Sick and dying Americans should feel deeply sorry for their health condition. That's what Sen. Roger Marshall says as Republicans prepare to reduce access to health care 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 is determined by what you eat and what you are surrounded by. By the time you come to my office as a doctor, I can influence maybe 10 or 20 percent of your health outcomes.”
Marshall did not say where he got those percentage figures. A former OBGYN, she is a leader of the newly formed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Caucus. He said the caucus will 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, nutritious food, and focusing on access to primary care to address the root causes of chronic disease.” Kennedy often argues against science, including anti-vaccines (saying “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”) Kennedy has also threatened to fire scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), cut the NIH and the Centers' budget. for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we are reducing infectious disease research in favor of “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”
Marshall said MAHA will address “nutrition,” “chronic disease issues” and “mental health issues.”
“We need to make these healthy foods accessible, available, and try to eliminate and reduce the toxins that we're exposed to,” Marshall told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “We come after a lot of processed food. They have a big problem and a big challenge.”
This narrative that Americans are responsible for their own health outcomes through the choices they make at the grocery store helps justify the impending rollback of health care protections and access. And it conveniently ignores other systemic health factors such as poverty, racism, and economic instability.
As they seek to emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes, the incoming Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are weighing proposals that would, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “undermine the protections of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), make health coverage more expensive and incomplete, shift more costs to states, and increase the number of uninsured people in the US”
Marshall voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. He supports a free market approach to health care and has advocated for fewer restrictions on physician-managed hospitals, an industry in which he and his family are heavily invested. Marshall helped lead the surgery center's transformation into a physician-managed hospital in Kansas. . And in the three years prior to 2020, Marshall's wife earned between $195,000-$450,000 from investments in physician-owned hospitals, according to the 2020 report The Kansas City Star.
“Just like Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us,'” Marshall told STAT News in 2017. “There is a group of people who just don't want health care and won't take care of themselves. “
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