HHS is trying to change the "perverse incentives" in the medical system, including the way doctors are paid, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday.
"A lot of the negative behavior and self-destructive behavior in both the medical system -- how we pay for healthcare -- and how we eat is driven by perverse incentives," Kennedy said at a press conference at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. "Today, we have a healthcare system that reimburses doctors and hospitals for procedures rather than for health outcomes. We have to change that."
On another front, Kennedy also said that the CDC "has done a very good job at controlling the measles outbreak. We've had about 700 cases nationally and in Europe, they've had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths." That number contrasts with 2024, in which 285 measles cases were reported in the U.S. for the entire year, according to the CDC
"People get measles because they don't vaccinate. They get measles because the vaccine wanes -- the vaccine wanes about 4.8% per year, so you know that problem is always going to be around," he continued. "We need to also make sure that doctors know how to treat measles and how to treat the associated diseases, the pulmonary disease that often comes with measles, and [the] bacteriological [ones] -- we can't rely simply on the vaccine."
In contrast to Kennedy's remark, experts say that the measles vaccine provides lifelong immunity, which is how the U.S. achieved elimination status.
It's "outrageous" that the government doesn't have a better surveillance system for vaccine injuries, Kennedy said in response to a question from the audience -- which was not audible on the livestream -- that apparently raised the issue of a possible connection between vaccines and autism, a relationship that has been widely debunked
The CDC did a study on HHS's surveillance system, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System -- which allows for self-reporting of possible vaccine-associated injuries but does not verify them -- in 2010, "and [found that] it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries," he said, noting that at the time, the CDC had a "machine counting" system for such injuries but they "put it on a shelf."
"We are going to improve the surveillance," Kennedy said. "We're going to get the data sets from everybody we can. We're going to make data-sharing agreements with scientists all over the world, with the best scientists, and we're going to find out what contribution vaccines and everything else make -- mold, EMF [electromagnetic fields], food, all of these other exposures -- which one of those are the culprits? I suspect we're going to see that there's a lot of culprits, but we need to know."
"People don't have informed consent [for vaccination], and people don't trust our agency anymore," he added. "And the way to improve vaccination is to make the agency trustworthy, and that's what we're going to do."
Kennedy also touched on the chronic illness he sees in the younger generation. "This whole generation of kids is damaged by chronic disease," he said. "I walk through an airport, and I see these young people -- you can see the chronic inflammation. You can see the mitochondrial challenges that they're facing." He noted that the U.S. is the fourth most obese country in the world, "and we have people who are obese and are at the same time malnourished because the food they're eating is not nutrient-dense."
Also at the press conference, Indiana governor Mike Braun (R) announced the signing of several executive orders
on diet and health, including orders to:
- Ban the purchase of candy and soda with benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). One other state -- Arkansas -- has also asked the Agriculture Department for permission to ban those items.
- Change the work requirements for SNAP to make sure able-bodied recipients who aren't employed will get on a path to employment
- Make sure SNAP recipients who aren't eligible for the program are removed from the rolls
- Initiate a study of diet-related chronic illness
- Crack down on eligibility errors in Indiana's Medicaid program
- Pave the way for more direct-to-consumer sales of food from local Indiana farmers
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA, who also appeared at the press conference, applauded Braun's moves. Having nine executive orders to address issues favored by the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, which Kennedy supports, "I think that breaks the record," he said. "Moms know you win the battle for health in the home ... These executive orders make it easy for moms to do the right thing for their kids."
"My position as administrator of CMS is helping to ensure that the nation's health insurance programs create the right incentives, empower the right people, including especially patients, so they now feel like they own a piece of the rock, like they have agency over their future," Oz said.
He listed three ideas for improving the nation's health. "The first is walking," Oz said. "If every American walked for 20 minutes a day ... it would probably reduce our healthcare budget by about $100 billion."
Next was proper nutrition. "It turns out that the healthiest way to address food is to eat food that looks the way it looks coming out of the ground," he said. "That's why butter is better than hydrogenated oils, because it doesn't matter if butter might cause other issues -- it's real food. Your body knows what to do with it."
And last was increasing community involvement. "The number one driver of an expensive patient is a patient without another person in their life," he said. "Loneliness ends up driving a lot of the pathology that we then have to deal with in the healthcare system. The way you deal with that is by having community groups that work together well."
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/115141
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