Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and The United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland incorporated Good afternoon, and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Thursday, May 7th, and I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of PwC and president of the City Club Board of directors.

The Kennedy family is no stranger to our community and the City Club.

In April 1968, Senator Robert F Kennedy, our speakers father, was scheduled to speak at the City Club.

The day before his visit, Martin Luther King Jr was tragically assassinated in Memphis while the senator was in Indianapolis.

After working to prevent a riot in Indianapolis, the senator and his team wrote one of the most resonant and important speeches on the mindless menace of violence.

And he delivered it here in Cleveland at the City Club on April 5th.

As you know, Senator Robert F Kennedy was assassinated just two months later when the secretary was only 14 years old.

50 years later, in 2018, our speaker, Sister Carrie Kennedy, returned to the City Club to speak about her father.

That speech and his legacy.

We have also hosted by our account, his uncle, the late Senator Ted Kennedy, one cousin, a brother and a sister.

So welcome, Mr.

Secretary, to the rich tradition of the City Club, our citadel of free speech.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, may be our nation's most famous secretary of Health and Human Services.

There have been 25 others.

And truly, I'm not sure I can name any of them.

His journey to this office has not been a straight line.

He began his career as an attorney, ultimately in environmental law, with an organization called Riverkeeper, where his work was largely focused on protecting the Hudson River and the Long Island Sound.

As a professor at Pace University School of Law, he put students to work on these cases as well.

He has never been far from politics.

His advocacy and leadership on a range range of adjacent issues positioned him for a run for the white House in 2024, first as a Democrat, then as an independent.

In August of 2024.

He dropped out of the race and two weeks after the November 2024 election.

President Trump announced he would nominate Kennedy as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

On February 13th, 2025, he was confirmed by the Senate and took over the leadership of HHS, which is responsible for a budget of over $1.8 trillion under the banner Make America Healthy Again.

Secretary Kennedy has led reforms across the entire HHS portfolio, many of which we will hear about today.

Moderating the conversation is Doctor Brad Wenstrup, former Republican congressman of Ohio's second district.

Currently, he serves as the executive director for Americans for Health Excellence, a nonpartisan advocacy coalition that focuses on lowering health care costs and increasing transparency.

The congressman is also a dedicated combat veteran and a physician, earning his medical degree at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine, and he spent 27 years in private practice in Cincinnati.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you may text it to (330)541-5794, and the City Club staff will try to work it into the program, now Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.

And Doctor Brad Wenstrup.

Thank you.

Well welcome everybody.

And thank you very much for those kind introductions.

It's a pleasure to be here.

In Cleveland.

I'm a native of Cincinnati but I like northern Ohio, too.

We're all good.

Anyway, you know, 27 years in private practice.

I started as a solo practitioner, then joined the large orthopedic group, 25 years Army deployment to Iraq and 12 years in Congress and in Congress.

In my last couple terms, I was co-chair of the doctors caucus.

So I, as you might imagine, all these issues in health care are very important to me.

And that's why it's my honor to be here tonight, with the secretary.

It's a real pleasure to be here with Secretary Kennedy, who I believe is leading the effort across America to end another type of epidemic that we have in our country today.

And that's with chronic illnesses.

And, you know, as a practitioner, I've seen over the years the gradual increase, alarming increase, I would have to say with chronic diseases in, in America and, you know, as doctors, we always say, look, we want early diagnosis, early treatment.

Those are some of our priorities towards our efforts and taking care of patients, but also a big one today.

And it's talked about more today, I think, than before.

And that's that's prevention.

So Secretary Kennedy, I want to I want to ask you what what would you say are some of your your biggest wins so far in the year or so that you've been in this position?

And maybe talk about how when you think about prevention more than anything else that drives other successes.

Thank you for that.

First of all, I want to start by saying how happy I am to be in Cleveland.

I've come here many, many times.

And, as was mentioned, my family has a long history with this club.

Many of the parents and family members were not mentioned, but, it's because there's a lot of us.

My, my two of my three top staffers are from Cleveland, and they're here today, Stephanie Spear and, Ken Callahan, whose father was a judge that some of you may know.

And I see Dennis sitting there who was my campaign manager during my presidential campaign.

And, so I'm really happy to be here.

The chronic disease epidemic, for me, is the biggest crisis that we face as a nation.

When I was a kid, when I was a little boy, my.

I was ten years old when my uncle was killed.

And during his presidency, we spent zero on chronic disease in this country, and we were the healthiest country in the world.

