Transcript: HHS Secretary RFK Jr. Remarks At National Governors Association Summer Meeting

For years, Republicans and Democrats have been talking about how to reorganize the health care system. Whether it should be private insurance, whether it be single payer or a public private hybrid. But all of those ideas are like moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. The ship is going down. The only way that we solve this problem is by ending the chronic disease epidemic.

We’re seeing now these extraordinary initiatives from the states to do that. In Tennessee, you’ve got cell phone regulations in the schools, which are really, really important. You’ve applied for a SNAP waiver. And this is something that I would urge every governor to do.

We spend $405 million a day on food stamps. 18% of that goes to soda and candy. So we are giving this population, the poorest population in our country, diabetes. And we’re paying for it again at Medicaid. If you want to drink a Coke, you’re in America, you ought to be able to drink one. You can make that choice. The federal taxpayers should not be paying for it. And if you’re doing that, it looks like cheap food, but bad food is not cheap. It’s much more expensive in the long run.

The Mental Health Crisis

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: You mentioned cell phones. Can you talk a little bit about the mental health crisis explosion that we’ve seen? I know many, many of us have read the book “The Anxious Generation.” But aside from one book, just the data itself that shows the rise, particularly in young people, of anxiety and depression and suicide. And it’s not just in America, it’s globally. Talk a little bit about that.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, we have a malaise in this country. We have a spiritual. We have a chronic disease and we have a spiritual crisis as well. And we have a generation that is purposeless, that is plagued by dispossession, by alienation, and the highest suicide rates in history, alcoholism, addiction.

Two years ago, we lost 106,000 kids to fentanyl overdose. I lost my niece. My brother died of a drug overdose. All of our families are touched by it. And it’s all an emblem of. It’s all a feature of a symptom of dispossession, of a lack of connection to community.

Addiction is about isolation. It is a disease of isolation. It’s of losing your connection to other human beings. And this generation is under assault. And I would say the primary drivers of it are social media, cell phones.

Cell Phone Restrictions in Schools

It’s so important to do these. So many states now are doing these bell to bell restrictions, or at least requiring that every school district have a cell phone plan so you don’t have to nanny manage them. You can say, “there’s something you have to think about, you have to come up with.”

In Virginia, they have bell to bell restrictions. The kids keep their cell phone in their backpack, so if their mom calls them, if their mom needs to get in touch with them, she calls the principal and then he can use her cell phone.

Initially, when the schools do this, there’s tremendous resistance among the student population. But in all the many schools I’ve visited, very, very quickly, the students begin embracing it. And you go to, you know, in Loudoun County, Virginia, I went into an auditorium, a cafeteria with almost as many people in it, and the kids are all talking to each other. They’re on the playground talking to each other. They’re not looking in their laps on a cell phone.

And when I polled the students, 99% of them said it was a good idea. So they embrace it in the long run. The parents told me that the kids now don’t use cell phones when they’re driving because they understand they don’t. They’re not attached to it at the dinner table. They put their cell phones aside and they have conversations. And that’s the beginning of restoring these bonds of community.

The Gut-Brain Connection

The other contributor is food. There’s an entire emerging body of science that links microbiome to mental health, what they call the gut brain connection. And there’s these extraordinary studies that have been done in prisons and juvenile detention facilities where they change the food. You can go on Google and look this up. There’s dozens and dozens of studies, and the results are extraordinary.

In one juvenile detention facility, and this is pretty typical, the suicide rates went down by 100%. The use of restraints went down by 75%.

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: When they just changed the diet.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: When they just changed the diet. There’s a professor at Harvard who is curing schizophrenia with dietary changes, about 70% of diabetes. You can lose the diagnosis by changing your diet. And, you know, one of the things that we’re urging, and violence went down in prisons by 47%.

New Dietary Guidelines and School Programs

So one of the things that we’re urging governors to do is to look at these areas and to do what they can to start changing the diets in the schools, changing, getting the food dyes out that we know affect behavior and changing the school lunch programs.

When I came into office, we inherited dietary guidelines that were 453 pages long. They were incomprehensible. They were driven by the same commercial impulses that drove Fruit Loops to the top of the food pyramid.

And we are going to issue by December, but we’re probably going to get them out at the end of October. Myself and Brooker Ollins, new dietary guidelines that are common sense that stress the need to eat saturated fats of dairy, of good meat, of fresh meat and vegetables and try to drive and that when we release those, it will give everybody the rationale for driving it into our schools. It will change diets and prison populations in the military and elsewhere. It’s a new opportunity to reboot and change the diets in our schools.

