Nick Carter (00:14):
Good morning. My name's Nick Carter. I'm proud to be a fourth generation Indiana farmer, deeply invested in local food in Indiana, and I'm proud to share the title of entrepreneur with Indiana's governor Mike Braun. Governor Braun is a conservative outsider who spent his career as a main street entrepreneur, building a business, creating thousands of good-paying Hoosier jobs. He's lived an American dream and now as governor of Indiana, he's working to preserve that same freedom, that same dream, and opportunity to achieve prosperity for future generations of Hoosiers. I happen to be raising three of them, so that future is very important to me.
(00:50)
The governor and I share similar values, faith, family, and community. Those values have guided governor while growing a business and raising a family and have inspired his call to serve fellow Hoosiers throughout the years. He began his public service as a member of a local school board for 10 years, then as a state representative from 2014 to 2017, and in 2018, he was elected to be a conservative voice for Hoosiers in the US senate.
(01:21)
That's where Governor Braun and I had the pleasure of first meeting, when he invited me to testify about local food, food access, healthy food, and what Hoosier farmers need before the Senate Agriculture Subcommittee where he served. Governor Braun and I are both avid outdoorsmen, enthusiastic morale mushroom hunters. And speaking of which, it's getting to be about that time of year. If you're looking for a neat place to forage that's not too far from the residence, you're always welcome at our farm in the woods around there. In addition to entrepreneurship, food. The governor and I both share a passion for locally produced food and the importance of healthy eating. So I'm pleased to introduce and welcome Indiana Governor Mike Braun.
Mike Braun (02:13):
Thank you, Nick. What a pleasure to be here talking about a subject that I've spoken about for years. It goes back to running that hardscrabble business that finally got to the point where I knew I could scale it and then had to deal with an annual issue of how lucky I was that my costs were only going up five to 10%. I remember in that 10th year where all you could do is raise deductibles, change underwriters, enough was enough. I think the proudest thing I've done in business, our government was sitting in on that HR meeting to renew or either say enough is enough. And in that one meeting, and I got most of this out of the insurance companies, they told me what would work, that insurance is about indemnification of critical illness or an accident, not about paying for every scratch and dent, basing it upon expensive remediation as opposed to wellness and prevention. And that one renewal meeting become the insurance company. You reconstruct it completely by not promoting expensive remediation, making healthcare consumers out of your employees, basing it on an ounce of prevention's worth a pound to cure.
(03:47)
I spoke about that in the Senate on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and like I told Maureen so often, it was like talking to the side of our big white barn back home. Everybody gave polite consideration, nothing happened. President Trump tried to take it on with executive orders. Only one stuck, and that's through the remediation system. What I love about this is we're talking about how to change the culture of promoting chronic disease through the way we produce our food, by not preventing chronic disease in the first place.
(04:28)
So I came out with nine executive orders today finally to where you can do something rather than just talk about it. So happy to see an administration that's going to be entrepreneurial with it as well. So thank you Secretary Kennedy, Administrator Oz for coming in. You're setting the stage at the federal level. We're going to be your best ally at the state level.
(04:55)
This isn't a usual top-down one-size-fits-all public health agenda. We're focused on root causes, transparent information and real results. We're taking on big issues like diet-related chronic illness. How often do you hear about it? Nothing happens. Children's fitness in our own schools and harmful additives in our food. Today's first executive order removes candy and soft drinks from taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits. What do you think about that?
(05:40)
More SNAP money is spent on sugar drinks and candy than on fruits and vegetables. That changes today. We're kicking off a study of diet-related chronic illness. When I gave a free biometric screening to every one of my employees after reforming it, number one asymptomatic issue was diabetes. And it's so easy to nip in the bud and it's very expensive to remediate it. The goal is to empower Hoosiers to address root causes of chronic illness with preventions, nutrition, physical activity, and early screening. That is so important, early screening. Hoosier parents are concerned with negative effects of food dyes. I share those concerns. Today, our health department kicks off a new study on harmful effects from dyes and other food additives as well.
(06:43)
I want to give every Hoosier kid any advantage possible to reach their full potential and lead a long and healthy life. Today we're starting the Governor's fitness test and School Fitness Month to encourage exercise and physical activity in school and for our youth as well.
(07:19)
Indiana Farms grow world-class nutritious food. Today we're making it easier to buy direct to consumer food from local Indiana Farms. We're also focused on the health of Indiana's biggest program, Medicaid. Study found 28% of Indiana's Medicaid spending, our largest budget line item, was improper spending, mostly due to eligibility errors. Today we're taking action to make sure everyone on Medicaid is eligible for it in the first place.
