Last week, almost immediately after Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s swearing-in as secretary of health and human services (HHS), Donald Trump established an interagency commission to follow through on his promise to “Make America Healthy Again.” This holistic approach to solving the country’s chronic disease epidemic is the only way to reverse it.
Carrying the same name as the slogan, the commission’s goal is to focus the country’s ever-expanding health care resources on ending chronic disease, with the ultimate goal of significantly reducing health care spending. The United States spends more on health care than any other wealthy country. According to Statista, annual health expenditures stood at over $4.4 trillion in 2022, and personal health care expenditures equaled $11,197 per resident. Roughly 90 percent of that number goes toward treating chronic disease and mental health problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Making this country healthy will require much more than HHS resources alone. According to the executive order, the commission will include representatives from more than a dozen agencies. Some, such as the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and HHS, are obvious considering that one of the greatest contributors to good health is proper diet and nutrition.
Food policy is a shared responsibility of several different agencies. While the USDA regulates farming practices and the quality of the food being produced (for example, USDA might chart the trend of fruits and vegetables becoming less nutritionally dense than they were 50 years ago), the additives and preservatives used by food manufacturers are in the domain of the Food and Drug Administration. And while SNAP (formerly called the Food Stamps Program) is overseen by the USDA, the CDC is responsible for infectious disease research and response and works with state and local health departments to improve food safety. This splintered and rather confusing approach to food policy might be worthy of the commission’s time as well.
However, Trump also included non-health-specific agencies and offices, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Education, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. This demonstrates President Trump’s dedication to a holistic, comprehensive approach to health and his understanding that if we are going to make America healthy and great again, we need to consider that true health is more than merely the absence of disease. Poor health also has much further reaching consequences than pant sizes or even health care costs. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