Today, we are the sickest country in the world.

The highest chronic disease burden of any nation on earth.

And it's bankrupting our country.

We spend.

If you include Social Security and, the VA, we spend 48 sense out of every dollar that we pay in federal taxes are now going to health care, and 90% of that is going to chronic diseases, almost all of it preventable, and almost all of it food induced or food encourage.

When I was a kid, my the average typical pediatrician would see one case of type two diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career.

Today, 38% of teens or I have ate a diabetic.

So one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.

In 1970, there was a study.

The biggest epidemiological study ever performed at that time was performed in Wisconsin, and they were looking for to describe the incidence of autism in American kids.

And they looked at all, 900,008 year olds in Wisconsin, and they knew what autism looked like.

And the number that came out was it was point eight per 10,000.

So less than one in 10,000 today.

The numbers we released three months ago are 1 in every 31 American kids.

And, California its 1 in 19 1 and every 12.5 boys.

And you can look at any of these chronic diseases, the autoimmune disease, the allergic diseases, the neurological diseases and see comparable numbers.

We have we have literally the sickest generation in history, and we are the sickest people in the world.

And, you know, people are always when I confront Congress, the Congress are always asking me about infectious disease and why I arent doing a better job in infectious disease, which I'm happy to talk about.

But we lose for vaccine preventable infection disease Kill about 10,000 Americans a year.

We lose 2.2 million Americans a year to chronic disease.

And so.

And yet all of our health care dollars at CDC, but the majority of them are going to infectious disease and chronic disease aggravates infectious diseases.

During Covid, we had the highest death rate from Covid of any nation in the world.

We had 3000 Americans per million population dying of Covid.

Africa had about 370.

So one tenth our rate.

Haiti had 14 per million population.

Nigeria had 14 per million population at 1% vaccination rate.

And so we had 200 times their rate.

And you asked CDC, why did Americans die of Covid worse than any country in the world is because were the sickest people in the world, the average American who died from Covid, had 3.8 chronic diseases.

So what was really killing?

It is almost impossible for Covid to kill a healthy person.

It was killing.

People were already sick.

And we need to start paying attention to that aspect of health care and of our health policies.

And, most of it is food induced So, and what we've done is to try to redress that, and you asked me what I think in that area, my best, biggest accomplishments.

Number one, the dietary guidelines, flipping the food pyramid.

When I came into office, I inherited dietary guidelines.

I was supposed to publish the following week, and they were from the Biden administration 453 pages long.

They were incomprehensible, and they were written by food industry lobbyists, as they had been for 50 years.

And they reflect the mercantile impulses of, you know, those commercial enterprises.

And they were there was nothing about science.

And they were telling us not to eat protein because it causes heart attacks.

There's no science that corroborates that.

And so we brought the best nutrition from the best universities in the country.

Well, we put them in a room for 11 months.

And we got science based guidelines that put protein, vegetables, healthy, grains at the top of the food pyramid that that reform alone is going to drive, cultural changes in the dietary culture of our country.

You go through a number of different mechanisms, but we spent just Brooke Rollins at USDA, spent $405 million a day on food subsidy programs, on SNAP, on WIC school lunches, and the infant health services, many others.

And they are now going to have to align with the Dietary guidelines.

The military is now changing its diet.

Peter is, has hired this incredible chef, Robert Irvine, who is a television chef, and they're changing the diet and all the pieces that already in five pieces, and we're throwing out two thirds their food because it is appalling.

And our soldiers who are supposed to be taking care of were not eating it.

They were going to fast food joints on the military bases, as food is not cheap.

A Big Mac meal costs 12 to $14 and is poison, and now we're giving them good food on US military bases.

Fresh food.

And guess what?

It's cheaper there.

His budget for $18.50 per soldier for three meals a day.

We're now feeding them for $10 a day.

Really good food.

And the lines around the cafeteria, are blocks on there are actually eating the food that we were throwing away, two thirds of it before school lunches.

All of these are going to change because of the dietary guidelines.

So that's one really important change.

We're getting the chemicals out of our food.

We're getting the petroleum based food is out.

We fast tracked it.

FDA seven new dyes and vegetable based.

We're changing the Grass standards, which is the loophole at the food industry captured again in the 1940s to put chemicals in our food without safety testing.

We have because of that loophole, we have 10,000 ingredients in our food in our country.

Europe has for 190, 600 that were used in our food are illegal in Europe.

It's no wonder we have the sickest kids in the world.

