Robert Kennedy Jr., testifying in January at a Senate Finance Committee nomination hearing. Credit: Senate Finance
Top health policymakers in the administration of President Donald Trump may not be that into employer health plans or benefits advisors.
The Trump administration's new Make Our Children Healthy Again report focuses on the effects of exposure to ultra-processed foods, chemicals in the environment, lack of exercise, and use of medicine and vaccines.
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In the past, many federal public health reports focused on the role of insurance in promoting health, or at least touched on the subject.
In the new MAHA report, the authors do not talk at all about how employer-sponsored health plans or other types of health coverage have affected children's health or how payers could work to improve children's health.
The backdrop: Trump suggested in November, when he said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be his Health and Human Services secretary, that he expected HHS to focus on protecting people from exposure to pesticides, food additives and other chemicals.
Trump formed the Make America Health Again Commission, the body that prepared the new children's health report, in February.
Related: New Trump health panel to look at children's chronic exposure to harmful substances
Kennedy is the MAHA Commission chair, and Vincent Haley, an assistant to the president, is the executive director.The commission also includes at least 12 other Trump administration officials, such as the secretary of Agriculture and the secretary of Education.
The report does not list Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or officials from the U.S. Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration as MAHA Commission members.
The report: The commission includes a paragraph in the report about how the structure of the federal crop insurance program hurts efforts to expand access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
The authors note that about 60% of the people getting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits have Medicaid coverage, and they cite that as evidence of a connection between "health care costs and suboptimal nutritional services."
The authors refer elsewhere to commercial health insurance and Medicaid only in connection with use of sources of data on children's health.
Commission recommendations: The commission finishes the report with a list of 10 recommendations, such as having the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration do more to monitor the safety of children's drugs and having NIH fund studies "comparing whole-food, reduced-carb and low-[ultra-processed food] diets in children to assess effects on obesity and insulin resistance."
The commission also calls for launching "a coordinated national lifestyle-medicine initiative that embeds real-world randomized trials — covering integrated interventions in movement, diet, light exposure and sleep timing."
That study would use existing electronic health record networks, and it could end up drawing on health plans' EHR systems.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
