During the National Assocation of Governors 2025 Summer Meeting in July, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the economic impact of healthcare costs.
00:00I had a question earlier that you mentioned to me outside. You want to ask it here?
00:04Sure, absolutely. First off, thank you so much for being here, Secretary Kennedy,
00:09and thanks for coming to Oklahoma. We got a great time. Oklahomans love you.
00:13And we also did the SNAP benefit waiver, and so we're excited about making Oklahoma healthy again.
00:20My question, you mentioned that there's about a $1 trillion cost in chronic disease.
00:26Do you have any stats when you get people healthy again, what it does to the economy?
00:31We had an economic update earlier about GDP rising at 1% this year in 25.
00:37But if you get them healthy again, not only the cost, but also what does that do with the workforce
00:43and getting people back healthy to engage in our workforce?
00:47Well, you know, I went on a long hike with Dr. Oz this morning, and he's going to be talking to you tomorrow.
00:58But he showed me a data point of a study that they just finished that showed that if you could get every American
01:05to do a 15-minute walk a day, it would save the country $150 billion.
01:12The cost said, you know, I said before, when my uncle was president, we spent zero on chronic disease.
01:18There were no treatments for it.
01:21The first pill that you took every day was the birth control pill.
01:25There weren't any pills like that before that.
01:27There weren't treatments, and, you know, the cause said, we are spending this money.
01:36And I'll give you an example.
01:38We had, during COVID, we had 16% of the COVID deaths in our country.
01:44We only have 4.2% of the world's population.
01:47And if you ask CDC, why did so many Americans die?
01:52Why did Americans die at a rate of 3,000 per million population?
01:58And in Haiti, they were dying at 14 per million population.
02:02In Nigeria, they were dying at 14 per million population.
02:06Across Africa, it was 321 to 320 per million population.
02:11So one-tenth of our death rate from COVID.
02:14Why is that?
02:14And CDC said it will say that's because Americans have such high levels of chronic disease.
02:21We have the highest chronic disease burden on earth.
02:24The average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
02:29So what was killing them?
02:31Was it COVID or was it the chronic disease?
02:34They were hanging by their fingernails at the edge of the cliff already.
02:39And COVID came over and stamped on their fingers.
02:42But what's really making it, and the real costs are not from the, from, you know, from COVID.
02:51The real cost and the cost we have, if a kid has diabetes, if a kid, COVID was killing, the average age of death from COVID was 84 years old.
03:01And the cost of that, if we can stop the autism epidemic or dramatically reduce it, which I believe we're going to do in my four years.
03:17We can, you know, we can, you know, the cost savings to our country will be astronomical.
03:25And diabetes is the same.
03:27When you start getting kids to stop drinking soda, stop eating junk food, and start eating real food again, we're going to see immediate cost savings.
03:38Because people, with autism, there's no cure.
03:43Diabetes, there's a cure.
03:44You can, you can cure diabetes with diet.
03:48And, you know, one of the things that we're asking governors to do, if you have a medical school in your state,
03:56we're asking you to pass a law, and these laws have passed in about six states so far, and there's, they're bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans.
04:07There's no such thing as Democrat children or Republican children.
04:11They don't face strong headwinds.
04:15It's an easy law to pass to require medical schools in your state to give a mandatory nutrition class.
04:22Doctors are not taught about nutrition.
04:24So, when you come into the doctor's office, he doesn't know any more than you do about nutrition.
04:31And, you know, he ought to be, not the first thing he does should not be to give a nine-year-old kid a GLP drug.
04:39Yeah, in the long run, you know, if there's no other choice, let's do that.
04:45But let's try diet and exercise first, and let's have a medical community that understands those things,
04:52and that's their first reaction, rather than giving you a drug.
04:55And most of the medical schools do not have mandatory nutrition classes, and we need to do that.
05:01We're going to, we're incentivizing to do them to do that at HHS.
05:05We're getting them to develop really good curricula on that.
05:08And, but, you know, one of the things I said to the governors yesterday is what you do is so critical to what I'm doing.
05:19We have 40% of the food industry that has now pledged to remove all dyes, all nine patrolling-based synthetic dyes.
05:27But they come to us and ask us and say, we want to do this, we want your support, you know, help us do this.
05:36They're coming to me not because they're scared of me.
05:40They're coming because they're scared of the governors.
05:43Because they don't want a patchwork of different regulations all across the country when they've got a national product.
05:48When you push this legislation in your states, it enables me, it gives me leverage to these industries to change their behavior
06:00and to change the ingredients that they're giving us.
