No Vozes do Poder apresentado por André Marinho, Robert Kennedy Jr. é questionado sobre os custos exorbitantes de medicamentos, e explica sua nova política. Ele detalha como os Estados Unidos financiam a pesquisa global e impôs às farmacêuticas a obrigação de cobrar no país o menor preço praticado no exterior, mas enfrenta forte resistência da indústria.
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00:00One thing that I found quite amazing, Mr. Secretary, was the fact that you're currently commanding, based on the fiscal year 2025, an outlay of approximately $1.8 trillion, and Brazil's GDP is currently $1.9 trillion, almost the same amount.
00:18So you've been doing lots of reorganizing, reshuffling, and basically revolutionizing the intricacies of HHS. Based on that, what have you learned from being in government these six to seven months at this point, balancing critique from the outside once you were back when you were an attorney and an activist, and now with real-world execution leading this department?
00:45Well, it's a lot more fun being on the inside.
00:47I'm sure it is.
00:48But, you know, it's a, as you said, this is a huge job. It's the biggest agency in our government. We have twice the budget of the Pentagon. And we had, when I came in here, we had 82,000 employees. We downsized down to 62,000.
01:08And during the Biden administration and the COVID pandemic, the budget of this agency went up by 38%.
01:18And so what we've been doing is scaling back. And, you know, what's curious is that the budget went way up. But the health of Americans actually got worse.
01:32So the money alone is not keeping people healthy. We need to really change the trajectory of this agency. And, you know, the American system of health is really a sick care system.
01:47There's, at every level, from the doctors, the hospitals, to the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, people make money by keeping Americans sicker.
01:59And today we have the sickest population in the world. More than 60% of our kids have chronic disease.
02:08disease. When my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy. It was 3%.
02:14We're talking around 1960 to 1963.
02:16Around, yeah. And today it's gone up to 60%. So about 8 in 10 American kids cannot qualify for military service.
02:28We have obesity crises. We have diabetes crises.
02:32The autism rates in our population in 1970, we have the largest epidemiological study ever performed, found that about 0.7, so less than 1 out of 10,000 Americans had autism.
02:50And today, the latest data from CDC, which is one of my agencies, is one in every 31 kids, one in about every 20 boys.
03:01In California, which has the best data collection of any state, we have probably the most accurate, so it's probably worse than this, is one in every 19 children has autism, one in every 12.8 boys.
03:16And so we need to really change, we need to pivot at this agency and make it, and begin at every level, changing these perverse incentives, which make people rich by keeping us safe,
03:33and align the economic incentives of our agency with good public health, so that people, so doctors, hospitals, insurers, all get wealthy by actually making people healthier.
03:50Definitely. I mean, these perverse incentives, Mr. Secretary, that you just mentioned, they are very much prevalent in Brazil as well.
03:56And both of our countries have diplomatic ties for over 200 years, America was the first country to recognize Brazilian independence, which actually occurred in 1822, but recognized it in 1824.
04:08Other than that, we have so many cultural ties that, but one of them that's really alarming is the fact that even though Brazil and America, with all these similarities, being the two largest population-wise countries in the Americas,
04:24based on distinct industrial, military, cultural and health policies throughout the last decades, we've gotten really sicker, considering the scenario you just described very accurately.
04:38I think I'm going to, offering this interview, that we delve into very specific subjects like the anxiety crisis you mentioned, obesity, the sedentary lifestyles,
04:46because it's very much similar and mirrored by Brazilian society these days, but why do you think, you just basically gave us the diagnosis, but getting to the root causes,
04:56and right now, based on the fact that you have described this as the chance of your lifetime, the project of your lifetime,
05:03what are you doing to address these main, the root causes of all of these issues and these places?
05:08Most of these diseases are linked to mitochondrial disorders, so there are environmental toxins, and really, these are dietary diseases.
05:22Diabetes is clearly linked to diet. You can cure most diabetes. You can lose your diagnosis by changing your diet, by getting rid of processes.