(08:08)
SNAP is intended to help our neighbors who have fallen on hard times, but we also need to encourage their long-term self-sufficiency so that they can thrive and benefit in their communities. Today we are changing work requirements, so the two-thirds of able-bodied SNAP recipients who don't work or put on a path to filling one of Indiana's 100,000 jobs that need better skills and that if you get your own plant and equipment in great shape and you know that that's out there, we're going to try to get you into it and not needing the experience or a college degree.
(08:50)
Today's nine executive orders reflect a new approach to health policy in the state of Indiana focused on empowering everyone to live a healthier, happier, longer life, and today is where we begin. When I heard about MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, I spent six years there trying to do it and making Indiana healthy again. I've always been a proponent that the leading states that are entrepreneurial that find ways to do it will probably be more agile than the place you're working in now that I did for six years. So I'm so excited about being a partner on stuff that is basically common sense and that takes on big, established, entrenched when it comes to health remediation, insurance, wholesome food that we need.
(09:57)
So it's my honor to introduce Dr. Oz, the commissioner of CMS, and thank you for coming in and I can't wait to hear from you.
Mehmet Oz (10:16):
This is a monumental day, not just in Indiana, but for this great nation because nine executive orders addressing MAHA initiatives, I think breaks the records. Secretary Kennedy, is that right?
Secretary Kennedy (10:28):
By far.
Mehmet Oz (10:29):
By far. And I want to thank Governor Braun and his staff for so thoughtfully crafting these in support of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy's commitment to the American people that we will make this great nation healthy again.
(10:41)
Now, let me give a little bit of background on why I think this is so important. And it all starts with the word subsidiarity. How many of you know what that word means? It's actually… A fair number of Catholics here then. Subsidiarity means you push the decision to the person lowest on the totem pole who can make it correctly.
Mehmet Oz (11:00):
Correctly. It's the most efficient way to run organizations in general and in subsidiarity, you don't want the federal government making decisions about lifestyle issues if the state can do it because the governor's capable, he knows his people. And you can go down the path because the most important person in the entire hierarchy is the mom because she knows you win the battle for health in the home, in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. That's where the real battle for health will be won. And these executive orders make it easy for moms to do the right thing for their kids.
(11:32)
Now, 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 matter, like they have agency over their future. And we want to make sure that we allow all Americans to be able to appreciate how important these lifestyle changes are. And to do that, I'm going to do what doctors are sometimes forced to do, which is to give you some news you might not want to hear. But once you know it, we've got good news to follow.
(12:04)
First bit. The number one line item in the state of India, and as it is in almost every state, is Medicaid. That's not actually the most important number because there's a lot of other things you spend money on, but it's the fastest growing as well. And that's the part that's most concerning because this is a commitment we have made to our most vulnerable. And if it's doubling, as it has I'm told, in the last four years, then it's not a sustainable program. It's one that desperately needs to be saved and strengthened.
(12:32)
To do that, we have to deal with another big reality, which is that the healthcare expenses in this country are increasing up two to three times faster than the economy. Effectively, we have now generated a healthcare system that has a country attached to it, and that's not healthy long-term. If we're spending twice as much as any other country, not giving the life expectancy benefits that we anticipate, and 30 years ago we were about equal to Europe, now we're about 5 years behind Europe. We're going in the wrong direction. We're not getting value for the money we're putting into it.
(13:05)
Why? Chronic illness. It drives 70%, 70% of a total healthcare budget. And the kinds of things that are in these executive orders will help reduce that incidence of chronic disease because it turns out that about the most patriotic thing you can do these days is to get healthy. It will dramatically allow our nation to be as healthy as it can be, and it feels a heck of a lot better to be healthy than the alternatives. So how are we going to do this? I wrote down three ideas that came out of the executive orders. The first is walking. Little stat to come in handy at dinner tonight. If you walked, if every American walked 20 minutes, exercised 20 minutes a day, broke a little sweat, it would probably reduce our healthcare budget, the part that I'm especially worried about in this at CMS, by about $100 billion. These aren't small rounding errors, these are massive ways of addressing the challenges that we face.