State-Level SNAP Waivers

So that’s, I think, one of the really important things that the governors can do. I encourage all of you to apply for SNAP waivers. Some of the states, most of the states are doing soda and that’s the easiest one to do. Some of the states, Jeff Landry down in Louisiana did candy as well. Some of the other states are doing that.

Some of the states are looking at getting rid of junk food and ultra processed food. California actually has a very, very good bill right now that’s going through the legislature. It gives a very good definition of ultra processed foods.

And so, you know, there’s opportunities now for all of us to live up to our obligation to our children and really give them a chance in life and change not only their physical health but also their mental health.

Measuring Success Through Data

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: Are there things we can do? I think about you make a change, you’ve got to be able to measure it. We have health data. How are you expecting to as you implement changes to measure those? And how can states be helpful in that process? Data, data, information sharing. I mean, data is going to drive and it’s going to substantiate what we have done. It’s going to prove or disprove an initiative that we might implement. Do you have thoughts or ideas about how states can work?

Data Sharing and Outcome-Based Medicine

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, one of the things that was really exposed, there’s two questions there is how do we do outcome based medicine instead of fee for services medicine, which gives everybody the incentive to keep Americans sick, the sicker the population, the more tests that can be awarded, the more money is made by doctors, by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers.

And so we need to. Right now, the biggest issue is that this misalignment between incentives and outcomes, if we want to have a healthy population, we need to reassign. We need to realign those incentives so that people can make money. Doctors, hospitals, et cetera, by making people healthy rather than charging for services. We’re trying to do that at every level of government.

Information Chaos and Data Silos

We’re changing. One of the things we saw during COVID was this information chaos that the medical establishment and the government was not able to provide good data to people. One of the things that I found since I came in was that one of the big problems at HHS is it is siloed and that there is no sharing of data. And we’re changing that. We’re changing it very rapidly.

There are agencies within CMS that sell their data to FDA, NIH, and CDC. This is true across the agency. So there is no sharing of data. One of the other things that I’ve learned is that a lot of the data you can’t really do longitudinal studies on because most of it is through insurance. And none of the insurance companies has long enrollment periods. The average enrollment period may be two years. And you’re not able to see. You’re not able to look at the potential environmental injury and then follow that patient for a long period of time.

Medicaid Data and State Partnerships

The only system that really has that is Medicaid. Medicaid follows people for 10 years, from zero to 18. It is the highest quality data that we have, but we don’t control it at HHS. It’s controlled by the states, and we’re now making agreements with the states. I talked with Governor Stitt about this last week, and he’s very generously offered to give us his data. Jeff Landry’s giving us his data. Indiana Mike is giving his data to us. Mike Braun.

And what we’re going to do is depersonalize that data, put it on a public database, and allow independent scientists to actually study it and research it. And that is going to enable you to do more targeted treatment in your state. So there’s a huge advantage in the state doing this.

And then we can also have the advantages of these giant data systems that will really allow us to look across the landscape and say, “Do statins really work? Do SSRIs really work? Is Metformin better than GLPs? And what are the advantages if there’s five different GLP drugs or five different diabetes drugs?” Let’s look at the long term health outcomes of those and see which one of them has the lowest all cause mortality and the highest efficacy. And we can’t do that right now. We should be able to.

AI Integration at HHS

We are driving AI into our agency, I think faster and more efficiently than any agency in government. And we really want to make HHS the template and the utilization of AI and there’s so many great things that we can do with it with diagnostics, with prescriptions, with treatment, with telemedicine, et cetera. But we also can use it to really find out why people are getting sick and what makes people healthy.

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: We are pursuing that data sharing as well because I do think if we could target our own individual populations.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: With an understanding of that data.

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: So why don’t we open it up? We have a little bit of time left. And I know there are governors that want to ask questions. Kevin, you had a question earlier that you mentioned to me outside. You want to ask it here? Sure, absolutely.

Economic Impact of Health Improvements

KEVIN: First off, thank you so much for being here, Secretary Kennedy, and thanks for coming to Oklahoma. We had a great time. Oklahomans love you. And we also did the SNAP benefit waiver. And so we’re excited about making Oklahoma healthy again.

My question, you mentioned that there’s about a 1 trillion dollar cost in chronic disease. Do you have any stats when you get people healthy again, what it does to the economy? We had an economic update earlier about GDP rising at 1% this year in 25. But if you get them healthy again, not only the cost, but also what does that do with the workforce and getting people back healthy to engage in our workforce?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, you know, I went on a long hike with Dr. Oz this morning and he’s going to be talking to you tomorrow. But one of the, he showed me a data point of a study that they just finished that showed that if you could get every American to do a 15 minute walk a day, it would save the country $150 billion.