05:32We're looking at 19 million Brazilians who are diabetic.
05:36Right, and it's, you know, it's the same reason that we're seeing this explosion of diabetes around the world.
05:43Brazil has, is increasingly, Brazilians are increasingly relying on processed food,
05:49rather than fruits and vegetables and meats and proteins that were part of the traditional diet.
05:55You know, 20 years ago, the diabetes rate in China was zero.
06:02And today, 51% of Chinese adults are either pre-diabetic or diabetic.
06:09And, and the reason for that is almost certainly partially because they built 20,000 fast food places in China.
06:19And they're getting, they're importing more and more processed foods from Europe, but particularly from the United States.
06:25And it's not really food, it's food-like substances that are poisoning us, they're mass poisoning us.
06:32And, you know, we, we, we need to reform our agricultural process, but also just our food system.
06:41And the diabetes is coming from ultra-processed foods, which are, yeah, carbohydrates and sugars, different forms of sugars, which, which trigger the, aid, diabetes.
06:55And what we find is if people switch to a protein diet, that they can very, very quickly lose their diabetes or their pre-diabetes diagnosis.
07:10So, you know, food is medicine and we are, you know, the food, the processed food seems very cheap when you buy it in the market, but it's not cheap over the long term.
07:21Exactly.
07:22Because you're going to, you're going to, it's going to make you sick.
07:25And whatever kind you eat, it's going to be, you're going to be sicker.
07:29100%.
07:29But if I might, Secretary Kennedy, based on the drug prices and what HHS, under your command, has been addressing and proposing specifically on the most favored nation drug pricing policy, I'm going to tell you a quick story here.
07:44Recently, a great friend of mine who's American, he has, he's been treated for Crohn's disease.
07:48It's an inflammatory bowel disease, as you know, and he was stunned to find that he pays $3,000 a month for the, for the, the medicine he's prescribed here in America.
07:59And once he was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he paid simply $400 for the same exact medicine.
08:05Many Brazilians and I would guess citizens of the whole world are kind of worried that this could push drug companies to raise prices abroad.
08:13What is, how are you looking at this particular policy right now?
08:19Well, they, you know, the United States basically pays for global pharmaceutical research.
08:26So U.S. citizens, we account for about 70% of the profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
08:34We're only 4.2% of the world's population.
08:38And the reason for that is that other countries simply won't pay for it.
08:43And so the drug companies sell to other nations to say, we're not going to pay for these, you know, these more expensive prices.
08:51And what we've now told the drug companies is whatever the lowest price that you're paying in any other nation, that's what you're going to charge here.
09:01And there's ways that we can do that.
09:03The way that we can do this is that most of the drugs that are purchased in this country are purchased by Medicaid and Medicare.
09:09They use a government program so we can tell the drug companies we're not going to pay any more.
09:14But we also want them to lower the price for the private market.
09:19And we have other tools for getting them to do that.
09:24We're trying to get them to volunteer to do that.
09:27And you've got to push a little further and a little stronger.
09:32Is that, are you facing some sort of resistance from big pharma particularly?
09:37Well, of course.
09:38But it's not only, it's not only the pharmaceutical companies, but the other countries have kind of gotten a free ride on the United States.
09:47Because they're getting the benefit of all of our research.
09:49And they're, they ought to be paying their first share.
09:53We spend about 8% of our GDP on drugs.
09:57And in Europe, they spend 3%.
10:00And so what we'd like to do is see them bring that up to maybe 6%.
10:06And if I might even add to that, some estimates say U.S. consumers pay up to 300% more on drug prices than their European counterparts.
10:15I think that goes along the same lines that you were describing, right?
10:19We spend a lot more.
10:21You can get Ozempic, for example, in this country.
10:28I think the list price is $1,300 a month.
10:33And in London, you can buy the exact same drug that's made in the same factory in New Jersey for $88 a month.
10:44And so President Trump has said this is something that has been bothering him a long time.