We did the first review of Baby formula.

We tested all the baby formulas in this country for contaminants and adulterants chemical contaminants cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury, and we also it's a first review in 30 years of nutrition guidelines.

The nutrition eyes were abysmal.

They were written in the 19 early 1990s.

We've we've, we've gotten the medical schools were created to teach nutrition.

Oh 54 the medical schools have signed on another 40 or about two.

We're going to get all of them.

And, they are now going to do they average out to two hours, as was the average is, or we're getting them all to agree to 40 hours of nutrition.

80% of medical school graduates say they don't feel competent to give nutrition advice.

80% of type two diabetes cannot be reversed or or, held at bay by dietary change.

Many people lose the diagnosis.

That's by changing diet.

Doctors should know that.

You shouldn't believe that.

It's just, you know, a pharmacopeia, a word.

You know, that's the only cure for diabetes.

The only treatment is metaphor.

Men or guppies or some other odd, pharmaceutical treatment.

You should be able to.

Who advises a patient about how to change their, their diet?

They're going to be doing that.

Now.

We have two states that have now passed legislation to include, medical nutrition training and the continually continuing medical education program programs.

The doctors who are already practicing are many of them, for the first time, going to get nutrition training.

Can I I can go on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I've scratched doctors handwriting here, a lot of questions, and I think you answered three of them already in that one.

So I thank you for that.

But because I did want to talk about, the importance, in looking into our dietary guidelines and how we're spending billions of dollars in food procurement, you know, across the country in many different ways.

And I think you just address, you know, where you're making some some changes there.

You know, about two years ago, Xavier University in Cincinnati starting a medical school.

And I was over there talking to the dean, talking about curriculum, and he's about my age.

And I said, well, you know, when you when we were in school, we didn't get anything on nutrition.

We all had to learn it on our own.

And it's important for wound healing.

It's and it's important for your immune system.

It's important for your overall fitness.

We really didn't get anything on that.

I said, I hope you're including that.

He said, take a look at my whiteboard and he had biochemistry slash nutrition.

That was two years ago.

So it has it is growing in popularity.

It is necessary.

Students want it too.

And so thank you I say for really doing that.

And and are you working on anything like within hospital systems.

The food that they deliver.

Is there any you want to talk about any you want to call it food?

Yeah.

But, we, we sent a, we sent it to your colleague letter out to all the hospitals in the country a month ago, saying that they needed to change their food and give good food to the patient.

If you're a diabetic patient and, you know, a majority of them now are you going to the hospital and you get jello and soda and some kind of sweet pudding and waffles, with fake syrup on them And, all the all that's doing is it's making you more likely to relapse.

And, and to have to be hospitalized.

We're, we're giving them we're giving them foods that are destroying their metabolic system, that are causing an, body wide inflammation.

And and we're not promoting healing.

So that's one of the things I also say, which is that, you know, one of the most important changes where we're change the Snap program so that we've now we're encouraging states to apply to exclude certain.

Bad foods from snap.

And percent of snap was going to sugar drinks and about 8% of candy.

So we're taking the 63 million poorest kids in the country giving them diabetes, and 78% of them end up on Medicaid.

And we're treating the rest of their life and diabetes if we live in America, if you want to drink at Coca-Cola, you ought to be able to do it.

You should make that choice.

The taxpayers shouldn't be paying to make poor people sicker.

And it may seem like it's cheaper at the outset, but it isn't.

It's much more expensive, and it looks a long term cost is saving our country.

One of the things that problems that we ran into is that there is the worst offenders, ultra processed foods, which are sugars, highly refined carbohydrates that's obliterate the metabolism, metabolic system.

And but there was no definition for what is an ultra processed food.

We have now created that definition.

It's it's going through the interagency process.

As soon as it goes through that process, you're going to do front of package labeling.

So we're going to have labels like they do in Europe and they do in Latin America.

And in every packaged food that you see in this country will have a green light or red light or a yellow light.

The green light means it's good, it's healthy for you.

Red light means don't eat this stuff.

And the yellow light means, you know, you can take a chance, but it's probably not going to be great.

So, that is, that is going to change the dietary culture in that country.

All of these things put together.

I think it's very helpful.

I wish that was very helpful when people started listing how many calories when your meal and you could, you know, make some decisions.

What is your is your beginning to eat a couple of the things I want to get into.

You know, it's nice if we can prevent things.

It's nice, when, we can do things that cure things.

But you can't cure everything.

