A Crunchy Libertarian’s Guide to Making America Healthy Again
Your health is your business — not the government's.
Public health has long been a highly politicized topic, but in the last five years since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen Republicans and Democrats largely swap rhetoric on issues related to national and individual health. I’ve experienced the anecdotal impact of this exchange in the way my personal health preferences have been perceived by my friends and neighbors.
As a teenager, my “granola” habits of hiking, vegetable gardening, and thrifting had everyone in my small southern town (including my parents) thinking I was a liberal hippy. Now, thanks in large part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, I’m at risk of being labeled a conservative neo-Nazi by my DC neighbors for wanting less processed foods and pharmaceuticals in my body. No, my views did not radically shift in less than a decade — society did!
The ways in which both political parties handled the pandemic, in particular their rhetoric surrounding the COVID vaccine, accentuated this political change. As a whole, Democrats took a hard stance in favor of the vaccine as a cure-all, while figures like RFK Jr. seeded doubt in government institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Ultimately, Democrats emerged defending the medical establishment under the guise of public safety, whereas Republicans claimed the hyper-individualist “do your own research” approach to promoting personal health.
I believe this radical shift in political messaging uncovers a void where the guiding principles of each party ought to be. It’s up to free thinkers to fill that void themselves.
I’ll be honest — I have a love-hate relationship with the MAHA movement. But if you know me, this shouldn’t be surprising. Despite working in policy, I am as disengaged from politics as I reasonably can be and am proudly politically homeless. I cannot in good faith align myself with a party or movement if I do not fully agree with every position they take. Instead, I align myself through principles — which is an approach I desperately wish more people and organizations would take.
The principles that guide me are personal liberty and self governance. In layman’s terms, I think people should be able to do whatever they please as long as they’re not hurting others. It follows in my view that the government’s role in public health, in so far as it has a role, ought to be to promote public education on matters of health and to defend individuals’ ability to make their own choices. These are views that have underscored my beliefs for as long as I can remember and will likely not change throughout my life.
The constancy of guiding principles makes them a more secure basis for making sense of our confusing and complicated world than fickle party politics. Imagine if the majority of people in our nation aligned themselves with others who shared the same core values, not just loyalty to a political base. Yet our country suffers from a toxic dependence on party lines to organize people and ideas into clear camps. Such categorization, disconnected from any substantive principles, results in even more confusion. This is why my propensity for healthy life choices went from being coded as liberal to conservative. If we lived in a principle-focused society, I doubt this level of intense sway would occur as often, if at all.
Regardless of what convenient political narratives each party is championing at a given moment, the problems facing our society affect everyone. For instance, research shows that our country is sick and getting sicker. A recent study found that Americans are living longer, but they are becoming more burdened by illnesses. Compared to other WHO countries, the United States has the largest gap between total life expectancy and healthy life expectancy — meaning Americans will live longer, sicker lives. Though the Republican base is currently finding it expedient to fixate on this issue, any potential solutions will impact both sides.
In a country that is so divided and so sick, how should free thinkers approach the MAHA movement? Through the lens of principles, of course!
I’m not a doctor or a scientist — no one should be taking health care or nutritional advice from me! But I am uniquely positioned to comment on the MAHA movement because of my background in health care policy and my own struggles with the health care system and chronic illnesses. My musings here are purely focused on what the government’s role, through a principled lens, should be in making America healthy. I will not be lending my voice to back raw milk or demonize seed oils, nor will I be advocating for mandatory vaccinations or “free” health care. I will merely venture to pose three core principles for engaging with public health policy, which I believe ought to guide every free-thinking individual to their own core beliefs when it comes to public health.
Principle #1: Restore the Doctor-Patient Relationship
No matter where you are in the country, you’re probably waiting months for an appointment with your health care provider just for the visit to last less than 15 minutes. And you can expect that wait time to be even longer and the visit to be even shorter if you’re seeing a specialist. When we eventually get sick and really need our doctors, there’s no way to get fit into their tightly booked schedules, so we’re forced to schlep over to urgent care to wait hours in a dingy waiting room to see a provider who doesn’t even know us. We’re paying lots of money for substandard care that we can’t even get in a timely manner. That’s unacceptable!
There are a lot of reasons why our health care system is like this, but it boils down to government-mandated insurance requirements. Through insurance, the government has placed so many mandates on our health care providers that they can no longer do the jobs that they spent years (and thousands of dollars) training for. Our providers are now forced to spend a significant amount of their time on administrative duties rather than patient care. The doctor-patient relationship has been totally eroded by these top-down government mandates.
