Like so many "officials" in the Trump administration, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has proven himself spectacularly adept at outright deception (which is a polite way of saying he is keen at lying and reneging on his boatload of promises made to US Senators at his confirmation hearing, as well as maintaining a rather cold indifference when challenged with cold, hard audio and/or video evidence when he mouths the words, "I never said that." And so it goes,,,) as well as swaying in a drunken state of Trump-enabled power. He literally brushes off criticism of negligence in outbreaks of Whooping Cough that resulted in the deaths of children on the east coast; measles in the southwest; and mocking that his overblown report on childhood health literally contains citations that do not exist. Worse is the anger from researchers that he has grossly misinterpreted and/or purposely misstated their research findings to make points about the state of children's health that are either grossly exaggerated or outright lies. It seems reasonable to conclude that Mr. Kennedy is far too comfortable lying for a someone who swore openness and transparency, yet continues to openly hold ties to an organization he founded that, from its inception, has done everything in its power to be as deceptive and manipulative as possible. So, all of this begs the question as to what, exactly, Mr. Kennedy, is attempting to accomplish.

First, Sec. Kennedy, said it was his mission to change the course of "health" in the United States, yet in so doing, he decimated many of the essential programs and services responsible for providing basic healthcare in the neediest organization in the country. Take, for example, hospitals and clinics in rural & southern communities. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, more than 150 rural hospitals have closed, and accoprding the University of North Carolina Sheps Center for Health Services Research, the majority have been in the south, and the specific reason has been because those states have politically refused to participate in the Medicaid expansion necessary to allow these hospitals to continue to serve their rural communities, to the detriment of their own citizens. ¹ For his part, Sec. Kennedy has done absolutely nothing to encourage these states to reconsider their policies in the interest, and in fact has made false claims in his confirmation hearing that "Americans strongly disapprove of the Affordable Care Act" as well as "strongly disapprove of Medicaid" when KFF Healthcare Polling consistently has found that 64% of Americans approve of the ACA, and and an even greater 77% of Americans have a favorable view of Medicaid. ²

¹ University of North Carolina Sheps Center for Health Services Research (https://www.shepscenter.unc.edu/programs-projects/rural-health/rural-hospital-closures/).

² https://www.kff.org/interactive/kff-health-tracking-poll-the-publics-views-on-the-aca/#?response=Favorable--Unfavorable&aRange=twoYear