Jerry Rogers is the Editor of Real Clear Policy, including Real Clear Health and Real Clear Books and Culture. He discusses health care policy, and how recent laws have impacted health care in America.
The following has been edited for context and clarity.
Federal Newswire:
What is your perspective on the recent election results and what led to them?
Jerry Rogers:
I'm watching the various news shows and the cable shows, and there's a lot of just superficial, "It was this or it was that." And it's more complicated. The American people are more complicated than that. Inflation was the number one issue, but abortion was also a top tier issue, especially for Democrats it was number four, number five. But it turns out that if you were a likely Democrat voter, 76% went to the Democrat candidate. But the analysis is, "Well, abortion played a big part."
Well, yes and no. It played a big part because the Republicans never offered up an alternative. There has been this false narrative that abortion bans nationally, that if you have a miscarriage, you wouldn't get help at an emergency room. And the Republicans made a decision to leave abortion alone, and that turned out to be a mistake. The governors that signed into law restrictions on abortion who were able to offer up some common sense and some consensus positions on abortion, all won reelection in big numbers. So again, it was a miscalculation not to articulate a vision on women's health, on abortion issues, because what happened was the Democrat's false narrative took hold, and that was a big issue.
Federal Newswire:
As the editor of Real Clear Policy, what role did the RealClear family of websites play in all of this?
Jerry Rogers:
RealClearPolicy really is the ideas factory. It's almost a think tank in its function, and what we try to do is take the best ideas from Brookings and from the Center for American Progress from the left, but also couple them with the best ideas coming from the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform.
Also, it's a place to go to see the best opinion commentary ideas coming out of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and a host of other venues. It really is RealClearPolicy, RealClearPolitics broadly, it's the last place where both the left and the right have a shared real estate. Both are coming to read about ideas, and I think that's important … This election, voters really considered policy and policy choices. The problem, the challenge moving forward is that one party in particular, the GOP, needs to do a better job articulating its positions.
Federal Newswire:
How can we have conversations about these complex issues?
Jerry Rogers:
I think the problem isn't so much making the complex conversational, we can do that. The left does it. They turn climate change into, "It's for the children." They turn public education policy into, "It's for the children." I mean, they're able to make complex issues very conversational. The challenge is we have to do that, and it obviously can be done. I tell you who did it, Ron DeSantis did it. Governor DeWine in Ohio did it. Governor Sununu in New Hampshire did it. Governor Abbott in Texas did it.
To say that our ideas are too complicated and therefore we can't express them I think as a cop out … The real issue is that Democrats put their money where their mind is. They have the conviction of their ideas. They really do believe that democracy is in jeopardy. They really do believe that abortion should be up till birth. They really do believe these things. And Republicans are afraid to express themselves, but they shouldn't be because where we see Republicans expressing hard conservative truths, they win. Ron DeSantis, again, I encourage your listeners and your viewers go and watch his election night speech. It'll give you goosebumps. And he takes on all the hard issues and he takes on all of the boogeymen that the left puts up.
Federal Newswire:
What did Larry Hogan accomplish in Maryland from a policy perspective?
Jerry Rogers:
Well, first, let's dispel this myth that the Democrat candidates were bad candidates. He ran against Anthony Brown his first time around, and Anthony Brown went on to win a seat in Congress. He's now the incoming Attorney General of the state of Maryland. He's a serious player. And so there was some competition there. And what Larry Hogan was able to do early was articulate this idea: you're taxed enough, you're regulated enough, our cities are dangerous, crime is a problem. But again, similar to President Trump, a lot of talk, a lot of bluster, a lot of me, I … At the end of the day, Maryland is ranked 46 out of 50 in terms of the economy and taxes. He leaves office with no lasting policy, legacy, nothing. Literally zero. He leaves with a high approval rating and that seems to be his one accomplishment.
Federal Newswire:
Was he maintaining the status quo?
Jerry Rogers:
I do think there was promise with him. He could have been America's governor … but he chose to be safe. He chose to be someone who wanted to be the darling of the media. He became, to a lesser extent without the military background, he became John McCain. He became the Republican on The View, on Comedy Central, the Sunday talk shows … and again, his defenders will say, "Look, he had a super majority of Democrats in both the House of Delegates and the state Senate. And I would push back in two areas. Number one, well, the reason why they gained a super majority was because Larry Hogan never built a network of conservatives and coalition of GOP allies. But more importantly, what Larry Hogan never did was what previous governors did when they had a recalcitrant legislature, he never used the budget. He never used the purse strings.
