by Eric Zuesse
29 January 2025
On January 29th, U.S. Senate Democrats, none of whom want Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be confirmed to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (including the FDA and a vast range of other agencies), challenged him with many hostile questions, some of which he refused to answer, some of which he answered poorly, and others of which he answered well. Among the questions he failed to answer well were the following, which prominently made public some important information about his fitness or lack thereof for this position, such as his belief that despite health care being addressed by the Government in almost every other industrialized country as being a basic human right, he opposes that policy for the United States, and would not advocate for it if he were to become confirmed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
RFK Jr. disagrees that healthcare is a right, not merely earned by not smoking etc. He said that it’s not a right for people who behave unhealthfully.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
RFK Jr. opposes the federal law that requires emergency room doctors to provide abortions that would be needed in order to be able to protect a woman’s life. He also says that America must improve its life-expectancy and lower healthcare costs (though he opposes “basic healthcare-for-all” as being any part of that).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
RFK refuses to say that he will disobey President Trump if Trump demands him not to do what RFK Jr. considers necessary to do in order to improve the health of the American people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
RFK Jr. refuses to promise to Senator Warren that he won’t continue making millions annually from suing drug companies, which he has been doing. The Republican Senator Crapo, who supports Kennedy’s confirmation, admits (according to the youtubed subscripts) that RFK Jr. “hasn’t complied completely with all applicable laws and regulations governing conflicts of interests.” However, that’s a false subscript, because even Senator Warren admits that what Crapo actually said (or at least was intending to say) is the opposite — that RFK Jr. “has complied completely with all applicable laws and regulations governing conflicts of interests.” The Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren had been trying to make the point that RFK Jr. is planning to earn millions annually by continuing to sue drug companies after he leaves the Department of HHS.
Other than those few aspects of the Democratic Party’s grilling of Kennedy, I found all of his responses to have made those hostile Senators seem to be clearly on the wrong side of the issue that they were asking about.
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.
