The good news for Americans is that wages have outpaced costs since the Clinton years. The bad news is quality of life is far worse due to things government micromanages, like healthcare.(1)
Thanks to new guidelines being promoted by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, and others with an outsized control over government healthcare, those government costs are going to rise dramatically. Because 88,000,000 adults will be told by doctors they should be on statins.
That's a big win for generic drug companies. I am a fan of pharmaceutical discovery, the U.S. leads the world in that for good reason, but generic companies like Mylan are parasites(2) who have lobbied to create a regulatory climate where only the existing companies can afford to compete.
This is the most ridiculous effort at over-medicalizing people since the Obama CDC invented pre-diabetes out of whole cloth(3). If China used our bizarre pre-diabetes a1c number, they would have 500,000,000 on drugs. These guidelines could lead to half of US adults going on medication.
To possibly impact a risk factor for a risk factor for a heart attack.
This is not just bad policy based on suspect epidemiology, it is like using national BMI averages to subsidize organic vegetables for the country.
I use pre-diabetes as a comparison because the a1c number fabricated by the American Diabetes Association is so low that only 5% of people with it will go on to get prediabetes over their entire lifetime. I am all for recommending diet and exercise but medicalizing blood sugar to where the perfect is the enemy of the good is silly.
That's what groups are doing by recommending statins at age 30. They believe they are preventing disease in 50 years but the cost is real right now. Even 22,000,000 new people on medication for no known benefit - it is based solely on epidemiological correlation, only 4,366 people in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Epidemiology without science is why some believe vaccines cause autism since 1998, or that weedkillers can cause cancer since 2017 - and will make real medicine even less affordable. Healthcare premiums have gone up even higher than hospital services.
“Observational evidence suggests the longer people are exposed to high levels of inflammatory cholesterol molecules, the greater their downstream risks of heart attacks and strokes are."
This is why you were told not to eat eggs but to use seed oils. Yet now activists say just the opposite.
Age is the risk you cannot control. Telling doctors to stop recommending lifestyle changes and start pushing statins on people who government says are just barely able to be off their mom's health insurance isn't medically indicated, and it is expensive, flawed policy.
Citation: Anderson TS, Wilson LM, Sussman JB. Implications of the 2026 Dyslipidemia Guideline for Primary Prevention Statin Therapy. JAMA. Published online July 20, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2026.11246
NOTES:
(1) Mark Perry at AEI did an updated chart. This always sends socialists into a panic, because if people have agency they don't need centralized elites to save them.
If government did not control healthcare (up 240%) and spend $5 billion convincing young people unlimited student loans would pay off (college tuition up 180% since 2000 - but 18X above the rate of inflation since Congress made student loans unlimited) our lives would be even better compared to the Clinton years.
(2) Needles and epinephrine have been well understood for 100 years, there is no reason FDA should treat every competitor to Mylan like they are claiming to cure cancer. Then with its wild profits, wrapped in the flag of 'we're generic', they scaremonger mothers of kids with allergies into demanding every business have EpiPens available. Which then expire unused and must be replaced.
(3) Which has led to diabetes patients paying more for drugs they need, so people who get a pre-diabetes diagnosis can crash diet.
