’s Health.
When I was growing up in the 1960’s, obesity was 4 percent. Those of us who thought we were fat had a few extra pounds, not obesity.
Now in 2024 the obesity rate is 20 percent. That’s beyond those who are simply overweight.
We can point fingers in many directions, but the primary cause is the American diet of highly processed foods.
Beyond highly processed, pesticides on our foods are proven risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorders in kids like ADHD.
Our health system has nothing to truly help anybody, especially children, with chronic diseases, and it’s getting steadily worse.
Corporate Capture
The main reason that what passes as food is allowed to be so damaging to our health is the special interest and corporate influences on our federal agencies.
Private companies use their political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. All three of the FDA, NIH and CDC suffer from corporate capture.
Pharmaceutical companies provide a large portion of the FDA‘s budget.
Biomedical and pharmaceutical companies have infiltrated the National Institutes of Health as its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs that NIH licenses to the companies.
Special interest groups regularly influence the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
What is worse is that the growers of food have been captured by these corporations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture often favors large corporations over the interests of small farmers and the public’s health.
Make America’s Children Healthy Again
Dr. Robert Redfield, MD is calling for health care reform ending corporate capture allowing pesticides and processed food to harm our children. He knows all about this because he has seen the inside of the CDC as its former director.
His op-ed published in Newsweek September 24, 2024 is a call to action for the nation.
He is calling for the establishment of a panel of top experts working with Robert Kennedy to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases. Then they can design some solutions.
Kennedy pledged that “within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically” if he’s given the tools he needs to make a change.
Here is Dr. Redfield’s conclusion:
The exorbitant cost of the failing health of our kids, the needless suffering and death, can be ended by a Kennedy Commission on Childhood Chronic Disease—and the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts our nation can disappear. The key is to see the possible, and lead our nation to act.
Dr. Robert Redfield, an American virologist, director of the U.S. CDC from 2018 to 2021