(13:56)
The President's Council on Sports Fitness and Nutrition that I was honored to be a part of in the first Trump administration actually created by Secretary Kennedy's uncle, John F. Kennedy, is a good example of how we can do this well. I learned on that committee that the number one thing we often lack in communities are coaches. It's an action step. We should make it easier to mentor young people. I'll come back to that theme.
(14:16)
Second big topic, nutrition. Quite a few of the executive orders touch on that reality. I'll give you a little tip that I learned years of studying nutrition science, 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. That's like a simple way of memorizing what makes sense. 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. It's a home game.
(14:44)
So we need to get everyone to understand the power of food. And to do that, we need to get parents and teachers and physicians and other health providers to understand it as well. The executive order that insists that to get credentials, you have to learn nutrition if you're a doctor is critical. When I was in medical school there was no nutrition class. I actually ran for student body president and won on that campaign promise, and we started one. Today in America most medical schools do not teach nutrition. Why does that matter? Because if you go to four years of medical school and bust your tail and learn everything and nutrition wasn't on the docket, what is that message to you? It doesn't matter. It's not important. If it was critical, you would've been taught it because you learned everything else you needed to learn in medical school. If nutrition is not on the agenda, not in the syllabus, it's not really important for you. And I believe that we should empower folks, and the executive orders will do just that, to be able to navigate nutrition, and we have plans at CMS to make that easier.
(15:36)
Finally, community involvement. The number one driver of an expensive patient is a patient without another person in their life. I'll say that again. 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 have community groups that work together well. One of the executive orders encourages schools to get young people to become educated about health. But I'll tell you from personal experience, they also become activists in a good way when they're healthy.
(16:06)
We started a foundation with my wife 20 years ago and have done very well across the country, touching the lives of millions of young people doing just this. And then when I go into these schools, as I hope many of you will, and you look at the eyes of these young people, sometimes it looks like the light's gone out. They just want to have a belief that they matter. And so after having done this a lot, I'm confident this executive order will make a difference because it'll get young people to believe they have agency over their future. And if they do that, if they have mentoring programs that support them, that are out there. Then we'll have a unique ability to allow this system to spread like wildfire because young people want to be connected. They want to be in community, and they're right now being atomized and ostracized.
(16:50)
Now, our nation is too great for small ideas, and the ideas that Secretary Kennedy and President Trump are putting forth in rapid fire and now supported at this level of intensity in the state of Indiana are emblematic of the fact that we have a generational opportunity to make this country as healthy as it should be. And the person who has represented this more than any other, Secretary Kennedy, is a dear friend. I've known him for many years through his foundation work, but I met him on my show. And when he came on the show, many did not want him to appear because they thought he had far-out ideas that were so bad they shouldn't be heard. And I'll tell you in my mind how you define MAHA because it's how you define the next speaker, Secretary Kennedy. It's defined in three words. The first is curiosity. Are you truly desirous of learning what needs to be done to improve the life of your fellow man? And if you are truly curious, and remember, 80% of questions are statements in disguise, so if you're truly curious and you really go in there with questions and you hear stuff that matters, are you then courageous enough to share it with people around you? Because when you do that, sometimes folks get mad at you, especially with the current healthcare system that we have, and certainly Senator Kennedy has faced that.
(18:07)
Secretary Kennedy finally is a compassionate man. And I say that because I think of him like a brother, but I have never seen him do something mean to anybody else. So if you're curious and you're courageous and you're compassionate in sharing that wisdom as difficult it is for people to hear that makes you a true healer. Secretary Kennedy, thank you.
Secretary Kennedy (18:25):
Thank you everybody. Thank you everybody. Really happy to be here today. Very, very grateful to Governor Braun and to Mehmet Oz.
(18:49)
I've been to a bunch of states to announce MAHA initiatives over the past three or four weeks, and it's always been one at a time, and this one really broke the bank on nine executive orders, all designed to improve our farms, our fitness, our food, our education, our health. And I had the pleasure to meet with many of the legislators in the state just now and with Governor Braun, and I was so impressed by the high caliber of the people there, the level of intelligence, the level of thoughtfulness, the commitment, and the idealism in that room. I have just nothing but optimism through the state of Indiana because of that leadership.
(19:40)
We're in a crisis today. We're about to announce new autism numbers. They've again gone up dramatically just in two years. We have, in some states, as low as well, 1 out of 20 boys having autism, 1 out of 31 kids. In my generation today, the rate of autism is 1 in 10,000. And this is just one disease. This whole generation of kids is damaged by chronic disease. I was talking to the Governor that I walked through an airport and I see these young people who once again have hope because of what's happening in this administration. But you can see the chronic inflammation, you can see the mitochondrial challenges that they're facing.