The Chronic Disease Crisis

The cost saving, you know, I said before, when my uncle was president, we spent zero on chronic disease. There were no treatments for it. The first pill that you took every day was the birth control pill. There weren’t any pills like that before that. There weren’t treatments. And you know the cause. We are spending this money.

And I’ll give you an example. During COVID we had 16% of the COVID deaths in our country. We only have 4.2% of the world’s population. If you ask CDC, “Why did so many Americans die? Why did Americans die at a rate of 3,000 per million population?” In Haiti, they were dying at 14 per million population. Nigeria, they were dying at 14 per million population. Across Africa was 320 per million population. So 1/10 of our death rate from COVID. Why is that?

And CDC will say that’s because Americans have such high levels of chronic disease. The highest chronic disease burden on earth. The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. So what was killing them? Was it COVID or was it the chronic disease? They were hanging by their fingernails at the edge of the cliff already and COVID came over and stamped on their fingers. But what’s really making it the real cause are not from COVID. The real cause and the cause.

Long-term Health Impacts

We have a kid who has diabetes. I mean, if a kid. COVID was killing. The average age of death from COVID was 84 years old. If you have a kid with autism, you have 75 years of life in front of them. And the cause of that, if we can stop the autism epidemic or dramatically reduce it, which I believe we’re going to do in my four years, we can, you know, the cost savings to our country will be astronomical.

And diabetes is the same. We start getting kids to stop drinking soda, stop eating junk food and start eating real food again, we’re going to see immediate cost savings. Because people with autism, there’s no cure. Diabetes, there’s a cure. You can cure diabetes with diet.

Medical Education Reform

And one of the things that we’re asking governors to do, if you have a medical school in your state, we’re asking you to pass a law. And these laws have passed in about six states so far. And they’re bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans. There’s no such thing as Democrat children or Republican children. They don’t face strong headwinds. It’s an easy law to pass to require medical schools in your state to give a mandatory nutrition class.

Doctors are not taught about nutrition. So when you come into the doctor’s office, he doesn’t know any more than you do about nutrition. And you know, he ought to be not. The first thing he does should not be to give a nine year old kid a GLP drug. In the long run, you know, if there’s no other choice, let’s do that. But let’s try diet and exercise first and let’s have a medical community that understands those things, and that’s their first reaction rather than giving you a drug.

And most of the medical schools do not have mandatory nutrition classes. And we need to do that. We’re going to, we’re incentivizing to do them, to do that at HHS. We’re getting them to develop really good curricula on that.

State-Federal Partnership on Food Industry Reform

But you know, one of the things I said to the governors yesterday is what you do is so critical to what I’m doing. We have 40% of the food industry that has now pledged to remove all dyes, all nine petroleum based synthetic dyes. They come to us and ask us and say, “We want to do this, we want your support, help us do this.”

They’re coming to me not because they’re scared of me. They’re coming because they’re scared of the governors, because they don’t want a patchwork of different regulations all across the country when they got a national product. When you push this legislation in your states, it enables me, it gives me leverage to these industries to change their behavior and to change the ingredients that they’re giving us.

Concerns About Public Health Infrastructure

JOSH: Secretary, thank you for the time yesterday, by the way. And if I may, to the surprise of probably everyone here, I want to really, really commend you on pesticide work. The sugar work is absolutely right on the mark. The processed food work will save lives for sure and save costs. And so to those points, thank you very much. I also think where some of our governors have asked questions about savings, this part of this 4 trillion dollar system, it absolutely will save a lot of resources. And we governors then will lean on you to reinvest it in good programs.

My question for you, humbly, is so right now a lot of the core public health infrastructure is in peril. I mean, there’s pretty deep cuts. And I know that that’s not all you, I get it. You have the presidency here. Oz does with you. So we’re seeing these big cuts and we are worried about health disparities in our states. You know, that is a very real problem for all of us.

What I’m worried about is the cuts could threaten, you know, rural health care. And it’s very real for all of our states, particularly middle America. And so I want to know what you’re feeling is like, how are we going to be able to change diets if we lose our capacity to have nutritionists? How are we going to be able to change the trajectory of processed foods if we are cutting SNAP and not given the flexibility to make those changes?

And again, I commend the work on sugar. We will do that in our state, too. How are we going to do these things if in health care, and I’m a health care provider, as you know, if the lowest hanging fruit falls away, like mental health care, because those are the disciplines that will get cut if there’s less resource available to us in our states. So just humbly, if we’re going to do these things which are very well thought out, how are we, if we have fewer pediatricians, going to give that advice, which you correctly say is essential? So how can you support us with all of your plans if we’re going to suffer these cuts?