He could have refused, "You're going to vote this way, you're not going to give me this bill, we're not going to have tax reform, well then I'm going to hold the money for this project, we're going to hold back the money on that project." But you see, he never had the courage of his convictions. And again, that's the theme, I think. The theme for Republicans this election cycle is if you want to win, you have to believe in something and offer something. Again, the cliché, you can't beat something with nothing. And I would say in many of the instances why we didn't see a red wave was because there were too many Republicans who were just offering up, "Democrats are bad." But you have to say, "Well, why are you good?"
Federal Newswire:
Republicans have been accused of not having any ideas when it comes to crime in cities. You worked for a number of years at the Manhattan Institute that deals in these issues, so what’s your perspective?
Jerry Rogers:
Yes. Well, again, if you're not familiar with the Manhattan Institute, just go to their website. This is an urban policy city think tank that quite frankly in the '80s came up with the blueprint that produced urban renaissance from Los Angeles to New York and from Houston to Detroit. I mean, this was…is still an ideas factory. There are lots of good ideas coming from the right center for cities on education, on crime, on criminal justice, on all these issues.
The problem is that the left no longer believes in diversity, and what I mean by that is that you look at Los Angeles, you look at Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore City, it's one party rule and no one brings in anything contrary, no diversity of ideas, no competition for ideas.
Federal Newswire:
Do you believe the failure in pushing back against the Affordable Care Act was the inability of Republicans to articulate alternatives? For example, when you're talking about ‘repeal and replace', you have to replace it with something.
Jerry Rogers:
The problem wasn't so much that there weren't ideas, I mean right now, if you go to real RealClearHealth, Grace-Marie Turner lays out an agenda for the new Congress on healthcare ideas. The ideas are there. I know that Republicans have put forward this thing called the Healthy Futures Act, which is a composite, it's a collection of all kinds of ideas to reform healthcare. The problem with Obamacare was that the Republicans, again, the Republicans were too tied to the industries. They were tied to the insurance industry, they were tied to Big Pharma, and they capitulated. And to a certain extent, look, I know no Republican voted for it, but behind the scenes, who do you think wrote Obamacare? It was Big Pharma. And Big Pharma employs a lot of Republican lobbyists.
And Billy Tauzin at the time, who was the head of PhRMA, he's a former congressman, both a Democrat and Republican, he served as both a D and an R from Louisiana … Billy Tauzin's a good man, but he said on one of the cable news programs at the time … "Look," he said, "we'll sacrifice price controls for volume." And so what happened was it really was the powers, the establishment, the Washington class decided that, "Yeah, we'll accept less freedom, more regulations if it means more money in our pocket." And that's been the problem with healthcare. There needs to be a divorce between the idea factories, the Republican Party and the industry sector. I mean, Big Pharma and big insurance do lots of big things wrong.
Federal Newswire:
Explain what went on in the Inflation Reduction Act and what we're looking at down the road.
Jerry Rogers:
Well, again, false narratives, misinformation. So the Democrats and the Biden Administration said that the Inflation Reduction Act will bring drug prices, make them lower for all Americans because Medicare helps set the prices for drug prices in the overall market, and what the Inflation Reduction Act does, so say the Democrats, is allow for Medicare to negotiate with the drug companies for lower prices. The problem is that that's completely untrue. It is an untruth. The fact is that what the Inflation Reduction Act does, it gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power without any veto. No one can say, "You can't do this." Congress has no oversight. The HHS secretary can choose medicines in Medicare and say, "Nope, that's too much." And he can set a price.
And the drug companies have to accept it or they can't sell the drug. And so what that will do, it has already happened, the evidence is piling in, drug companies have already decided not to do certain research. So we're going to have less innovation and … when you have price controls, prices go up ultimately. And the CBO, the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, when they scored this bill, said that, "The only way you'll ever save money in Medicare is to deny access to care to seniors." So ultimately, what the Inflation Reduction Act does, beside all the green energy nonsense, what it does is it lays the groundwork for denying access to needed healthcare to our seniors and ultimately to the rest of us.
It should have been called the Green New Deal, and oh, by the way, No New Cures Act.
Federal Newswire:
What is in the Healthy Futures Act?