(20:35)
And this is not, as the Governor mentioned, diabetes is a treatable disease. Virtually 100% of people who are pre-diabetic can get rid of that diagnosis through changes in their diets, and so it's treatable. If 50% of our adults… When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes during his lifetime, during a 40 or 50 year career juvenile diabetes. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. We just got new numbers from NIH that said that 38% of teens are pre-diabetic. We have 100 million people in this country who are pre-diabetic. This is unknown in human history. And obesity crisis, when my uncle was present, 3% of Americans were obese. Today it's around 70% are obese or overweight. In Japan, when my uncle was president, 3% of kids were obese. Today in Japan, 3% of kids are obese. So it's a choice, and it's almost certainly because Japan has a very, very aggressive school lunch program.
(21:58)
Make sure the kids get wholesome
Secretary Kennedy (22:00):
… wholesome foods. And when you raise these children, as Mehmet said, when you raise them, they become advocates for good food, they become energized themselves, and they develop lifelong habits. Their taste buds are altered so that they have a yearning and a hunger for good food and a repulsion towards food that is making us sick.
(22:26)
Today, we're the fourth most obese country in the world, and we have something that is unique in human history. We have people who are obese who are at the same time malnourished because the food that we're eating is not nutrient-dense anymore.
(22:44)
And I was involved in tobacco litigation back in the 1980s, in the late '80s, and the tobacco companies at that point were the most cash-rich companies on Earth. And they saw the writing on the wall, they saw the regulatory headwinds, and their consumers were walking away from their product, and they decided to diversify, so they started buying up the food companies.
(23:15)
By the mid-1990s, the two biggest food companies in the world were R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, and they transferred thousands of scientists that were engaged in making tobacco more addictive to do the same thing with food, and they developed in the lab all of these chemicals that are unknown in nature that make food more attractive.
(23:42)
But it's not food. It's food-like substances. So they'll put a strawberry flavor in the food, but there is no nutrients that you'd find in a strawberry. Your body is craving that, but it doesn't get filled up, and it doesn't give you nutrition, but you want to eat more and more, so you get obese, but at the same time, you get malnourished. And they put addictive substances like sugar and sodium and others, monosodium glutamate, in our foods, that make you so that you don't get satiated and that you constantly want to have more.
(24:17)
They realized at some point through all these that they could hijack the human brain in all these nefarious ways, but one of them is that they realized that one of the ways that your brain tells your stomach that it's full is how many times you chew. Oh. They began adding food softeners to our food so that your brain would be under the illusion that you weren't full. You can inhale 20 Twinkies and still want more as you're not chewing them. And so they figured out all these things, and they changed our food system in this country so it is poison to us and it is poisoning the American people.
(25:04)
My uncle, as Governor Braun said, launched the Presidential Council on Physical Fitness back in 1961, and because he thought he saw the healthcare costs increasing, but he also saw more importantly, that our country, Americans, when I was growing up, were regarded as the toughest people in the world, and he associated that beef jerky toughness, that was associated with the American people and the minds of the rest of the world, with the success of our nation, and he didn't want us to get soft.
(25:42)
And when Governor Braun and I were growing up, we all participated in the Presidential Council and the fitness test, and it was a big aspiration at our schools to do that. And for me, it imbued me with a lifetime commitment to physical fitness. And today, I'm 71 years old, and the governor is the same, and both of us feel like we're in our 40s or 50s, and we have a lot of energy and a higher capacity to enjoy our lives. And we want that for our children and we all want it.
(26:22)
We now have the sickest country in the world. We spend two to three times for healthcare what other countries spend, and we are the sickest nation. We had, during COVID, the highest death rate of any country in the world. We had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country, and we only have 4.2% of the world's population.
(26:45)
And that's because we have these comorbidities, this chronic disease, that the CDC said, the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. Healthy people were not dying. It was sick people who were dying. They were already sick. And so if we want to protect our country against infectious diseases, we need to start by making people healthy again.
(27:11)
And President Trump, who I'm very, very grateful for, because he's given me this opportunity and given Dr. Oz this opportunity, he often says that he wants to make America strong again, but we can't be a strong nation if we're not a strong people. He says that he wants to restore the American dream, but a healthy person has 1000 dreams and a sick person only has one. And today, 60% of the people in this country have only one dream.