Rural Health Transformation Initiative

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed our conversation yesterday. I’d start by saying this, and I told you this yesterday. I’m the secretary of HHS. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t cut anything in my department. There’s no Cabinet secretary, with the exception of maybe Linda McMahon. There’s nobody else, I think, in the Cabinet who wants to see any of their budgets cut.

We also support the president because I understand and I ran for two and a half years for president. And Americans are concerned about the budget deficit. We have a $34 trillion debt now. Within five years, 50% out of every dollar we collect in tax is going to go to servicing the debt; within 10 years that’s 100%. And we’re leaving this debt to our children, which is going to diminish their capacity to get health care and good food and all these other services. National debt is a social determinant of health.

And I admire the president because it’s not popular for any politician to cut, stop spending money that’s not his. And he is doing things that are very, very difficult and very controversial and looking down the road and doing something that all of us know has to be done, but none of us knows how to do it.

But having said that, he is particularly concerned about rural health. And I ran on that issue, and it’s probably the issue that I talked about to more senators about Democrat and Republican when I was going through my confirmation process. And one of the answers to that, I think it’s a really good one, is this provision for rural health transformation provision and the big beautiful bill. And Dr. Oz is going to be here, I think, today talking about that.

And it’s a $50 billion payment now and it’s going to improve rural health. This is a lot of money. It’s $10 billion a year for five years. Put that in perspective. We spend about 6, maybe 6 to 7% of our Medicaid budget on rural hospitals. That’s about $20 billion a year. So this is $10 billion a year and it’s going to go to rural health. So it’s not trivial. It’s going to raise the revenues of rural health care providers by 30% over the next five years.

Dr. Oz will talk about the details of that, but we’re going in. Every state will get money for it. Some will get more, some will get less. Depending on the quality of your application and your arguments. The money has to be spent by the end of this year. So it is on a very, very fast track. The applications have to be in by September. And it’s going to go for infrastructure improvements, for workforce improvements, for innovation, or all of these things that are holding rural hospitals back. And so it’s a big investment and it’s an emblem of my personal and our commitment, the President’s commitment to rural health.

JOSH: And I appreciate that because that’s why I proposed it to him. Okay, well, thank you. But, and it is going to help us. Incredibly, the question is in the, after the five years, and it’s, that is going to save us to a large degree. But after five years we’re going to have to continue to reassess because those monies could likely go away and the governors will worry about Medicaid. But I really do appreciate that.

And the last thing, forgive me for asking a second question, is you were saying about the future. Well, we just ballooned the deficit with the tax break. And so we’re going to have to come, we’re going to have to have kind of an existential moment sooner or later because if we did add this deficit while we made some theoretical long term cuts to our health care safety net, we’re probably going to need you and others to influence the President to either lower that debt or find a new mechanism to help our country.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: I mean, I deal with Roosevelt every day and, and he’s not, you know, he’s looking at more cuts and cuts that, you know, are not going to necessarily be popular within my agency and other agencies. So it’s a battle that we all have to continue fighting.

Addressing Peanut Allergies and Food Safety

JARED: I appreciate that you’re working on kind of finding out what’s causing some of these changes and whether it’s autism and some of the others. But there’s some that we basically know. And yet nothing still seems to change.

And this one you mentioned, peanuts. And it just drives me crazy. You know, in Israel, the kids all eat the Baba snacks and they have peanuts, and they have one tenth the peanut allergy rates that we do. Even the therapies for peanuts here, for peanut allergies here are like these $700 a month pills that basically have small doses of peanuts. I mean, the whole thing’s absurd. The pharmaceutical industry just packages up a teeny amount of peanut and sells it back to you for $700. I mean, we know that one. So why aren’t we fixing that already and making sure kids are getting exposure to peanuts at a young age, like I did and my parents did. And I mean, it just. It just sort of worries me that even when we know some of the others, nothing will happen.

So, like, at least some of the ones we know, why aren’t they fixed yet? And how can we fix them?

Research on Allergy Causes and Vaccine Connections

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We don’t really know what’s causing the peanut allergy epidemic hypothesis.

JARED: Look at the Israeli data, because, I mean, it’s one tenth of ours. And basically a very most popular kid snack is a peanut snack. And that’s what is generally accepted as the reason.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Just let me finish. That’s a correlation. It doesn’t prove causation. So we need good studies. And that is a hypothesis that’s a very popular one. There are no allergies in the Amish community in this country and eat peanuts any more than other Americans.

