Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyeye | Hacker News Reader

60% of the US population has at least one chronic disease. 60 PERCENT!

40% has 2 or more. In any other sector would this be an acceptable outcome?

https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html

The old establishment health bureacracy should not be taken seriously. By any measure they are corrupt and incompetent fools.

View on HN

You’re blaming the medical establishment for Western disease? Maybe blame a car centric, carbohydrate rich ultra processed food incentivized system? Read the risk factors on the page you cited. It’s smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Everyone gets cancer when we live longer and improve detection.

Prescribe and subsidize exercise and GLP-1s, ban cigarettes, and you solve a lot of this. The medical establishment did not make the system humans exist in the US in, they simply try to treat it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

You can't really do that, but life expectancy in the US is a fair bit lower than comparably wealthy countries. I'm not sure you can blame the CDC but something is not ideal.

I think it's 84 years in Italy, 79.3 in the US. I'm sure a lot of that is due to healthier diets and less obesity, but isn't that the sort of thing RFK is trying to encourage?

https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap

With demagoguery you start with there needing to be a party that's "corrupt and incompetent fools" and then apply that to the party you don't like. What are you doing, earnestly trying to understand the problem or something?

Yes this would be their primary challenge at which they have comprehensively failed.

What task have they failed in? And, more importantly, what is the better approach?

You've asserted 60% of Americans having at least one chronic condition is a failure and begged the question that it is a failure (instead of a reasonable expectation of the health of mortals, especially mortals in a population that starts to skew older as our birth rates fall relative to the baby boom... Or the consequence of accurate tracking and reporting on an ever-widening set of understood or recognized conditions). Start by convincing the room there is a problem to solve before asserting leadership has failed at it.

And even if there is a problem to solve: entropy being what it is, there are infinitely more worse ways to do things than there are better. Even if the CDC's approach has room for improvement, from whence comes the confidence that putting a debunked conspiracy believer (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...) and anti-vaccination activist at its helm leads to improvement?

To paraphrase Dwight Schrute, did the CDC force people to not exercise and eat butter and sugar for 30 years?

What about the role of companies that develop and manufacture and market all this delicious, poisonous food?

The fact that you mentioned butter and not synthetic dyes, glyphosate, seed oils, or literally anything else is part of the problem (ie corporate capture).

Dyes, glyphosate, seed oils... Yeah. I like olive oil, and don't want to eat glyphosate, but you're fixating on the tenuous unfalsifiable presumed linkage of their toxicity to population level health problems.

I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.

"Butter" is in the quote I was referencing.

I covered corporate capture in the second half of my comment.

These aren't mentioned because Kennedy is against all of them.

But he is perfectly happy with people drinking liters of Coca-Cola (with still the same amount of sugar, but "natural", now).

I completely agree. On any other issue this would be considered a catastrophic failure beyond failure. This is an op-ed from a series of old army generals who lost the war because they were in bed with the enemy every step of the way. The CDC, FDA, and other regulators have a revolving door open to the same industries that profit from the demise of public health.

Take, for example, myopia in children (which has grown from zero to nearly half of children today) or vitamin D deficiency (34.5% of Americans _sufficient_!) The cost is colossal - both myopia and vitamin D deficiency have huge knock-on effects. The intervention in this case is easy and free. And yet, because there is no profit to be made, approximately nothing was done. This is a completely insane state of affairs.

I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause. The CDC can identify issues and provide recommendation and guidance.

Implementation and enforcement are federal and state legislative responsibilities. The CDC has known vitamin D deficiency is an issue for awhile; why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school? Hint: it would cost money and at least one party has no new taxes as a pretty consistent plank.

>why aren't we handing out vitamin D tablets at school?

The current US administration, the one with Trump and RFK jr, is currently cutting free meal at school. The food was coming from local farms, not Big Ag.

Whatever the posters above are claming the CDC did wrong (when in fact it was undercut at every step by the Republican Party and the right wing of the Democrats), the cuzrrent administration is doing worse. Much worse.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/trump-admin-cuts-prog...

You want the nanny state to tell you what to do?

How many of you American are following the CDC's guidelines? Can you follow them without the nanny state enforcing them on you?

Look at Trump congratulating himself for the return of gas cooking - a known cause of inside air pollution. Freedom!

Agreed. The crazy thing is that the Silicon Valley ethos has always been about disruption, challenging the status quo. Yet when it comes to the utterly abysmal state of public here they all are reflexively rushing to defend the indefensible.

Michele Obama tried to encourage physical activity, and was met with frothing-a-the-mouth backlash from the whole right-wing media personalities and Republicans who vehemently criticized related regulation as government overreach.

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/29/politics/michelle-obama-n...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/14/michelle-o...

https://authorityhealth.org/irony-abounds-on-the-anniversary...

Do you have any long-term memory?

Look in the mirror: you are the corrupt one.

Weird comment? Why am I the corrupt one? I think there is a deep institutional corruption that exists across the food and health bureacracies. and it persists regardless of who is in power. And no doubt there are many Democrats too who benefit from the status quo. I dont think Michelle Obama absolves them of their sins.

It was the Republicans who kneecapped Michelle Obama's initiative. Not the Democrats. Stop trying to bothside this.

And "who is in power" is decided by your vote. You could vote anytime against those Republicans who voted again and again against health because it was too "socialist". Now you have a health secretary who is happy that the sugar in Coca-Cola is another type of sugar.

Yes, this is the cost of "freedom". Do you want the nanny state to come and tell you smoking is bad, eat less meat, walk more, drink less sugar, don't sell guns and put "This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" labels everywhere?

You red-blooded Americans hate all of these things and then you discover you have chronic disease? Take responsibility for you own footgunning for once, instead of blaming the Deep State, a corrupt CDC, or immigrants or anyone but you.

When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.

I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.

Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).

1 in 3 adolescents has pre-diabetes.

https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/prediabetes/adolescents-...

It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.

Have you read the list of remedial actions at the bottom of your source? What can the medical establishment do to enforce these actions?

And how will banning vaccines will help with any of the problems you pointed out?

You can’t pick your parents. ~40% of pregnancies every year in the US are unintended [1], and a similar percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid [2] (~50% in rural communities). Lots of kids born into some combination of poverty and parents who aren’t providing the nutrition and exercise kids need to not be pre-diabetic (poverty rates are highest for rural children). The only solution to that is to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to not have them (robustly accessible contraceptives) if we’re not going to provide robust social support to parents who need it to raise healthy children (all evidence points to “we are not going to do this” for the foreseeable future). Are you expecting the government to do something different? Because they were providing food assistance (SNAP) and child healthcare (Medicaid) which is getting reduced or removed (depending on state or circumstance) by this administration.

Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.

[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[2] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-02-07-fact-sheet-medica...

[3] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

[4] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/12/poverty-rate-...

[5] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com