(27:46)
It is threatening our national security. 74% of our kids cannot qualify for military service, and it's destroying our economy and our national figure. When my uncle was president, we spent zero on chronic disease, zero in this country. Today, we're spending about $1.3 trillion a year, and we can't afford it.
(28:10)
And we have to figure out new ways to allow Americans to take responsibility and agency for their own health, but also, we need to change our food system in this country so that we start giving our kids foods that are going to actually make them healthy and imbue them with vigor and ambition and a dream.
(28:40)
I want to thank again Governor Braun. I also want to take this moment to encourage governors all over the country to follow the lead of Indiana and to file with Brooke Rollins, who's my partner and head of USDA. She is right now at this very moment in Arkansas with Governor Sarah Huckabee announcing the application for SNAP Waivers for sodas in that state. This is the first state that has added candy to the SNAP Waivers. I'm very, very proud of you, governor, for doing that.
(29:22)
Well, I look at Governor Braun as a really important partner in the MAHA movement, and a great leader, and I'm very, very grateful for you taking the very ambitious steps that you've taken today. And not only that, I'll say this: there's a couple of states that I've been to where we've announced SNAP Waivers, but we haven't seen the SNAP Waiver application yet. And Governor Braun's SNAP Waiver already went to USDA today, so thank you very, very much. Thank you all so much.
Mike Braun (30:14):
So what a pleasure to have these two come in and weigh on an issue that's important not only to Hoosiers but the rest of the country. And we will take a few questions for any one of the three of us about Make Indiana Healthy Again or Make America Healthy Again. So-
Speaker 1 (30:31):
How does your executive order-
Speaker 2 (30:31):
[inaudible 00:30:35].
Speaker 1 (30:31):
… address Indiana's maternal mortality rates? And if so, how do those executive orders address that specific issue?
Mike Braun (30:42):
So that's a shameful statistic for us when we've got the highest healthcare costs of any state in the country and we sport the worst statistics on infant and maternal mortality rates. So when we're doing that, it's systemic, so every one of these executive orders is about changing the underlying issues that we've all got control over, so each one of them will play into that.
(31:13)
And when it comes to something that we hold dear like that, that is one of the metrics. If we get it right, we'll see those statistics go the other way.
Abigail Ruhman (31:29):
The SNAP benefits, going into that, you talked a lot about how you're reducing some of the things that you can purchase with the SNAP benefits, but there's a rising cost of food and rising cost of living.
(31:38)
Do any of the executive orders address the difficulties with affording food or affording the ability to have the time to invest in a healthy lifestyle?
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Can you say your name and what outlet you're with?
Abigail Ruhman (31:52):
Abigail Ruhman, Indiana Public Broadcasting.
Mike Braun (31:55):
So the whole idea of affordability and accessibility, that is something you can't sidestep, because if in fact it is going to be more costly to actually eat better, we got to find out entrepreneurial ways of addressing it through the folks that produce it and not necessarily just asking for more to get it done. Because even Medicaid, Medicare, which actually are less costly than the private side of healthcare, begs the question of why is it less costly to remediate there than going through the private side?
(32:35)
All of that weighs in, and all I can tell you is if you keep doing more of the same, and you're not looking at other approaches, you're guaranteed to keep going into those bad statistics and same bad results. And that's where I invite the real world that solves these problems without government being in the way to help figure out how to do it.
Abigail Ruhman (32:57):
One more question!
Speaker 4 (32:57):
[inaudible 00:33:00]-
Speaker 5 (33:01):
Secretary Kennedy, you mentioned that in order to be effective in fighting infectious diseases, we have to start at the preventative level. We know there is measles outbreak in [inaudible 00:33:12] county. How do we start when it comes to measles? How do we fight if vaccines may or may not be the answer? Just wanted to clarify because we said last week that we do support these vaccines, but at the same time they don't have a long term… They don't last long term. They wane out as you mentioned. Just wanted to clarify you're saying.
Secretary Kennedy (33:28):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say that CDC in this case has done a very good job at controlling the measles outbreak. We've had about under 700 cases nationally, and in Europe they've had 127,000 cases, 37 deaths. People get measles because they don't vaccinate. They get measles because the vaccine wanes. The vaccines wanes about 4.8% per year and so that it's a leaky vaccine and that problem is always going to be around.