And, you know, I’ll just tell you my own anecdote. And this doesn’t prove causation. I have a son who had severe severe deadly anaphylactic peanut allergies. He made 22 emergency room visits before he was 2 years old because he’d go to a birthday party and eat a cake, and there was nuts in the cake or there had been nuts cooked in the pan that made the cake before.

And so I paired up with a guy with David Koch, who I was in litigation with at the time and who had a son who was born exactly the same time as my son and had the same level of peanut allergies. We started out a group called the Food Allergy initiative. We raised $100 million, and we poached the best allergy scientists from all over the world. We brought them to Mount Sinai in New York, and they had a laboratory that I visited where they would induce food allergies and other allergies in rats and feed them different things to try to try to find out what treated it.

And I asked the scientists there, “How do you induce an allergy in a rat?” And he said, “It’s formulaic. You take an aluminum adjuvant and inject it into that rat with a protein. If it’s a peanut protein, that rat will have a lifetime allergy to peanuts. If it’s a dairy protein, you’ll have a lifetime allergy to dairy. If it’s a latex protein, hell of a lifetime allergy to latex.” That’s the same aluminum adjuvant that’s in the hepatitis B vaccine we’re giving. And many of those vaccines contain peanut oil excipients.

We also there’s a study by scientists called, two scientists called Mawson and Cowlings, one of them from the University of Mississippi and one of them from Britain. And they looked at the same issue and they showed that it’s not only what’s in the shot when you give that injection, but also what’s in the ambient environment at the time. So that if there’s a Timothy weed outbreak at the time you get that injection, they found that you could have a lifetime allergy to Timothy weed. And vaccinated children, according to their study, are 30 times more likely to have allergic rhinitis and unvaccinated children.

So we need to look at the aluminum in the vaccines and see if we need to look much closer. We’re doing that today at NIH to see if that has anything to do with this explosion of allergies that began in 1989, which was the year they expanded the vaccine schedule. I just had. I mean, the only. I mean we obviously all the data, wherever the data leads us.

JARED: But in Israel, they do use the same epidemic to Hep B vaccines. And vaccines is they don’t use anywhere nearly as much and they don’t give them early in life.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: We give that hepatitis V vaccine during the first 24 hours of life. No other country in the world does that.

AHEAD Model Implementation

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: We’ll take one more. Wes, we are out of time, but let’s go ahead. You go ahead.

WES MOORE: Thanks so much, Governor, and I’ll be brief. And Mr. Secretary, thank you so much. And we’re thankful for the chance also work with you. As you know, Maryland was the, the first Democratic state to, to sign up for the prescription for the entre initiative, for the prescription for, for a healthy America. And we are working on a lot of things when it comes to chronic health, dealing with population health, nutrition, et cetera.

I do know one important component to that as, as well though is the the future of the AHEAD model, which we’re working on standing up. And I know if you think about Cohort 2, I believe Vermont and also, and also Hawaii are in, are in cohort too. So the question just how are you thinking about the, the future for the implementation and the standing up the, of the head model and what can we as governors do to be helpful with that?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: You know, I, I, those are evaluated case by case. And you, you’re going to have, you’re going to, you’re going to, you’re going to have Oz up here in a little while and he’s the one who’s going to make that judgment call on the Maryland system. But you know, we support waivers that are helping people. We’re encouraging states to become laboratories for innovation and for figuring out ways to deal with these big issues state by state. And, but he’ll be able to answer more particularly exactly what’s going on in Maryland.

Closing Remarks

GOVERNOR BILL LEE: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I was just thinking the people sitting around this table got into this job that we’ve gotten into because we care deeply about the people in our states. And we have decided to use our lives to impact their life for good.

We all share that same passion for our people. It’s the reason that we are serving to a person. And what I appreciate about you and your work is, I believe, and we see it in your passion and in your heart for the work that you’re doing. It’s because you care about this issue and you care about America and you want to lean into this in ways to challenge the status quo in ways that may change the trajectory of the health of this country forever. And for that, we are very grateful and honored that you came to join us today. So let us thank the Secretary.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Thank you very much.

Related Posts

• Mel Robbins Podcast: w/ Doctor Mike on Top Health Lies (Transcript)
• The Inner Child: Who Is It And Why We Need to Hear Them
• Bialik’s Breakdown: w/ Anita Moorjani (Transcript)
• Gut Microbiome Crisis w/ Dr. Trisha Pasricha @Mel Robbins Podcast (Transcript)
• Joe Rogan Podcast: #2476 with Shanna H. Swan (Transcript)