The Dems Are Holding the Nation Hostage. The Result? Inflated Healthcare Costs and Sicker Americans.

By John Klar, Contributor, The MAHA Report

The MAHA movement has promised to make Americans healthier, not by expanding healthcare services but by reducing illness. This is a radical reversal of the longstanding healthcare model that is destroying the United States economy as average life expectancies plummet and various diseases – including cancer, diabetes, obesity, autism, and heart disease – become more prevalent.

Healthier food and reduced exposure to toxins are proven preventive measures touted by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and many health experts.

Unfortunately, the Democrats are holding this plan hostage — shutting down the government by demanding massive funding to perpetuate the failed scheme of the Affordable Care Act, led by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch.

The failed model, also known as Obamacare, has resulted in skyrocketing healthcare expenditures and insurance premiums, yet Americans are sicker. The Trump administration has reduced Medicare spending, but diverted massive funding to the hospitals that most need support through the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHT), which allocates $50 billion over five years to the nation’s rural hospitals. Sanders and Welch are holding the national budget (including WIC and SNAP benefits) hostage to secure ongoing funding for a gargantuan, inefficient federal bureaucracy rather than ensuring the RHT Program rescues struggling rural hospitals.

States can submit applications to the RHT Program to improve rural hospitals by providing better patient food, advanced technologies, staff nutrition training, and more efficient use of SNAP benefits. The idea is not to cure more disease but to prevent it.

Prevention and education have proved to be the most cost-effective investments to combat the opioid crisis, and a similar logic applies to health outcomes. Type 2 diabetes can be cured for most people with dietary changes, eliminating the expense of insulin injections rather than funding more insulin. Healthier foods in hospitals can shorten hospital stays, reduce return visits for diet-related conditions, and teach patients lifelong eating habits that will minimize future illness. Healthier diets eliminate the need for costly drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic, saving taxpayers billions while saving lives and sparing patients from various side effects.

Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly vowed to focus on the root causes of chronic disease. Rural hospitals have been struggling for years, with about a third currently at risk of closure. Rural populations are also generally more unhealthy than those in urban centers. Addressing this disparity directly rather than through a lethargic, failed Medicare and Medicaid system is sensible.

Dr Mehmet Oz, who oversees the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has said it’s time to rethink the rural care model rather than simply pay bills or patch over systemic problems, instead prioritizing sustainability, quality, and prevention. He declared, “We want transformative, big ideas that will dramatically change our expectations of the rural healthcare system….”

Congressional Democrats, led by Sanders and Welch, instead strive to preserve a failed status quo that rewards bureaucrats with jobs instead of patients with better health outcomes. Paul Dame, Vermont’s Republican Chair, explained in an October 20 party newsletter titled “Democrats Block $50 Billion for Rural Health Transformation Program”:

“[T]he RHT program requires hospitals to design their own improvement plans — so federal funds go toward real solutions. Rather than supporting rural hospitals, Sanders, Welch, and Washington Democrats want to keep funneling money into the broken Affordable Care Act. That approach has failed for a decade. It doesn’t fix the system — it just kicks the can down the road. Costs keep rising, subsidies keep growing, and taxpayers keep paying…. If we follow that path, Vermont’s rural hospitals will continue to struggle or disappear. The only way to actually lower health care costs is to address the cost of delivery, not just how we pay for it. ”

Dame is correct. Senator Sanders displayed this interaction recently with “The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart:

STEWART: “But where Democrats find themselves is this: we’ve shut down the government to protect subsidies for an insurance marketplace that funnels $800 billion a year into the pockets of these insurance companies. Have Democrats boxed themselves into a corner…?

“So my question is, will Democrats recognize the poison pill that they’ve often placed into well-intentioned policy?... Is this a good system to defend?

SANDERS: “To defend today—yes. Obviously, it is a system designed to make huge profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies, period. We have got to move to a Medicare-for-all single-payer program.”

Sanders proceeds to advocate for expanding the system and taxing imaginary billionaires to fund it. After an interview with fellow budget blackmailer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN reported that “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were in the difficult position of having to justify Democrats’ decision not to accept a GOP funding plan — which would keep those paychecks flowing — and instead use the funding fight as leverage for their health care fight.”

Welch has similarly stymied the RHT Program:

“Welch has repeatedly pointed to estimates that show 45,000 Vermonters could lose their health care coverage in the coming years because of the president’s policies.

‘That is going to be a hammer blow to our hospitals, because those folks who lose health care don’t get a guarantee they won’t get sick, and they’re going to show up at our community hospitals,’ Welch said during Thursday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing. ‘Our community hospitals are going to treat them, and they aren’t going to be compensated. And it’s why Vermont community hospitals are on financial thin ice…..’

Vermont’s community hospitals are on thin ice because Vermont’s bureaucratic bloat has crippled them with fantastical healthcare models that have delivered profits to technocrats and middle management while crippling service quality and costs. According to Consumer Affairs, Vermont holds the dubious honor of being the most expensive state for healthcare in the nation, including “the highest annual premium of all states.”

Vermont displays a dismal track record of healthcare administration premised on an experimental model funded by the Sanders-Welch cure-all of pumping more federal dollars into a failed, money-sucking, for-profit scheme that fails to deliver improved health outcomes. Vermont’s OneCare effort overspent year after year, while paying hefty salaries to failed administrators. As I wrote back in 2022, OneCare Vermont employees were being paid nearly twice what comparable organizations paid, rural hospitals were being damaged by the program while patient care declined. State Auditor Doug Hoffer concluded that “OneCare has cost the state $25.6 million more than what it would have paid under the fee-for-service Medicaid model” and deemed $12.7 million to be ‘unaccountable expenditures.’ ”

In his recent book studying healthcare industry waste titled “Pre-Existing Conditions: How Lobbying Makes American Health Care More Expensive,” University of Vermont Professor Alex Garlick pointed to the bureaucratic hurdles that hurt patients not just in the Green Mountain State but across the country. He calculated that states with the most lobbyists experience the greatest increases in health care costs. Professor Garlick stated that “It’s hard to expect the industry to issue the recommendations that are going to reduce their own revenues.”

Vermont and its bumbling U.S. senators prove why a novel effort like the RHTP, which directly supports rural hospitals through policies that improve health outcomes and prevent illness, is far superior to the botched bureaucratic mess they leave in their wake. What is all the more disgraceful is that Vermont is uniquely positioned to benefit from the RHT Program and is applying for $500 million that its senators are actively blocking.

It seems many Democrats prefer an inefficient bureaucracy that sickens Americans while enriching administrators and discouraging medical staff. Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz are determined to change that failed model, to Make America Health Again.

Key Takeaways

– Congressional Democrats are holding the entire nation hostage in a budget battle solely to ensure more taxpayer dollars are wasted in a failed bureaucratic model that is unsustainable and does not prevent illness.

– Ironically, Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch both hail from the U.S. state that perhaps best proves why their spendthrift idiocy has failed, and why HHS Secretary Kennedy’s Rural Health Transformation Program is a rescue plan for American health.