Americans who are sick and dying should mostly blame themselves for their health condition. That’s what Sen. Roger Marshall said as Republicans are poised to cut health care access and increase costs for millions of Americans.
“Look, about 70 percent of your health outcomes are determined by you,” Marshall said Sunday on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “It’s determined by what you eat and what you’re surrounded by. By the time you come to my office as a doctor, I can impact maybe 10 or 20 percent of your health outcomes.”
Marshall did not cite where he got those percentage figures from. A former OBGYN, he is a leader of the newly-formed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Caucus. He has said the caucus will work with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — Trump’s choice for secretary of Health and Human Services — to “improv[e] health outcomes by prioritizing nutrition, providing access to affordable, nutrient-dense foods, and focusing on primary care availability to tackle the root causes of chronic diseases.” Kennedy has frequently spouted anti-science talking points, including opposing vaccines (saying that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”) Kennedy has also threatened to fire National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists, cut NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budgets, and curtail infectious disease research in favor of “preventative, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”
Marshall said that MAHA will address “nutrition,” “chronic disease issues” and the “mental health crisis.”
“We need to make these healthy foods affordable, available, and try to eliminate and minimize the toxins that we’re exposed to,” Marshall told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “We’re coming after ultra-processed foods. They have a big problem and big challenge.”
This narrative that Americans are responsible for their own health outcomes through the choices they make at the grocery store helps justify the forthcoming gutting of health care protections and access. And it conveniently ignores other systemic social determinants of health such as poverty, racism, and economic instability.
As they try to emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes, the incoming Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are weighing proposals that would, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “undermine Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage protections, make health coverage more costly and less comprehensive, shift more costs to states, and increase the number of uninsured people in the U.S.”
Marshall has voted in favor of repealing the Affordable Care Act and against protections for Americans who have preexisting conditions. He supports a free market approach to health care and has advocated for fewer restrictions on physician-owned hospitals, an industry he and his family have been heavily invested in. Marshall helped lead the transition of a surgery center into a physician-owned hospital in Kansas. And in the three years before 2020, Marshall’s wife earned somewhere between $195,000-450,000 from real estate investments in physician-owned hospitals, according to a 2020 report in The Kansas City Star.
“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” Marshall told STAT News in 2017. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”
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