Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com