The real goal of ‘Make America Healthy Again’? Woo-woo treatments for the rich, shrinking healthcare for the poor

[umbertino]

 

A new coterie of advisers around Robert F Kennedy Jr is shaping the US’s already exclusionary health system for the worse

 

 

Mon 6 Oct 2025 08.00 BST

Alexander Avila

 

 

In Donald Trump’s second administration, the US’s health agenda has taken a new shape in the form of a populist movement known as Make America Healthy Again, or Maha. So far, its central figurehead, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr) has cancelled $500m of vaccine research, fired thousands of health agency workers and promoted an unsubstantiated link between Tylenol and autism.

 

But what underlying vision ties the Maha project together?

 

Its fundamental claims are simple: Americans suffer from a chronic disease epidemic fuelled by corrupt incentives in the medical, food and pharmaceutical industries. But what starts as a reasonable, even compelling, complaint about corruption quickly devolves into a mistrust of vaccines, health institutions and mainstream medical treatments.

 

What further separates Maha from other health movements is its larger cultural and social critique: a belief that the “ills” of modernity – its vaccines, artificial foods and environmental toxins – are symptoms of a social and spiritual decay that must be countered with a health-conscious conservative lifestyle. Maha’s clean anti-establishment message has gone on to attract a diverse coalition of concerned mothers, wellness influencers, conspiratorial hippies, culture warriors, health food CEOs, conservative social critics and alternative medicine practitioners.

 

One of the movement’s central architects is Calley Means, current special government employee at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and direct advisor to RFK Jr. A close friend of Kennedy’s, he was the visionary who first connected RFK Jr to Trump after recognising a politically powerful overlap in their populist messages. Calley’s own political debut came in 2024, when he and his sister, Casey Means, co-authored the bestselling health and wellness book Good Energy and promoted it to right-leaning audiences on The Tucker Carlson Show and The Joe Rogan Experience. Together, the Means siblings built and spread the Maha message to millions of rightwing listeners.

 

The siblings pair their work with a carefully calibrated backstory: Calley tells stories of corruption from his time as a former lobbyist for the food and pharmaceutical industry. Casey, a Stanford-trained physician, retired from the medical profession feeling disillusioned with its profit-driven and overspecialised approach to health. They tout their “former insider” status as proof of their populist credentials, a strategy so effective that it landed them insider positions in the Trump administration: as previously mentioned, Calley as an adviser at the US health department and Casey as Trump’s nominee for surgeon general. The siblings are set to become some of the most powerful figures in American health.

 

But if you, as Maha evangelists say, “do your own research”, you’ll find that Vanity Fair reported that Calley Means has never registered as a lobbyist in the US and that former employers dispute him ever having worked for food and pharmaceutical clients. In response, Calley Means said: “I stand by everything I’ve said.” Meanwhile, in the LA Times and Vanity Fair, Casey’s former colleagues have suggested that her departure from medicine was motivated more by stress than disillusionment. But perhaps misrepresenting parts of your backstory is simply a part of the growing pains of building a new political movement. So, what do these public health newcomers offer in terms of concrete policy?

 

In interviews, Calley often repeats a rhetorical question: why should we work to increase healthcare access if we know that the system is broken? Instead, he argues, Americans should focus on holistic “root causes” of ill health, which is why he co-founded Truemed, a platform connecting tax-free health savings account (HSA) owners with a marketplace of wellness products. Visit Truemed’s website and his intended audience becomes clear: Americans who shop for $1,000 cold plunge baths, five-figure personal saunas and flashy Peloton bikes.........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/06/make-america-healthy-again-healthcare-robert-f-kennedy

Edited October 6 by umbertino

[Sage449]

Cheaper to eat off McDonald's dollar menu than to by veggies.