Jerry Rogers:
Digital health proposals, telehealth proposals. Do you know that one positive that came out of the pandemic was the rise of telehealth. However, in Medicare and in other insurance programs, telehealth is a second or third thought. Well, this would provide incentives, this would provide opportunities for telehealth in Medicare and in government healthcare systems, but also allow for more innovation. Again, I don't want to get into pro-market, anti-market because sometimes people get hooked on words. The fact is that if we want to see healthcare, what we have to see, and we see it in the Healthy Futures Act, we need to see less government interference. We need to see more innovation. Let companies invest their money. We should stop price setting.
We price set everywhere. Think about the Medicare system, Medicaid system, think about TRICARE and the veteran system, all kinds of price setting … One good thing the Trump administration did is allow for more private choice and allow for more private hospitals and private healthcare in the VA. And so in the Healthy Futures initiatives, there's more of that. There's more choice … I think it's important that we have to allow for doctors and scientists, and we have to allow for medicine to run medicine. The pandemic completely politicized medicine to a point that we haven't seen before. And the Healthy Futures Act gets back to letting doctors and scientists run medicine, not politicians.
Federal Newswire:
"Follow the science" is a saying we’ve heard consistently over the last two years. Can you explain how it’s been politicized?
Jerry Rogers:
Well, we should follow the science and obviously after the pandemic, not the scientists … What I mean by that is that Dr. Fauci, Dr. Burkes, God bless them, I don't have any animus toward either one, Dr. Francis from the NIH and others, what they did was they started to run the public health entities. The NIH, the CDC, the HHS started to run them like political entities … There's always been trouble with public health getting into the business of politics on the gun issue, on other issues. But during the pandemic, it was put into hyper drive and they politicized a virus.
And a lot of it had to do with the fact that they didn't like who the president was, how he was handling things, and so they started to leverage the public health communities. There needs to be a reckoning. I've said this before. Right now, if you polled the American people, they do not trust the public health community. That's bad news for healthcare, for innovation. It's bad news for science. There has to be a reckoning. The Atlantic put out a piece recently. There needs to be a COVID amnesty. In other words, forget what happened. We can't forget what happened because we closed the schools down knowing in retrospect … that the children were never a vector. We closed down small businesses and restaurants knowing they weren't a vector of the spread. We can't go back to that. There has to be a reckoning.
Federal Newswire:
Who was the scientist put on Maryland's COVID response team by Larry Hogan who suggested that the Wuhan lab leak theory was a possibility?
Jerry Rogers:
Dr. Robert Redfield, who is a non-partisan overall good guy scientist, and he had the gall to speak out the idea that, "Well, perhaps this came from the Wuhan lab," and he was drummed out as a racist. And it turns out now after a Senate report and other investigations, it is likely, it is...essentially, we all know now that it did come from the lab in Wuhan.
Federal Newswire:
This has also been an issue with climate change.
Jerry Rogers:
When we hear the term denialist or he or she is a denier, that should put our guard up. And this is why I'm disappointed in the election results, not because my side didn't do as well as I had hoped, because I was hoping to move past this cancel culture. This, "If you say what I don't like, you're out of here." There really has been a stifling of the public discourse, the exchange of ideas.
If we're going to fix things, one of my criticisms of the GOP was they didn't put forward a program to deal with inflation, to deal with high energy costs. They said a lot about the other guys, the Dems were bad, but they should have been more proactive in terms of why we're good. But again, how do you have a debate over inflation or tax policy or energy cost or climate change and drilling or not drilling and all this, if you're going to simply dismiss out of hand one side of the argument? Well, that's a problem.
And again, here's the thing about politics. It is personal, in a sense that bad decisions impact your family in a bad way. I talked to a very close family member of mine who voted for Barack Obama the second time and I said, "You know Barack Obama caused my health insurance to go from $700 a month to $3,600 a month." And I said, "So his policies on Obamacare hurt my family." And the same is true today. There's a reason why prices are higher, energy costs are higher, gas prices are higher. It's not because of some market glitch or some problem with supply chain, although those things might factor into it. It's because of decisions being made by the Biden administration. Their decisions are having a trickle down negative impact on my family.
Federal Newswire:
How do people find the RealClear family of websites?
Jerry Rogers:
Go to www.realclearpolitics.com and then they're all listed there. So politics, investigations, policy, health, education, all the rest of them. But you know what? We're still trying to figure out this election. If you want up to the minute updates.
