Arugulazempic: The Coming Word Salad of Health Policy
“Yes, by all means, let’s eat more arugula. But let’s not turn our back on the role of human ingenuity in making America healthier.” This is how Rich Lowry, Editor in Chief of the National Review, tried this week to make sense of the coming salad of health policy that we will call arugulazempic.
Give us our salads and our meds, please.
The Kennedy Creed
The proposed head of Health and Human Services is tossing one point of view into the word salad bowl of health policy. To make America healthy again is simple in his view. Just serve up good food.
Early in his journey toward taking a health post in the new administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr was quite dismissive of medicine for obesity and cardiometabolic health:
“They’re counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”
He’s backed off that stance a little, recently saying:
“The first line of response should be lifestyle. It should be eating well, making sure you that you don’t get obese. Those GLP drugs have a place.”
Mounjaro Musk
Perhaps Kennedy sees the inevitability of a place for GLP agonists because they have such a fan in the President-Elect’s best buddy, Elon Musk. Staking out an unambiguous endorsement of these medicines for making America healthy, he says:
“Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public.”
We won’t quibble about the fact that these drugs are promoters, not inhibitors, of GLP-1 activity. His point is that they can improve health and better access to them would be a big help. Yes, we agree.
Word Salad Health Policy
Of course, getting to a coherent health policy to Make America Healthy Again might take some doing. But we might find that coherence is overrated. If making laws is like sausage making, perhaps health policy can be like salad making. Just throw the best ideas you have into the bowl and toss it up.
Whatever. When all is said and done, our only hope is that this new administration can find a way to claim victory by making CMS do at long last what no other administration has done. Open up access to obesity medicines in Medicare and Medicaid. Just like medicines for any other chronic disease.
Click here for the Lowry commentary, here for another view from RealClear Health, and here for reporting on this from The Hill. To speak up in favor of positive change, click here and here.
Salad of Baalbek, photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg, licensed under CC BY 4.0
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January 3, 2025
