The MAHA Commission order also appears to reflect the interests of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed by the Senate Thursday as Trump’s secretary in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Thursday.
From 2015 through 2023, Kennedy was chair of Children’s Health Defense, a group that sees exposure to preservatives in vaccines and other substances as a major threat to children’s health.
The MAHA Commission could have affected commercial health insurers and employers’ self-insured health plans: The order indicates that health coverage providers will have to make new efforts to improve children’s health.
The federal agencies participating in the commission must “ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention,” according to the text of the order.
The thinking: “American life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries, with pre‑COVID-19 United States life expectancy averaging 78.8 years and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years,” Trump states in the order. “Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases.”
In 2022, Trump says, about 41% of U.S. children had at least one chronic health condition, such as allergies or asthma, 40% of U.S. adolescents were overweight or obese, and 18% of late adolescents and young adults had fatty liver disease.
“To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must re-direct our national focus, in the public and private sectors, toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease,” Trump says. “This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.”
Kennedy, the new HHS secretary, said during a confirmation hearing organized by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that the new GLP-1 agonist anti-obesity drugs are “miracle drugs” but that he fears widespread use of the drugs could double employers’ health insurance costs.
The MAHA Commission’s role: The initial mission of the new MAHA Commission will be to “advise and assist the President on how best to exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis,” according to the order.
The focus: The commission will “study the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism,” Trump says in the order.
The commission will “assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanisms of disease,” Trump adds.
The commission is supposed to “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs,” Trump says.
The commission is also supposed to report on ideas for preventing childhood health issues by promoting proper nutrition and promoting healthy lifestyles, and it’s supposed to evaluate the effectiveness of current federal government childhood health data programs.
The nuts and bolts: Kennedy will be the chair of the new MAHA commission. A White House domestic policy official will be the executive director.
Other officials listed as commission members include the heads of HHS agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and the heads of departments such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Education.
The order does not mention the U.S. Labor Department or the Labor Department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration. EBSA likely would be responsible for applying any new federal children’s health rules created by the commission to employers’ self-funded benefit plans.
The order does give Kennedy and the commission executive director discretion to let other members of the Trump administration to serve on the commission.
