Roff: To be confirmed, RFK must go further

Robert F. Kennedy has been handed a tough job. He must restore people’s confidence in the public health system and change the conversation regarding healthcare from how we pay for it to how we live longer and healthier lives.

What he’s been asked to do, what he seems to want to do, is bring what economists call “creative disruption” to the healthcare arena. That sounds scary – and, to some degree, it is. We don’t like it when politicians mess around with medicine because it inevitably leads to outcomes we can’t control unless we’re very rich or, increasingly, very poor.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama managed to ride the healthcare reform train into the White House on tracks built by the American people’s sympathy for those who, as the legacy media told us over and over in emotionally manipulating in-depth personality profiles, couldn’t get the care they needed because it was too expensive.

Exploration for answers to life-and-death medical questions should be a priority, not a second thought.

This is what RFK has ahead of him. He’s got to be willing to take on the healthcare hydra, head by head by head. It won’t be easy, and while he doesn’t have to be as pure as Caesar’s wife to do it, his hands must be comparatively clean. So far, he hasn’t managed that.

During his confirmation hearing, senators asked him to address his prior work questioning the safety and efficacy of the vaccines the government mandates our children receive before being allowed to attend school.

He didn’t handle it well. On the particularly thorny issue of retaining his stake in the financial outcome of a lawsuit pending against Merck Pharmaceuticals over its product Gardasil, the secretary-designate said, in Biden-like fashion, that it wouldn’t pose a conflict because he’d assign his interest to his son.

That’s a clever move, but it’s not enough. If you’ve got a hand in the pocket of the guy who’s got his hand in the till, it looks like you’re still in line for some filthy lucre. It allows people to question your judgment and your honesty. RFK doesn’t resolve concerns about his potential financial and legal conflicts by committing to walk away from his stake in one award if the proceeds are reassigned to his son or any other member of his family. This only increases the level of concern as it’s the kind of maneuver that suggests a deliberate attempt to avoid accountability.

Left unresolved, it will lead to further speculation and raise additional reasons for senators to vote down the nomination once it comes to the Senate floor.

As a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Kennedy must come clean. He’s got to renounce utterly his stake in the Gardasil lawsuit, the one in which he appears to have invested the most time and effort—even if that means leaving money on the table. Moreover, he’s got to withdraw from any interest he may have in other ongoing suits against America’s pharmaceutical manufacturers and other deep-pocketed players in the healthcare sector.

If he does, we can trust him to lead an honest conversation about making America healthy. If he doesn’t, then we can’t really be sure he’s not somehow in it for the money. That’s crass and crude, but politics is a crass and crude business. Calling a politician’s motives into question is like putting butter on a slice of bread: it’s the instinctive thing to do.

Kennedy must recognize that and rise above it, or it might be better if he doesn’t take the job.