And so there's always a need for medications.

And the cost of medications is a huge issue.

And, you know, I can tell you in practice how you try to help patients when they couldn't afford the medicine that was going to be best, best for them.

And so lowering drug prices has been a really hot topic amongst the American people.

And it's it's a concern.

We did a poll was a concerned Republicans, Democrats, independents.

And I would say, you know, 12 years in Congress, you know, I saw several presidents, I saw many members of Congress make attempts or promise to to do something about it.

And right now, you know, Americans are paying more for their drugs than than people are in, in foreign countries, in other countries, they're getting a better price on their.

And that has really raised concern amongst the American people.

And that's understandable.

Why should we carry the weight on it?

That's me interjecting there a little bit.

But I've seen President Trump's work on that most favored nation pricing and seemingly having some success and and the work of, Trump and, you know, you see people that have insurance, but it's much cheaper to go through through Trump or X. And, so can you explain how some of these, these efforts are driving down costs and what you're seeing and what it means for patients?

Because that's really the bottom line.

Yeah.

I mean, I think this is one of the most important accomplishments of my administration, and it's largely because of, I call it leadership.

But, I would say that it was more just, angry phone calls from President Trump to me and Doctor Oz or, for the first three months we were in office to the point where doctor House was calling me because we were getting calls from the president at 2 a.m.

saying, where are you on that map, Vance?

Most favorite nation.

And, doctor has told me I'm not answering his phone calls anymore because, I, you know, I can't take the eight, and but every administration has promised to do this.

Nobody's been able to do it.

And it seemed insurmountable, particularly since President Trump said to us, I want to maintain the United States companies as the powerhouse of global innovation.

I don't want to bankrupt them.

And number two, I want them to reassure all their pharmaceutical production, we have to go out and tell the pharmaceutical companies you need to cut your, your prices by sometimes by, by 90%.

And at the same time, we want you to continue to innovate and we want you to reassure us, spend a lot of money reassuring your pharmaceuticals.

And we spent, almost a year in negotiations with them.

We negotiated one at a time with 17 companies.

Those companies make 86% of the pharmaceuticals in this country.

Now we're doing the ones that are left.

Oh, we came to agreements with all of them.

They all agreed.

Just to give you an illustration, when I came into office, the, ozempic was the list price was $1,350 for Americans.

They were selling the same product from the same factory in new Jersey, and even from a pharmacy in London for $88.

And that was the gap was that was not unusual.

We were paying typically about 2 or 3 times what the Europeans paid for the exact same drug.

And it's because their companies were better at negotiating, their countries were better at negotiating.

They were telling the pharmaceutical companies, if you don't give us our prices, you can't sell them here.

They were selling them their, for a tiny fraction of the price.

It irked President Trump for a decade, and that was one of the first big things he wanted us to do.

We ended up, using the tariffs to get the, foreign countries, the European countries to raise their prices a little, which allowed them to drop the price here by a lot because they've got double our population over there.

And, and then we got them to agree to reassure and they're already doing it.

I just got a note from David Ricks, who's the head of Eli Lilly.

They're building six new factories now in Indiana, in the Midwest.

But all of the companies are building or they're investing hundreds of billions of dollars in reshoring their pharmaceutical, and that the foreign country companies, well, not just the U.S.

companies.

We're going to be the pharmaceutical center of the world within three years.

The production is is going through the roof here.

So now we have an agreement that every new drug that they produce, that we will get the lowest prices in the developed world.

And for most of the big, most popular drugs like El Pais and Ives, we get that are already existing.

We get the lowest rates in the world.

And so and you know, Trump is a has gotten all the publicity.

But it's a very small part of it.

And it's really for people who are paying cash, you can actually get better deals in some cases for your insurance.

You should always check, Trump Rex and check the prices there and see if your insurance company is giving you better prices at the drugstore.

But now we're paying a lot for most drugs.

We're now paying the lowest cost in the world.

And by, within two years, for 95% of the drugs in the world, we will be paying the lowest prices.

By the way, Ohio is a great place to on.

Sure.

Yeah.

I will tell them I'm not the congressman anymore.

I just couldn't help it.

I do, I know something that's near and dear to me too.

And that's that's rural health.

You know, I represented Cincinnati, I practiced in Cincinnati, but I also represented a lot of southern Ohio in the rural areas.

And so, rural health is is very important to me.

And, you know, there's a rural health transformation fund.

It's part of the president's working families tax plan.

