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September 5, 2025

	By Alex Ellerbeck Associate Staff Editor, Opinion

Aaron Carroll is a health policy expert who has been writing for years about all the ways America gets health care wrong — why it’s so confusing and expensive and unfair. But lately, Carroll has been worried that rhetoric portraying American health institutions as broken beyond repair is being used by the Trump administration as a pretense to demolish the very parts that are working.

Carroll argues in a Times Opinion guest essay that it’s time for a patriotic defense of America’s health institutions, and to remember what makes them so great. It was our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after all, that helped get rid of smallpox and polio. (Just one of the reasons American kids are healthier today than they were in the 1950s, despite the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims to the contrary.)

It’s our National Institutes of Health that leads the world in research by orders of magnitude. There’s a reason that, according to some estimates, more than half of new drugs are invented in the United States. For all the concerns that the F.D.A. is sometimes too slow, America has approved 94 percent of novel cancer drugs before Europe did.

“Americans are right to demand more from their health care system. But if we tear down the parts that work — the research, prevention, regulation and education that have driven decades of progress — we won’t be left with something stronger,” Carroll writes.

Read the guest essay:

Maggie Shannon Guest Essay American Health Care Gets a Lot Wrong. Here’s What It Gets Right. For one thing, Americans get new cancer drugs way before Europeans. By Aaron E. Carroll

Here’s what we’re focusing on today:

Editors’ Picks

The Editorial Board Trump Thought He Was Leading on Trade. No One Is Following. A sign of the folly of Trump’s trade policy is that it has inspired no apparent envy among other nations. By The Editorial Board

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