The Future of Health in America

Let's bring in our guest. Dr. Marty McCary, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Meas, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and National Institutes of Health Director, Dr. Jay Badacharia. Thank you all for being here. Mr. Secretary, this is unique in that you work with all these guys very closely, and it's a different scenario for HHS. Yeah, I actually had Tommy Thompson in this morning talking to me. who is uh HHS who had my job under the Bush administration and I was talking about my relationship with these gentlemen who are running the agency running the major sub agencies of HHS and he said that nothing like that had ever happened in history. I say that I talk to them typically about two or three times a day that we're friends. We go to lunch together. Uh we stay at each other's homes. um we vacation together and uh and then you know we're aligned on in our vision friendship is is based upon shared values and that's the strongest bond that holds people together and in this we all share a vision that's been a lifelong vision for all of us which is which is to to make our country healthy to have evidence-based science to have gold standard replicable science and then do the and then use that to challenge what we have the the this kind of bedrock system that is destroying our health which is a complete misalignment of economic incentives and public health. I we yesterday we met with the heads of all the pharmaceutical companies and I said I want to live in a place where you can make money by making people healthy and right now we're all aligned against each other. the this the health care system in this country is a bundle of perverse incentives that that force people to do the wrong thing and we've turned this country into a sick care system rather than a health care system and all these people are the people who are going to change that. I know you all have a lot of balls in the air but I'd love to go down the row and just talk about the big thing that each of you are dealing with working on first FDA Marty. Well, um, first of all, we want to focus the agency on cures and meaningful treatments. Uh, the in the last administration, the number one priority the commissioner stated was fighting misinformation and the DEI staff ballooned out. We want to focus on cures and meaningful treatments. We believe in the letter and the spirit of right to try and there's amazing stuff in the pipeline. I've seen and we're talking about new treatments for stage 4 cancers, for neurog degenerative disorders, for diabetes that we've never seen before. Why does it take 10 years on average for drugs to come to market? Why are we blaming children for being sick and not looking at our food supply? Why are we thinking it's a willpower problem as we watch half of our nation's children with belly pain or attention deficit disorder on medications? and can we use common sense and gold standard science both? And that's the charge that we have from Secretary Kennedy. You've also obviously done the dyes recently and we we covered that extensively. There's this question about um vapes coming over from China and that they're really pervasive in our country and and kids with like video games and getting vapes and they're dangerous. That falls under FDA. Yeah, it does. These are devices that are designed to get kids addictive to playing a video game. And there's an inhalation port in the device. They're showing up at our borders. And what we have been doing is just sending them back. And so the Chinese manufacturers are just sending it to another port. It's called port shopping. And they all get in. They're laughing at us. So that's going to stop in this administration. We're not going to allow these devices to get in. We're going to confiscate them. Memit, um there's a lot of focus on Medicaid and Medicare and it it gets demagogued all the time that you're coming after it, that you're going to kill it, that you're going to cut it. What do you say to all that? Our goal is to put health back in health and human services. And under Secretary Kennedy, and that's why we're all here. We're laser focused on the broader picture, the more holistic picture. In the back of this wonderful theater that we're recording in now, there's a quote from Hubert Humphrey. The building is named after him. He's Democrat. And he said it's the moral obligation of government to take care of those of us at the very dawn of our lives, children at the twilight of our life, the elderly and those living in the shadows. That's our focus. It's quality of care at all levels. And we're working together to make sure that happens in every single scenario that we're looking at. We are increasing payment in Medicaid, putting more money in the Medicaid, increasing increasing. So the question is how do you spend that money so efficiently that you stop throwing money at problems but actually deal with the broader health needs addressing the fundamental reality that 70% of the money that CMS spends that's what Medicare Medicaid the exchanges chip 70% of the money we spend is on chronic illness and we're not getting our money's worth. So for folks listening right now it's your patriotic duty to be as healthy as you can and it's our job to help you get there make it easy to do the right things. At the same time, we've got to make wise decisions because we're stewards in order that