Facts by Secretary Kennedy:
I want the agencies under HHS to earn that level of global Trust; and what is the past of public Trust? The path to trust is always through transparency. Transparency is the foundation of Science and it is the foundation of democracy. I think it’s significant that an overwhelming majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, this nation’s founding fathers, were also citizen scientists these included Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, a physician Julian Bartlett a physician, Matthew Thornton a physician and Oliver Walcott a physician.
Science and democracy were born together during the Enlightenment and they share the same ideals for open as – public access and for transparency. Science and democracy flourish from the free an unimpeded flow of information. No One Trust science that isn’t transparent about its research hypothesis is raw data or is conflicts of interest. No one trusted government built on lies on the secrets on cover-ups and propaganda that’s why my uncle famously observed – the word secrecy is repugnant to a free and open Society.
Our health is getting worse and worse…
Health Care policy has been the subject of intense controversy for 20 years, that have you noticed, that the controversy is almost entirely about who pays for it. Republicans and Democrats fight these ferocious battles on Capital Hill, and it’s always about who to shift the burden of paying for it; and for me I’ve said before this is like moving chairs around on the Titanic.
Our health is getting worse and worse, and when the total costs are over 4 trillion dollars as they are now, there is no good solution, only less bad ones. We need to start asking a very different question regardless of who pays, why are we paying so much: Which is by the way 2 to 3 times what European nations play, for better for worse outcomes. Corruption and efficiency may be part of it. The main reason it’s quite simply that Americans are very very sick; we are in fact the sickest Nation on Earth with the highest chronic disease burden in the world.
