I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard my friend and colleague Calley Means, co-founder of TrueMed and an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, being booed, laughed at and shouted down at the Politico Health Care Summit this week.
Apparently, that room full of health care lobbyists and partisan critics didn’t want to hear the truth: American health policy in its current form is an absolute and utter failure. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest health bureaucracy in the world, needs an overhaul and it needs to happen fast.
The backlash Calley encountered Wednesday came just 24 hours after HHS began laying off 10,000 federal employees — including entrenched officials from agencies like the FDA, NIH, and CMS, who have presided over a stunning collapse in American health.
Shortly after Secretary Kennedy’s announcement of the restructuring, the former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf went on his LinkedIn page and stated ‘The FDA as we’ve known it is finished.’
Thank goodness it’s finished.