who have to protect the money for the population that Hubert Humphrey described. Fiscal year 2024, largest percentage of improper payments, 54 billion in Medicare, 31 billion, Medicaid, earned income tax credit was 15, SNAP was 10.5. But I mean, you're looking at 845 million in improper payments. Billion billion. That's an underestimate. Yeah. Here's the thing. We have a war room now. a war room to fight back against adversaries. And these aren't just small-time players. These are foreign governments weaponized organized crime. And why are they coming after us? Because our budget is nearly $2 trillion if you include the monies that are spent that we direct but sometimes don't come out of our pocketbooks. But the direct budget just for CMS is $1.75 trillion. That's twice the defense budget. So there's a big target on our back and folks are coming after it. And there the kinds of things that shouldn't make you mad. It's USA ID on steroids. Frankly, I give you a couple examples. Almost a quarter million Americans found out by surprise because they got an IRS notice that they had gotten the Affordable Care Act insurance without knowing it. Why would you sign someone up without telling them they have insurance? Because brokers can steal the money. We have hundreds of millions of dollars spent on housekeeping. We have tens of millions of dollars spent on public unions getting free child care or student tuition or DEI programs. I'm have an obligation, all of us do, to protect the people that Humphrey was speaking about. And if we're not going to protect the most vulnerable, that's who they're stealing money from, then we're not doing our job. So, we're going after, there's a new sheriff in town, and we're coming after folks in a very big way. NIH uh always looking to the next thing. Uh but there are people concerned that that funding is drying up in the in the president's budget. Um FDA is spared, but there's 33.3 billion cut from HHS, 18 billion from NIH, 674 million from CMS. Does that affect you and how do you you portray that about what NIH is doing? I mean, I think the the the key fact I look at for NIH is that in uh the mission of the NIH is supposed to is to improve do research that improves the health and longevity of the American people and since 2012, we've seen no increase in life expectancy in this country. Uh in that sense, the NIH has not done its mission over the last dozen years. Um and and in fact, NIH uh was involved in supporting research that may have actually led to the pandemic that we all just went through. Uh so we we'll speak to that for a second. Gain of function just signed this executive order the other day in the Oval Office. U what does that mean to the average person? You can stop it on the US side, but obviously it's happening around the world. The US is the primary state that sets the example for how to do this kind of work around the world. When the US says, "Look, we're not going to allow scientists to to play God, take viruses with with with cockami justifications, make them more transmissible, more deadly." That doesn't protect us against anybody. And it and it causes tremendous risk. And what the president did by signing this order is he said, "No more. We're not going to have another lab generated pandemic on on on my watch." the surgeon general nominee. It was supposed to be a hearing today on Capitol Hill. Uh Dr. Neshwa was pulled. Um she's heading here to the HHS. What happened with all that? What happened with her withdrawal? We uh we talked to Dr. Neshwad. She is going to we're going to put her at a very good place here at HHS. Um, Casey means we felt was the best person to really bring the vision of Maha to the American public. She has a this unique capacity to articulate it. She's written a book that really mobilized, galvanized the movement. She uh is an extraordinary uh she she is she is excellence in everything that she's ever done. Obviously, she's come under her own criticism about u some of the things she's advocated for. She never finished her residency and she doesn't currently have an active medical license, but that's not she was the top of her the very top of her medical class at Stanford. She is in every during her residency, she won every award that she could want. She walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients. She couldn't get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness. and she said, "If we're really going to heal people if we're healers, we can't just be making our life about building new procedures, we actually have to figure out new approaches to medicine." And that's the kind of leadership that she's going to bring to our country. And last thing on this, your your former running mate weighed in today saying that she wasn't happy about this and said that you're somehow being controlled. U your decisions are being controlled. That's what she she posted. Listen, you got sitting here four people who were all cancelled during co Yeah. Right. of these people are, you know, you've got an the entire leadership of this agency is renegades who are who are, you know, who are juggernauts against convention and who are trying to look for truth no matter what the cost. So, nobody's control is among those. Gentlemen, stand by if you would. We'll be right back to the HHS department after this. [Music] [Music] Welcome back to the HHS department. We are talking maja with the leaders of the health movement at HHS. Mr. Secretary, uh estimated 129 million people in the US have at least one major chronic disease. Five of the top 10 leading causes of death in the US are or strongly associated with chronic diseases. If you go down these stats as we put them up, we're not healthy as a country. 