Vice President JD Vance pointed out that the United States healthcare system and leadership have failed the people of Appalachia, and that the people there “have been left behind.”
While speaking at the Make America Healthy Again Summit on Wednesday, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described Vance as being “kind of a golden child of Appalachia.” Kennedy added that Vance attended Ohio State and Yale University, and is a best-selling author, among his other accomplishments. During the discussion, Vance pointed out that while people living in Appalachian America get pissed off by jobs moving overseas, and other countries being prioritized, they also get pissed off when their loved ones don’t live as long.
Kennedy stated that Vance’s accomplishments are also a “tragic reminder of the lost potential of almost everybody else” in Appalachia, pointing out that Appalachian America has the “worst health of any region in the country,” the highest rates of addiction, obesity, alcoholism, and suicide, among other issues.
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“If you look at where life expectancy has gotten the worst in the United States, Appalachia is sort of at the top of the list,” Vance said, sharing that his father “died of cancer a few years ago.”
Vance added that when asked by his wife, second lady Usha Vance, if he has “ever had a really important male figure” in his life who lived to the age of 70, he shared that his grandfather died at 67 “from a very preventable illness,” and said out of all of his uncles, “not a single one” survived to 69.
“It kind of hit me, that if you grew up in Appalachia, you were used to losing the people that you love, very, very early on,” Vance added. “You want to talk about populism? You want to talk about people being pissed off? Well, yeah, people are pissed off when they don’t have good jobs. People are pissed off when things disappear and move overseas. People are pissed off when they feel like other countries are being prioritized over the United States of America — and all of that is part of the populist resentment of the past 20 or 30 years in American politics. You know what really pisses people off? When they realize that their loved ones are dying much sooner than everybody else.”
Vance’s comments continue in part:
My story obviously, it’s been … like you said, I’m like the golden boy. Things have just worked out for me in this really incredible way, I feel so lucky and so grateful for it. But, I also feel a certain sense of guilt, because there are a lot of people who grew up in families like mine who haven’t had an easy life, and who haven’t had all this economic opportunity, and who haven’t had a person that they’ve fallen in love with and they’ve been able to sort of build a stable, nice family like me and Usha have been able to build.
That gives me a sense of purpose, because I want those people to have the same opportunities that I’ve had. But, it also gives me a great sense of anger, because we never should’ve gotten to the point that we are today, and the reason that we have is because of failed leadership, and it’s failed leadership over generations.
And, by the way, you talk about Appalachia, you are talking about people, who though they don’t have much — would take the shirt off their back and give it to a complete stranger, because that’s what you do.
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Vance added, “If any place in this country deserves not to be left behind, it’s Appalachia,” and pointed out that the people there deserve to be able to “live better, healthier lives.” Vance also stated that they “have been left behind by this country’s leadership.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, people who live in Appalachian America — which consists of roughly “205,000 square miles along the Appalachian mountains” from northern Mississippi to New York, “face serious health challenges.”
People living in Appalachian counties are also faced with high “unemployment and poverty rates,” according to the CDC’s website.
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