But I've, I've been, I've been seeing many people talk about this as a once in a generation opportunity for health in, in rural America to modernize health in rural America.

And, of course, there's the components that we need to address, such as access to care and having a good workforce and maybe the role of telehealth, but also making sure that that there's quality improvement in the health care things that can be measured.

What kind of things do you see that we can do or maybe are doing as we try to transform rural health into a better system?

Yeah, I mean, I, I was lucky enough to spend the day at Cleveland Clinic today and meet with the CEOs of Metro Health Systems and, and University Hospital.

Just an extraordinary collaborative relationship between them.

And I saw, I went to a surgery, a robotic surgery, heart surgery.

I got to see the quantum computer that is revolutionizing medicine.

It's the only Cleveland Clinic, the only facility in the world that has a quantum computer, and that's devoted completely to health.

And it's going to revolutionize not just diagnostics, but drug creation and treatment.

Everything to do with medicine.

And that's extraordinarily exciting.

It's also an incredibly elegant, beautiful structure.

But, but these, you know, urban hospitals and especially hospitals are doing very well in this country.

They're making a lot of money.

The rural hospitals are not.

Rural hospitals are almost all in trouble.

We've lost 120 of them over the past ten years.

And when one of those hospital closes and absolutely decimated that community, because there the biggest job sources in the community that the highest paying jobs, you don't just lose access to proximate health care, but you lose, you lose your community.

And no business is going to ever move there because they can't get access to health care.

What absolutely destroys them.

And President Trump asked us to end that at marriage.

And the and he put in the, and the working family tax got built this rural health transformation fund that just illustrate how transformative this is.

About 7% of our Medicaid dollars that we send out as a nation, only 7% goes to rural hospitals.

It's about a total of $20 billion a year that we spend on rural hospitals for Medicaid.

And the Rural Health Transformative Transformation Initiative is going to put $50 billion over ten years of that $10 billion a year, added to the 20 billion that they already got.

It's a 50% increase in the influx of federal money for those facilities.

And it has the capacity to transform them for a generation.

And, you know, we got we took applications from all the states.

We took a base, their applications on applications that were given them by rural hospitals or other providers.

And we got an extraordinary litany of incredible proposals, you know, to a lot of them are about integrating AI, integrating telehealth.

I work on retention, which is a huge problem, brave provider and nurses and doctors that they can't get and they can't retain and and and then also just the infrastructure repairs that have been lingering for decades for a lot of these hospitals.

We the money is out the door.

They're spending it right now.

The applications were wonderful.

And, we're really pleased.

I'm very, very proud of it.

In addition to that, we're putting a lot more money.

I just want another $50 billion.

$50 million into, to community health centers around, actually, 145,000,000,000 million the community health centers across the country to do rural residencies.

We find that an aid when a medical student, as at a residency at a rural hospital, about 30% of them stay there for the rest of their careers.

We're dealing with a, Jimmy program and the and the Israel residency programs.

We're trying to get as many doctors doing residency in those hospitals so that we can help recharge their, their, personnel staffs.

That's a that's a huge thing.

I can tell you, amongst the doctors in Congress, we were always talking about that having more rural residencies can help, solve the problem.

Well, we're about to be in the audience Q&A in just a few minutes.

I have a couple more questions, though, that I want to get in while I have the opportunity.

But, for those just joining the live stream audience, Doctor Brad, once you're a former congressman, executive director of Americans for Health Excellence, we're here with Robert Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of Health and Human Services.

We welcome questions from everyone.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794.

And the city club staff will try to work it into the program.

My next question is, you know, having served as, physician and, and congressman for southern Ohio, I lived what, much of Ohio and the country did, the real problems that we struggled with, the opioid epidemic and with addiction, the book Dreamland, if you haven't read it, is a good, story to tell, what happened in Ohio.

And we've made a lot of changes to address that.

But we had pill mills pushing OxyContin.

Now we had cartels run and heroin and fentanyl.

In the early 2020s, America was losing, between ages 18 to 45.

Over 100,000 Americans a year to overdoses.

And, I know there's been an executive order concerning the great American recovery.

What is being done with HHS to further address, these issues, of substance abuse, addiction, etc.?

I mean, for me, this was a priority issue.

When I came in here.

I was a heroin addict for 14 years.

I've been in recovery for 43 years.

And, I go to meetings every day.

It's part of the way that I just process my world, and I want that opportunity available to other people.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it, how to do that.

And we have a number of programs now in the streets program, which, you know, one of the problems with treatment in this country is that it's very fragmented.