100 days in, do we have a sense more of why that is? We're about to publish the MAHA commission report and and that comes out next week and that will uh that will summarize the and distill the science that we have that points to causation and in many many cases we know what the cause is. Too much sugar, too much starch, ultrarocessed foods. When my uncle was president and I was a 10-year-old boy, Bren, the the chronic disease rate in our country was 3%. Today it's around 60% in kids. Juvenile diabetes was practically unknown. Today 38% of American teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic. Autism in 1970 was you know the the most comprehensive and largest u uh epidemiological study ever done was done in this country to determine precisely how many kids had autism. At that time it was less than one in 10,000. Today CDC's data that we released last week, one in 31. In California, it's one in every 20 children, one in every 12.5 boys. This is a thousand times worse than co this this epidemic. And we nobody's done anything to even to try to identify what the ideology, what the causes are. We're doing that. Jay is doing that now. We will know these answers very quickly. How soon do you think? Well, because that's a big thing for a lot of parents. We will have definitive answers within a year, but we will have very good answers within six months, by September. We'll have preliminary answers by them from some of these early studies. Uh we will have definitive answers within a year. And and but for but some of the stuff we don't need to we don't need any more science. We don't need more commissions. We don't need more study groups. We need to act. We need to reduce the amount of sugar in our food. We need to reduce the amount of chemicals. We're already We've already ordered that all the dyes, the nine petroleum based synthetic diets, we're getting rid of within two years, the worst two within two months. So, we're acting in this administration and we're going to get we're going to identify the things that we can't get rid of. we're going to label so that when you go into the grocery store to buy food for your children, you know what you're giving them and you know whether it's going to be good for them or whether it's a foodlike substance that is loaded with lab created chemicals that's going to poison your children. All of you have now been in the belly of the beast now for a little bit. Uh breaking or changing a bureaucracy is a massive thing, right? I mean it's hard. It it's hard and but we're up for hard work. And I think one big surprise I had that I didn't expect was just how the incredible chemistry that we've developed as friends has enabled us to be very effective. For example, uh Jay and I launched a massive program to reduce animal testing both in research and uh before drug approvals. Uh Dr. Oz and I have been working on a way that Medicare can pay for something the second the FDA approves a breakthrough device. So they don't have to go through their own repeat duplicative approval process for for a year. They're important issues. We got a debate and we've got good solutions. But the health of the population is the core issue that we've not been talking about. If we had another pandemic, would we do the same thing? Would it be completely different? How would it be different? We do science. We do evidence-based medicine. CDC knew how to do this. And WHO, they knew there were manuals on how to do it, but they just threw those manuals out of the window. And they did a politicized version of science that was designed to serve certain vested interests. Uh economic interest and power centers in the society. And we had a complete information chaos. And that is the good information is the basis of managing any pandemic. And we're going to make sure the next time that that happens that we have gold standard information. We have complete transparency so the public can ask us questions and then we can make answers. And above all, we are going to get rid of the taboos about about challenging orthodoxies, about challenging consensus. And and we're telling the public every day, all of us that is not science. You know, your whole industry was telling the public for years, trust the experts. Trust the experts is not a function of science or democracy. as a function of totalitarianism and religion. You testified on Capitol Hill that you're not antivaccine, but you do have concerns about mRNA and you want to move forward with figuring out what that's going to look like in the future. We're going to do uh peer-reviewed we're going to do place controlled studies on all new medications and all new technologies. That's what we should have been doing all along. We need to understand the risk and the benefits of these products and we need to be the American public cannot have informed consent which is a key feature of democracy if they don't have if they don't have good knowledge about the risk and benefits of the products they're they're you want to weigh in on yeah can I follow up on on this uh one of the main problems during the pandemic was censorship free speech is absolutely