(34:08)
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 come with them and bacteriological. And we can't rely simply on the vaccine. We also have to know how to treat measles. Children shouldn't die of measles. When I was a kid before the measles vaccine was introduced, there was a half a million people who got measles as many, as 2 million a year and nobody got in the newspapers for them for that. But the death rate was about 400 people a year, mainly children who were malnourished children. So it's a infection fatality rate of one in 1,200 to one in 10,000. Healthy children should not die of measles and there's no reason they should. If the doctors know how to treat at the hospital, that will not happen.
Speaker 6 (35:06):
Wait a minute. Any other questions for Dr. Oz or Secretary Kennedy? We'll do about two or three more. Go ahead.
Speaker 7 (35:16):
Vaccine hesitancy is a big issue right now and we're seeing that this trend is growing. One of the core issues with this is informed decision making. Parents do not feel like they have the ability to make informed decisions about vaccine. VARS is an epic failure. I'm [inaudible 00:33:27] registered nurse from Fort Wayne. I have done continuing education on VARS, created it for nurses because there's nothing out there now. The system is a failure. Nobody knows about it. Nobody knows how to use it. Indiana is prime position to do an overhaul using VARS ESP, electronic support for public health widely across the country to do automated VARS reporting. We also have the Indian Health Information Exchange, which has collected all of our medical records for probably the past 10 to 15 years, along with mandatory reporting within seven days of vaccination.
Speaker 8 (36:06):
State your question.
Speaker 7 (36:08):
So trying to do this, can we start an initiative in Indiana to study the outcomes, the health outcomes of vaccination in Indiana and assist with this administration-
Secretary Kennedy (36:18):
I mean, the issue that you're raising is absolutely critical, important, and it's outrageous that we don't have a surveillance system that functions. CDC did a study on its own vaccine, the only surveillance system it has there really, and the CDC did a study on it in 2010 and it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries. So that's CDC's own study. And they had at that time a machine counting system that they were going to roll out to all the HMOs and they put it on a shelf and we are going to roll that out exactly the system that you're talking about. We're going to improve the surveillance. We're going to get the data sets from everybody can.
(37:07)
We're going to do 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, mold, EMF, food, all of these other exposures began in the late 1980s. 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. You're right. People don't have informed consent and people don't trust our agency anymore. Trust in the agency is at a historic [inaudible 00:37:46] and the way to make it trustworthy and the way to make people to improve vaccination is to make the agency trustworthy. That's what we're going to do.
Speaker 8 (37:53):
We have time for one more question and it needs to be on what we're here today. I need your first name, last name, and outlet.
Speaker 9 (37:53):
Should we expect the federal government to ban the dyes and chemicals in our food?
Lawerence Wilson (38:06):
Lawrence Wilson with The Epoch Times. And this question is for really all of you. I'll address it to Secretary Kennedy because it applies at the national level. It applies at the state level. Mahat is trying to make a cultural change using the letters of government. We're talking about human behavior and things that people see on TV and talk about with their friends. How confident are you that you can make this shift that's taken in… You said when you were a kid, Secretary Kennedy. So that goes back a number of years, maybe 60.
Secretary Kennedy (38:43):
60 let's say.
Lawerence Wilson (38:47):
How can you make the change using government that is taking the culture of this law [inaudible 00:38:54]?
Secretary Kennedy (38:53):
A lot of the negative behavior, self-destructive behavior in both the medical system, how we pay for medicine, et cetera, how we pay for healthcare and how we eat is driven by perverse incentives. And what Dr. Oz and I are trying to do is to identify those perverse incentives and we're getting a lot of help from Elon, and then eliminating them so that we can realign medical choices, both individual and institutional medical choices with public health. And it's not aligned. It's totally misaligned today. We have a healthcare system that reimburses people for doctors and hospitals for procedures rather than for health outcomes. We have to change that, but we also… Alone, we can't do this, but we're getting tremendous help from the governors, from the grassroots. You see all these warrior moms here today, they don't want to take this anymore. They want a change.
(40:03)
There's a huge, huge movement to get a change. And then we have extraordinary leaders like Governor Braun who are doing this on a state level and that helps us extraordinarily. I met with the big food titans a couple of weeks ago and they weren't scared of me. They were scared of what's happening in the states. They don't want a patchwork of regulations where one state bans dyes and one state bans bromates and one state bans titanium dioxide in the food and now they don't know how to market a national product. What's happening here in the States is driving this movement and it's going to drive the kind of cultural change that you're talking about.
Speaker 8 (40:45):
Thank you.
