OPINION:
Mindful of strength in numbers, Democratic governors have formed a state-based alliance on health care. Republicans need an effective response.
Formed on Sept. 3, the Governor’s Public Health Alliance now includes 15 blue states. The alliance says it will function as “a unified, cross-state liaison with the global health community.” That sounds like outreach to outfits such as the United Nations World Health Organization. President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from WHO, yet perhaps this Democratic alliance can join WHO somehow as a signal of globalist solidarity and resistance to Mr. Trump.
Moreover, the Democratic alliance emphasizes its focus on “elevating national considerations for vaccine policy and regulatory solutions to keep science front and center.”
The references to vaccines and science are intended as digs at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In August, Mr. Kennedy canceled federal funding for mRNA vaccine research, and earlier this month, an HHS advisory panel voted to roll back recommendations, even as a new appointee to the Food and Drug Administration, a unit of HHS, signals still more anti-vax action.
Unsurprisingly, top Democrats don’t like this. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker rips what he dubs the “junk science” of Mr. Kennedy’s HHS. He recently announced that his state, a member of the alliance, will establish its own vaccine guidelines. That clears things up quite a bit: This Democratic alliance is anti-MAHA and, by extension, anti-Trump and anti-Republican.
Given the salience of health care issues, Republicans need a strong vision of their own. First, do Mr. Kennedy and MAHA speak for all Republicans on health care? Do they address traditional Republican concerns about deregulation and personal liberty?
Consider, for instance, the FDA. Over the past six decades, its bureaucracy has strangled new drug innovation to the tune of minus 80%. The contrast with other categories of innovation is stark. To be sure, this doleful trend long precedes Mr. Kennedy and MAHA, yet we can ask: Has the new team pursued deregulation?
Not in the opinion of Stephen Moore, the longtime free market champion now leading the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. “They are worse so far than the Biden FDA in their pace of approving new drugs,” Mr. Moore says. “This is unnecessarily keeping potentially lifesaving drugs off the market.”
So we see, if not a fracture, at least a fault line in Republican thinking. On the one side, Mr. Kennedy and MAHA, focused on safety. On the other, free marketeers in the tradition of Milton Friedman, who argued for people being free to choose with respect to health and just about everything else. Friedman supported shrinking, perhaps even abolishing, the FDA.
Today, Mr. Kennedy and MAHA are dominating federal policy, yet thankfully, Washington is not the whole country. There are the 50 states, and as 10th-Amendment-empowered “laboratories of democracy,” they should get the most say in their own destiny.
There’s the Republican solution: Let Mr. Kennedy speak for one wing of the Republican coalition and libertarian-minded states speak for the other.
Speaking of freedom, Montana has made the most dramatic break with the old regulatory orthodoxy. The Big Sky State is strongly pro-Trump, but it’s also staunchly libertarian. Just this May, it blazed its own trail on medical liberty, pushing “right to try” legislation to new frontiers. As one headline puts it, “Montana Set to Become a ‘Wild West’ Hub for Experimental Medical Treatments and Therapies.”
Montana is launching exactly the experiment in liberty, entrepreneurship and innovation that free market conservatives applaud. Yet we don’t yet know how the FDA bureaucracy will react, to say nothing of the trial lawyers and other enforcers for the blue-state-based medical industrial establishment.
One prominent American would surely love Montana’s just-do-it approach. That would be the dealmaker in chief, President Trump. He has been attached to Mr. Kennedy and mindful of MAHA, but at the same time displays little patience for obfuscation. So the idea of repurposing some of the $5 trillion the U.S. spends annually on health away from bureaucrats and toward new discoveries ought to appeal to him. This president could be the best friend Montana ever had — and a hero as well to all those yearning for medical breakthroughs.
If Democrats can have their state-based health alliance for regulation, Republicans ought to have their health alliance for deregulation.
• James P. Pinkerton worked in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.