essential for scientific progress free speech if if we had had it during the pandemic, we would have had much better outcomes. Uh so when Secretary Kennedy says that we're going to have gold standard science, the the the bottom uh what what holds that up is free speech. Um and when Secretary Kennedy talks about the taboos in science, he's absolutely right. I I as a scientist, I don't know what what causes autism to rise. I read the scientific literature and it it just looks like people haven't really asked the question in a in a deep and honest way. What we're going to do is we're going to shatter that that taboo so that people can ask the question honestly so I could look at the scientific literature and give give an answer um uh at least that's grounded in truth. Uh it's it's um you saw during the pandemic it was taboo to say certain things right you you couldn't say that if you had COVID and recovered you'd have some immunity for instance those kind of taboos are anathema to scientific progress and in this administration under Secretary Kennedy's uh leadership and President Trump's leadership we are not going to have those taboos we're going to have free speech in science and free speech in medicine. Gentlemen stand by again if you would. We'll be right back with special [Music] report. Welcome back to the HHS department. Continuing our interview with the leaders of this effort. Let me go down the road here. What's one thing for people sitting at home um in the near future that uh you think of from a health perspective they should focus on for what you all are doing because it's an uphill battle? Well, I think u this is something that that most people don't know about that the NIH has been doing. We've been working with Vice President Vance to look at a study of and and to find answers for people affected in East Palestine by that that train disaster that happened during the B administration. Uh it was shockingly we the NIH had not asked that question. Um but what what what I'm looking forward to is that we're going to address the health questions and the health needs of the American people with excellent gold standard research. It is your patriotic duty to be healthy. It's a hell of a lot more fun than being sick as well. And I say that because threearters of our youth cannot serve in the military because they don't pass fitness standards. And we've got a massive budget that is driven primarily because we're overweight. 43% of us overweight. That's more than twice what European countries can boast and it's almost 10 times what Japan is. So we got to do this together. We've believed in empowering patients with good information. And so one of the big barriers in health is that the government put out maybe one of the biggest pieces of misinformation in the history of healthcare and that is a flawed food pyramid written by the industry. And so one of our tasks at the FDA that uh Secretary Kennedy has has given us is to rewrite that uh guidance and that MAHA report coming out uh soon is going to have a lot of the new information. TV commercials you where are you on that? Uh we uh we don't think and I you know I met with pharmaceutical companies yesterday and had a very frank discussion with them about ways to limit TV commercials. When you advertise a pharmaceutical product, it's the government that is most likely going to pay for that product. You're advertising products that people aren't going to pay for it, but they're going to go buy it. And you get a tax deduction to put that ad on TV. So, the federal taxpayer is paying for the I don't, you know, for the ad than they're paying for the product. And we use more. We use 70% of the pharmaceutical products in the world are sold to our country. We only have 4.2% of the world's population. We are the sickest country in the world and pharmaceutical products are the number three cause of death after cancer and heart attacks. So all that advertising, we're the only nation in the world that allows that kind of advertising on TV. We're a complete outlier. There's one other country, New Zealand, that allows limited but nothing like what we do. But you've talked about environmental toxins before. You think it's a real problem? If we are going to protect ourselves against chronic disease, we've got to find out the ideology, the origins of it, the the environmental exposures that are causing it and then we have to eliminate them and that's what we're doing and we can do it and we're going to do it and we're going to do it in four years. Pretty amazing. Well, when you have all those breakthroughs that you're talking about, please come back and talk to us again. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brad. Up next, Secretary Kennedy takes us for a behind-the-scenes tour of the HHS operations center. The Hubert H. Humphrey building was completed in 1976. It was actually first called the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1977, it was named for the former vice president and Minnesota senator. It's actually the first person to have a federal building named in his honor that was living at the time. 1979, they took the education part out. HHS has been here ever since. Special report continues. After [Music] this tonight, a look inside the HHS secretary's operations center with the man himself. All right, Mr. Secretary, this is the operations center. Yeah, this is the secretary's incident operation center and this is where we track, you know, any kind of incident. Could be hurricanes. It could be chemical spills. It could be um a measel outbreak, which is what they're tracking right now. Let's go around this way. These are your guys at the uh How are you? Good to see you. Welcome, sir. Good to see you. Thank you. So, any incidents that are happening real time, it's put up on the uh screens here. Yeah. And it allows us to to visualize it and to you know it it helps us better to mobilize resources to uh whether it's pandemic response team or whether it's chemical response or any kind of emergency to look at the assets that we have in that area and get them to the site as quickly as we can. So measles is at 980 I guess confirmed cases today. Uh, I mean, I'm very proud of CDC's management of the measles pandemic. We're mainly is in 22 states, but most of it's been in Texas and New Mexico. We're working with the governors at their request to both states. We have teams in both states doing uh epidemic response. Um but we have seen the uh the the growth in numbers steadily decline and the serious of this of the cases also decline. If you look at our country, if you look on this map, we have about 940 cases. Canada which has 1/8 of our population has,00 cases. Um Europe has over 6,000 cases. They're twice our population, but they have seven times the amount of cases that we do. And Mexico has uh has pretty much the same amount we do. So, we're been we've been doing the CDC has been doing an excellent job on the ground at getting this outbreak under control. And so, what's your message to the folks who are dealing with that, especially in Texas? Well, you know, in Texas, a lot of the people who are affected are the Menanites who are unvaccinated and measles is going to spread through an unvaccinated population. We tell people you should get your vaccination because that's what's going to stop the measles outbreak, but we also understand that some people don't do that. The MMR vaccine that we currently use has over has millions of particles from um were created from aborted fetal tissue, millions of DNA fragments. And there are people who have religious objections toward those and those people should be treated with compassion. If they come to a hospital and they're sick, we need to know how to treat them. And one of the failures of the CDC in the past is they weren't telling doctors no kid should die of measles in this country. Even in 1963 before the introduction of the vaccine there were 400 deaths a year and there were up to two million measles cases. So it's only very very sick kids should die from these. Nobody should. There's some were saying that the rebella portion of the vaccine and you were talking about the produced from the fetal cell line originated from an abortion that took place in the 60s but the MMR vaccine doesn't contain the cells in its final form. It doesn't contain cells but they it contains DNA fragments. Got it. Got it. And so that's your point. Yeah. So and people have religious objections to that. And although I might not share those objections, I I respect them and I think those people, you know, a lot of the men and I said told me and I went down there and spent time with the community during the outbreak and they said they didn't want to go to the hospital because they were treated as pariah. They said we were treated like lepers there and that should not be part of American healthcare. If somebody comes in, if they have religious objection, we should still be treating them. And your big point is a choice. a choice for people to make, informed choice. Exactly. And that whatever your choice is, you're human. You're entitled to compassion. You're entitled to the best quality healthcare. And nobody should die at measles. Let me ask you one more thing, not on these topics. Today, 60,000 more files came out about your dad's assassination, and there's obviously thousands of files about your uncles. Do you think that that has come out fast enough? Are you okay with what has happened transpired with all of that? I mean, I think President Trump has done an excellent job. This is stuff that was supposed to be released in at the latest in 2018 and it was held year after year after year. Um, and you know, the fact that he's finally releasing it, I think is is gives us all a chance to have a new beginning in our country because that was really a crossroad when our country um sort of walked down the road that President Eisenhower had warned us about about becoming a a a an instrument of the military-industrial complex. And and if we want to walk that back and reclaim America's initial ideals, um the it has to begin with total honesty. Do you think we'll ever know? I mean, we're digging through these files today now, but do you think we're ever going to know on both cases? We know a lot about my uncle step. So that's been very well documented. There's probably 30, you know, confessions. There are people who were involved in it. We know a lot less about my dad's death. There are uh you know there are there's all kinds of circumstantial evidence that there was US government involvement. There's not the kind of proof that we have now with President Kennedy's death. We'll keep looking. Mr. Secretary, we appreciate this day. Thanks for the tour. Thanks for having me, Brad. I appreciate it. Up next, some final thoughts from here at HHS, plus a big announcement. [Music]