Nobody is really in charge of the addict from when they go into detox and they go through rehab and they go into sober housing, and then they got a job in education.

We have four different agencies.

We have Department, my department, HHS, SAMHSa, we have the, Department of Housing, HUD involved.

We have apartment, education and, and then the department and they, Labor Department are all involved and none of them talking to each other.

So the street program is mandatory.

Bring them all together with local law enforcement and local, treatment and and, and and keep track of that addict through the system.

Yeah.

Their problem is that we have.

Cause we have a basically a fee for service model, which is loaded with the same perverse incentives, that fee for service, and imposes on the rest of our health care system that people are getting paid.

They keep the attic.

Six.

Oh, if you run a rehab and the addict relapses, it's a good thing because then it comes back and you get paid twice.

And, we're trying to change that into a value based model where people will get paid on how that addict performs.

I was at a rehab called Camelback.

I was I spent a day yesterday at a rehab here and, and, Medina County.

Is that how you pronounce it?

Medina County, an incredible rehab here, really is a model.

That word, you know, we want to replicate around the country.

But the Camelback rehab in Phoenix as a system where if the addict comes in, spends 30 to 60 days in rehab and goes out for the next 12 months, if he relapses, he comes back.

That incentivizes them.

Good.

I hope he program to do sober housing, to do all the things that they can to keep that addict sober for a year.

And that's the kind of model that we want to implement throughout the system.

We have a real opportunity now, particularly on the state level, because of the litigation, the by the state attorney generals and, private attorneys, the drug companies that were making opioids had to pay $50 billion, and that money is going to be distributed to the states for opioid, treatment.

And so the states are really going to have an opportunity to revolutionize that system over the next couple of years.

And, you know, do the kind of things that we're now experimenting with, where it is scaling.

A lot of the things that we're developing now at HHS.

Excellent.

And we can figure out what works and what doesn't in the process, which is always the way I assume I'll be getting some questions handed to me, shortly.

I do have one.

I do have one quick question.

If you can just comment on the work you're doing on transparency and accountability.

You know, patients are so frustrated and anxious, they don't know what their hospital bill is going to look like.

They have no idea.

They can't figure it out.

Is there any work being done on that?

Oh, I mean, we've just passed regulations that's going to force every hospital in the country to publish their, all of their prices and every provider publish all their prices in advance to certify those prices so that you're not going to get a surprise later.

And it's crazy the way the system works.

If you today, if you go to a restaurant, the prices are all on the menu.

If you go to a car dealer, he's not going to tell you or you have to buy the car.

They're not going to tell you what the prices.

That's the way our health system works.

And because of that, there's absolute pricing, market chaos.

We we're going over in the next couple of months, publish, publish a, web system that you can download on your cell phone that if you need an MRI, you're going to be able to look at all of the providers, the concierge providers, a hospital within five miles or six miles, whatever you want from your home and see the prices.

Oh, so you're going to get from each of those?

We did this.

I looked at a mock up of that web page in, for pregnancy for for a child delivery, and I looked them up from a mile around Manhattan or 30 hospitals.

The lowest cost was $1,360.

Highest cost was 22,000 and Detroit, the lowest cost was $6,000.

The highest price was 60,000.

The only way you get that is for the exact same thing with the exact same outcomes.

And the only way that you get that kind of pricing chaos is if there's no market and there's no market because they don't it to publish their prices.

And one of the ways that we're one of the things that we need to do to drive down health care costs is create prices where people can actually shop.

First question.

Thank you so much for being here today.

I'm an incoming freshman at Wellesley College, and I also plan on participating in the Air Force ROTC program, at Boston to hopefully become a military doctor.

I, so I've also worked in the research field for with researchers at Case Western University and over the past couple of months, these researchers have been under significant stress because of the funds, that have been cut from the NIH, from the HHS.

Now, you told us earlier today that you wanted us to be a pharmaceutical powerhouse.

How do you plan on that happening?

If NIH funds are getting, reduced for people who are the best researchers in the country?

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, we we have not cut any clinical trials, and I hate there's a proposed budget cut for NIH, which we were has to do across HHS, which I think is a I think it's a 12.6.

Percent budget cut.

Congress is a proposal for Congress.

So Congress is going to have funds or not.

In the past, Congress has not gone along with, with, let me put it this way.

Republican budget cuts and I don't know, and, you know, and I was doing so many crazy things when I came in there, I could read you a list of the kind of studies that they were funding, and they were over $1 billion of these studies.