Some doctors have decided to forgo the burdens of insurance altogether through direct patient care models. But this solution isn’t accessible to everyone as it tends to be very cost-prohibitive by requiring patients to pay out of pocket with limited insurance reimbursement options. For many patients, however, especially those with chronic illnesses and complex medical histories, the higher cost is worth it as they get more in-depth and reliable care in a timely manner.
There was a time when the care you can now only seem to get in boutique practices was ubiquitous. We need to get the government out of our doctor offices and bring back the doctor-patient relationship.
Principle #2: Science Is Ever-Evolving
This is somehow controversial today, but it’s an elementary-level principle that science is an ongoing and ever-evolving discipline. Too often, we see absolute outrage from all over the political spectrum when people question what we hold to be undeniably true in the field of medicine. But that’s how science is supposed to work: We ought to ask questions and develop hypotheses using the scientific method to make sense of our world, to find new solutions and new truths.
In that sense, I appreciate RFK Jr.’s musings even if I do often disagree with his conclusions. We shouldn’t attack people for genuinely questioning what our society holds to be true. But we also shouldn’t base our regulations and laws off of social media fads. Science is important, and it’s constantly evolving as we gain new knowledge. That process should be embraced!
Principle #3: Consumer Education > Mandates, Bans, and Restrictions
Consumer education is far preferable to top-down mandates and bans. Individuals should be empowered to make educated choices about their own health. If I want to eat highly processed sugary candy full of artificial dyes, shouldn’t I be able to? Sure, I know it’s not good for me, but I’m an adult and I can govern myself. I can eat unhealthy things in moderation and still be okay in the long run (or, not — but that’s my prerogative). I don’t need the government to take responsibility for my self-control — and it’s not very effective when it tries. That’s why New York City’s ban on oversized sodas failed in 2013.
Now, if those dyes in that candy are toxic and will imminently kill me, I think that’s a reasonable time for the government to step in and ban that product. But that power has to be wielded wisely and conservatively. We can all agree that alcohol is not good for our immediate or long term health. If you drink past your individual limit in a single sitting, you will surely feel the consequences the next day. If you continually overdrink for a long period of time, you put yourself at risk for developing liver disease, cancer, and dementia. Should the government stop us from overdrinking by limiting the allowable alcohol level, or by taking alcohol off the market completely? Absolutely not! It’s up to individuals to make responsible decisions about what goes into our bodies. Instead, the FDA needs to focus on keeping poisons out of our food and drug supply, while quickly getting safe and effective products onto the market. This is a task that the FDA has historically been pretty bad at.
What consumers really need is accessible comprehensive nutritional education. And I’m not talking about an outdated food pyramid that’s been corrupted beyond recognition by lobbyists. Issue education will not eradicate America’s health problems, but it will allow consumers to make informed choices when they have access to accurate information. Whether or not they make “good” choices with that knowledge is up to them. It’s not the government’s job to parent us. Infantilization of consumers strips away their right to choose and forces them to rely on the government to make life’s most basic decisions. Acting as if functioning adults are incapable of making these simple cost-benefit analyses is insulting.
The Bottom Line: Your Health Should Be Up to You
Regardless of your political persuasion — or lack thereof — you should care about your own personal health. In the sense that the MAHA movement elevates the importance of a healthy citizenry to a national platform, I think it’s a good thing. Everyone should feel empowered and engaged in their health care. As someone who is currently struggling with chronic illnesses, it’s validating to me that these problems are getting airtime from national figures. The more people talk and think about these complex issues, the better.
But the MAHA movement’s current and potential reliance on top-down mandates and overall lack of scientific rigor is concerning. In the same vein, so is the current status quo in health care. Our dependence on an easily corruptible government to tell us what vaccines to take, which foods will and won’t give us cancer, and how much highly-processed dairy to eat in a day, is ridiculous — no matter who is in charge. If the MAHA movement wants to make real, lasting, and important improvements to public health, it must challenge the existing system instead of molding it around their personal agendas.
The momentum the MAHA movement has created in fixing our health care system and focusing on personal wellness is wonderful. But the government cannot reasonably deliver a one-size fits-all solution to our national health crisis. A healthy lifestyle looks different for everyone. For me, it looks like growing a garden in my tiny 10 by 10 foot backyard, begrudgingly paying out of pocket for an integrative functional medicine doctor, refining my yoga practice, and trying to scale back my energy drink addiction. It’s all about finding a personal balance. The government — who doesn’t know us or our individual bodies — can’t do this for us. It’s time for each of us to claim responsibility for our own health.
is a harm reduction fellow with Young Voices and a health care policy analyst at a DC-area advocacy organization. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Washington Examiner, MSNBC, and Reason Magazine. Be sure to follow her Substack .
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