Americans who are sick and dying should mostly blame themselves for their health. That’s what the senator is saying. Roger Marshall said as Republicans are poised to cut health care access and increase costs for millions of Americans.
“Look, about 70 percent of your health outcomes are determined by you,” Marshall said Sunday on Fox News. Sunday morning futures. “It depends on what you eat and what is around you. By the time you come to my office as a physician, I can impact maybe 10 or 20 percent of your health outcomes.
Marshall did not indicate where he got these percentages from. A former OBGYN, he is a leader in newly formed Making America Healthy (MAHA) Caucus. He said the caucus would work with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services – to “improve[e] health outcomes by prioritizing nutrition, providing access to affordable, nutrient-dense foods, and focusing on the availability of primary care to address the root causes of chronic disease. Kennedy frequently made anti-science arguments, including oppose vaccines (adage that “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”) Kennedy also threat to lay off scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), cut the budgets of the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and restrict infectious disease research in favor of “preventative, alternative and holistic health”.
Marshall said MAHA would address “nutrition,” “chronic disease issues” and the “mental health crisis.”
“We need to make these healthy foods affordable and available and try to eliminate and minimize the toxins that we’re exposed to,” Marshall told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “We are targeting ultra-processed foods. They have a big problem and a big challenge.
This narrative that Americans are responsible for their own health through the choices they make at the grocery store helps justify the coming reduction in health care coverage and access. And it conveniently ignores other systemic social determinants of health, such as poverty, racismand economic instability.
As they seek to emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes, the new Trump administration and congressional Republicans are considering proposals that: according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities“undermines the coverage protections of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), makes health coverage more expensive and less comprehensive, shifts more costs to states, and increases the number of uninsured people in the United States”
Marshall vote in favor of repealing the Affordable Care Act and against protections for Americans who have pre-existing conditions. He supports a free market approach to health care and has advocated for fewer restrictions on physician-owned hospitals, an industry in which he and his family have invested heavily. Marshall helped lead the transition from a surgery center to a physician-owned hospital in Kansas. . And in the three years before 2020, Marshall’s wife earned between $195,000 and $450,000 from real estate investments in physician-owned hospitals, according to a 2020 report published in The Kansas City Star.
“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” Marshall said STAT News in 2017. “There’s a group of people who just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. »