It was $1 billion in, studying the genetic causes of autism.

And that's like studying the genetic causes of lung cancer and not looking at cigarets.

I'm looking at environmental causes.

There's really just crazy stuff.

And then all kinds of it was not doing what NIH supposed to do, which is what we're going to get.

Well, we are now the new NIH is doing, which is studying the etiology of chronic disease, which is the biggest threat to our country.

There's going to be more money spent on that than has ever been spent in history.

And I today spent 75% of the total funding for biomedical research globally.

And we will continue to be a leader and we will do cutting edge studies.

But there are those studies are going to be designed to make Americans healthy and, doing some of the crazy stuff they were doing before.

But thank you for your service.

My question is, on behalf of my fellow Ohio moms who have children who are playing on playgrounds right next to I data centers, tech companies are building them all over our state over the objections of residents.

We already have 200 of them.

We're on track for 300 by 2030.

Meanwhile, it's been found that these facilities could contribute to 600,000 cases of asthma by 2028 on an annual basis.

Yet your administration issued an executive order to fast track the building of them.

How does giving kids asthma make America healthy?

And if it doesn't, will you commit to pausing the administration's executive order?

I can tell you this.

I'm deeply concerned about the health impacts of the data centers.

And, you know, I have never read any data about how they contribute to asthma.

I would like to see that.

But, there are other injuries that are very well documented.

And in fact, I sued the FCC about a year before I came into office, and won that case in the Court of Appeals and, cell phone radiation and cell tower radiation, which is a lot of the same emfs that are emitted by some of those, data centers.

And, we gave the court over 10,000 studies that, that, you know, documented it.

And the court agreed with us and said that, FCC and FDA need to go back and redo their regulations.

And we are at NIH under my direction.

We're going to we're continuing to study the health impacts, of these kind of, facilities.

I can't speak to the executive order.

I can tell you when my agency and I were watching it, and I'm, I'm doing what I can to make sure that Americans get best information about the health impact of these kind of hostilities.

Since October, we've seen the number of Snap enrollees decreased by 11,000, and many of our community based groups report that they've been doing more than ever to help people access healthy food.

So my question is, what is your strategy to ensure that rising food insecurity doesn't undermine your nutrition and prevention goals?

I mean, I'm working probably on a half a dozen different programs to increase affordability of food.

American people, many of them with USDA, including a, or many programs that are doing that reduce the cost of food, teach people.

I mean, one of the things that we're doing is, we've made a requirement that anybody that any of the retailers in this country that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food that they sell in their facilities.

And, you know, people say, well, good, that that real food, a good food that, you know, fresh produce is more expensive than processed food, but in reality it is not.

You know, Mark Hyman just published a book that shows how you can eat good food, three meals a day for less than $10 a day.

One of the problems, one of the impediments that we're running into is that Americans don't cook anymore.

If you cook, you know, a frozen salmon cost $9, a fresh salmon cost six.

And if you shop right, good.

Right.

You can you can feed your family well, most Americans have stopped cooking and they've forgotten how to cook, you know, not the cutlery.

They don't have the cutting boards.

They don't, they don't know how to shop for good food as possible.

Ultra processed food.

It was so convenient.

And it seems cheap.

And the long and the short run is not cheaper.

And we're doing everything that we can to make sure that people have access to good food.

And we have now 4000 members of the commission, or going out to communities that teach them to cook.

We're putting out videos.

We've got the best chefs our country making videos, telling people to how to shop within a budget, a very small budget, and how to cook good food for their families.

And that's what we've got to, we've got to move towards that.

And of course, you know, now that you can't get candy and you can't get soda on snap, more people are going to be demanding good food for their families.

question is, in light of the recent announcements regarding antidepressants, what concrete mental health supports does HHS believe Americans should realistically be able to access, particularly given the rising rates of isolation, trauma, suicidality, and barriers to care?

Yeah.

I mean, just so that people know, we sent out a dear colleague letter to every doctor in this country, urging more caution and more transparency in the prescription of antidepressants.

About 20% of the American population is now on antidepressants, more than any other country in the world.

And, there are still a lot of scientific doubts about the efficacy.

It clearly worked for some people.

One of the things that, one of the developments instead of caused us to do this is that, the D prescribing them and getting off of them.

Turns out for some people it can be very, very difficult.

The withdrawal, can take up to a year and, a can cause, people report suicidal ideation and very, very serious aggravations of depression.

