The public argument over Make America Healthy Again has run straight into a harsher fact: Americans are dying younger than Europeans even though they are the wealthiest people on the planet. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine of 74,000 adults found that even the wealthiest Americans had higher mortality rates than the wealthiest Europeans.
That is why Robert F Kennedy Jr and the movement he leads are being searched now. It has built its message around soaring obesity, diabetes and chronic disease, but its public face is influencers in saunas, gyms and parks urging better choices, individual discipline and, in some cases, eating more red meat, doing more push-ups, drinking raw milk, avoiding vaccines, boosting natural immunity and sweating more. The appeal is obvious in a country where wellness culture sells hope. The problem is that the numbers point somewhere else.
The United States spends twice as much as comparable countries on healthcare, yet across every wealth category Americans were more likely to die younger than Europeans. The richest Americans had mortality rates comparable to the poorest residents of northern and western Europe. That gap is not small, and it is not explained away by income alone. It says the country is buying more care and getting less life out of it.
The deeper fault line is policy, not personal virtue. The US does not guarantee healthcare, around 26 million Americans remain uninsured, and millions more carry plans with loopholes or deductibles so high that getting care can be financially risky. A Commonwealth Fund survey estimated that 57% of underinsured adults delayed or avoided medical care because of cost. That is one reason the argument over health cannot stop at diet, exercise or self-control.
Violence and injury make the same point. The US is a uniquely violent high-income country, with guns the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, followed by road traffic collisions. The firearm death rate among American children age 0-17 is 72 times higher in the US than in the UK, which effectively banned handguns after the Dunblane shooting. The country also has about one mass shooting per day on average. No amount of wellness branding can offset that.
Polling still finds scientists among the most trusted sources of information in the US, far ahead of politicians and influencers, yet 60% of voters disapprove of the job Robert F Kennedy Jr is doing. That gap matters because the movement’s message is landing just as public health agencies are being gutted and experts sidelined. The most immediate way to narrow the US-Europe life expectancy gap is not to ask Americans to do more push-ups. It is to change the policies that make them sicker and kill them younger.
