Richard H. Hughes, IV, and Ada Peters, attorneys in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, co-authored an article in Health Affairs, titled “A MAHA Check-Up: Is the United States Getting Healthier?”
Following is an excerpt:
Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entered the second Trump administration with the bold objective to Make America Healthy Again. The “MAHA” movement has had remarkable political resonance but an inherently misleading message. In many ways, Americans were becoming progressively healthy in the decades, even century, leading up to his tenure, exemplified by dramatic reductions in smoking and infectious disease, safer food and water systems, increased life expectancy, and improved access to evidence-based preventive care.
These advancements were made possible through deliberate medical innovation and policy interventions motivated by public health challenges endured by generations past. Nevertheless, Secretary Kennedy is right to bring a new wave of attention to chronic disease. More than 60 percent of US adults and 30 percent of children have at least one chronic condition, 90 percent of the nation’s $4.9 trillion in annual health care expenditures are allocated to patients with chronic and mental health conditions, and half of the leading causes of death are connected to treatable and preventable chronic diseases.
Secretary Kennedy’s focus on chronic disease has been a rare and welcomed window for bipartisan consensus and has the potential to result in meaningful policy change. Nearly 300 days after taking office, he is under scrutiny for threatening decades of progress around vaccines, disregarding evidence-based decision making and democratic accountability, and radical untransparency. Temporarily tabling those concerns, there is a need to examine the merits of his approach to curb the chronic disease epidemic and identify if his concern for the US’s metabolic health is more signal or noise.