And doctors do not know how to prescribe.

There are no protocols for d prescribing.

We now are in my agency developing US protocols.

We are, educating doctors and all 1400, federally financed health centers around our country.

Three, 39 million Americans, Americans.

And and they're disproportionately, getting these drugs because it's, it's just an easy thing for doctors to do.

But, the medical community has not paid much attention.

The difficulties in getting off of these drugs and, we're going to make sure that, patients are informed of that risk.

We're not telling people to get off of these medications.

And we're not telling people not to take these medications.

We want Americans to know what the potential risks are of these medications.

And, you know, in my own life, I said a few months ago that I made a public statement that it's hard to get off of for some people.

It's hard to get off of this, then that's a withdrawal is worse than heroin.

And The New York Times published this story saying that experts disagree with me, but I happen to be an expert on getting off heroin.

And, you know, I, I well, I was on heroin for 14 years, but I never wanted to be on it.

So I was constantly getting off and I went through cold turkey probably 100 times.

And, I, you know, it's five days of, five bad days, but then you're done.

And you know that when you start off in five days, it's going to be over.

I've watched a family member go through withdrawal from SS eyes and, wake up every day and say, I don't want to live.

And the only reason that I'm staying alive is for you.

And, that is heartbreaking.

And I've heard that same story among hundreds and hundreds of people.

And we need to, just be more prudent and more humble about, prescribing this.

And I'm very happy that a major medical association in the country have supported me on this.

And we're going to try to do something that makes sense for the American people.

And.

Secretary Kennedy, my name is Patricia Kelner.

I'm a family physician.

I've been a family physician for 40 years.

My question for you, when you talked about your heroin addiction, one of the first things I thought about was hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is, an illness that is more common among drug users.

And I wondered if you had it or even if you knew you'd had it.

And I'm not asking you your medical history.

But people who used drugs get hepatitis B, and given that people still use drugs in our country, the only way to prevent hepatitis B is to vaccinate.

And the best way to vaccinate against hepatitis B is by starting with a birth dose.

And that was one of the landmark achievements.

Early in my career.

I took care of people who had hepatitis B, some of them didn't know because it can be asymptomatic.

Some of them found out when they got liver cancer.

So why are you opposed to a birth dose of hepatitis B?

First of all, the ACIp, changed the recommendation on hepatitis B so that it wouldn't be mandatory, but people can still get it and they can still get their insurance for it.

There is it was mainly concerned the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, that it was not, adequate safety testing on the hepatitis B vaccine, hepatitis B there two vaccines.

One of them was safety tested for four days.

There was safety testing for five days, neither, with a placebo.

That's not a safety study.

That's, that is that is nothing.

There's no way that a company says that it it tested something for four days with no placebo.

You you can't tell anything from that.

And there's other countries that don't recommend the first.

So the first does, Denmark, for example, have the same rate of hepatitis B as we do hepatitis B?

Is, for high risk groups like drug addicts or prostitutes or, for promiscuous, homosexuals.

It is, it is, it is a risk.

It's a high risk.

But, but to give it to a little baby without knowing what the risks are to give it to millions of little babies in the country.

And there were many, many reports of injuries from in the, their system.

And there's only collects about less than 1% of of vaccine injuries.

That's our surveillance system, that we're concerns about its safety.

The, death rate of, among kids from hepatitis B, I think is 1 in 16,000,000, which means you have to get 15,990,000 vaccines to prevent one death.

And that means you have to believe that none of those vaccines are going to cause a death.

And these were the calculations that were being made by the ACA panel.

And, again, they did not remove the vaccine from the insurance if people want it.

Yeah.

And they recommended it.

The only way a baby can get it really is if their mother's already infected.

Mothers are supposed to be tested when they go to the hospital.

And, and it's recommended for any baby of a mother who has hepatitis B, for other children.

They deemed that he, approved as was not worth the proven benefit in all cases, and that parents ought to be able to make up their own minds.

And if they decide to do it, the insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid will pay for it.

They should be given that choice and not haven't made by the government.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Awesome.

Thank you, Doctor Brad one strip and Secretary Kennedy for joining us at the City Club today.

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A free speech at cityclub.org The City Club would like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the center for Community Solutions.

Tri-C, Friends of Kennedy, friends of Mark Ross, the LGBT community Center, Metro Health University Hospitals, and the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services.

And thank you once again to the Secretary and Congressman, and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Mark Ross, and this forum is now adjourned.

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