Posted on 10/08/2026 11:20:18 AM PDT by little jeremiah
Tomorrow, September 29, the second annual MAHA Summit will be held at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. Today, I looked at the speakers and was genuinely taken aback. Then the picture became considerably clearer when I took a gander at the sponsor list. This is being advertised as “a one-day gathering of the foremost leaders shaping the future of American health,” culminating with Vice President JD Vance and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What bothers me most is not any single corporation on this list. It is who is missing. I know many of the people who spent years doing the difficult, often personally costly work that created the constituency now called MAHA. Physicians who lost positions and privileges because they refused to remain silent. Scientists who watched open scientific debate give way to institutional orthodoxy. Vaccine-injured patients and their families. Independent doctors fighting to practice medicine without becoming functionaries of enormous hospital systems and insurance companies. Farmers and ranchers struggling under a regulatory structure increasingly built around industrial agriculture. Small food producers and meat processors fighting rules that protect enormous incumbents. Researchers who documented financial conflicts throughout medicine and public health long before doing so became politically fashionable. Parents who organized, testified, protested and endured years of ridicule because they insisted that responsibility for their children belonged first to families, not bureaucracies. These people were not an interest group within MAHA. They were MAHA. Yet at the movement’s premier Washington gathering, they are remarkably difficult to find.
To understand why this is so jarring, remember what MAHA was supposed to represent. What Bobby Kennedy promised us. It did not arise because Americans believed that the health insurance industry needed a larger voice in Washington, that hospital conglomerates lacked influence, that Silicon Valley needed better access to government, or that venture capital was insufficiently represented in health policy. Quite the opposite. The movement grew because millions of Americans concluded that the institutions controlling medicine, food, agriculture and public health had become far too intertwined with the industries they were supposed to oversee. They watched regulatory agencies defer to pharmaceutical companies, doctors lose autonomy to enormous health systems and insurers, small farmers struggle under rules written for industrial agriculture, and dissenting scientists marginalized by institutions increasingly dependent upon government and corporate money. Whatever else one thinks of MAHA, its political energy came from that profound loss of trust. That is why the Summit program is worth examining closely. It raises a simple question that should not be dismissed merely because the people currently occupying HHS are people many in the movement supported: Who exactly is MAHA for now?
Perhaps nothing captures the problem better than the 10:40 a.m. panel titled “Affordability First.” The people chosen to discuss affordability are Wyatt Decker, chief physician for value-based care at UnitedHealth; Catherine Gaffigan, president of Health Solutions at Elevance Health; and Mike Tuffin, president and CEO of AHIP, the national trade association for health insurers. The moderator is a senior CMS official. MAHA Summit 2026 There is nothing inherently wrong with hearing from insurance executives at a conference on institutionalized health care. They understand their industry and should be required to defend its practices publicly.
But where is the other side of that discussion? Where is the independent physician spending hours fighting prior-authorization denials? Where is the patient staring at a five-figure hospital bill despite having insurance? Where is the rural doctor whose practice can barely survive the administrative burden imposed by insurers and consolidated health systems? Where is the economist examining what vertical integration has done to American medicine? Where is the physician trying to figure out how to code and document a vaccine injury in a reimbursement system that determines what gets recognized, treated, and ultimately paid for? Where is the patient whose claim has simply been denied? We all thought MAHA was founded to challenge entrenched interests has somehow convened a panel on medical affordability dominated by the insurance industry itself, while the physicians and patients who live under that system have been completely excluded from the discussion.
The incestuous nature of MAHA is becoming harder to ignore, and the conflicts of interest seem to multiply by the day. GRAIL is a marquee sponsor of the MAHA Summit while its flagship Galleri cancer test is before the FDA. Its CEO gets a seat on the Summit stage. Casey Means invested in Function Health, which now offers GRAIL’s Galleri test to its members. Meanwhile, the same small circle of people moves among MAHA Center, MAHA Action, MAHA PAC and MAHA Institute, while corporations with business before the federal health establishment sponsor the gathering alongside senior government officials. Any one of these relationships might be dismissed as incidental. Taken together, they demand transparency. MAHA was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry and government, not build its own.
The fact that GRAIL’s CEO has been given a seat on the Summit stage is a conflict of interest that demands disclosure. How much did GRAIL pay? Which sponsorship package did it purchase? What did that money buy? Was the speaking slot part of the package? Did GRAIL have input into the panel topic, its composition, or the other speakers? Which HHS or FDA officials attended meetings, dinners, or private events involving GRAIL? MAHA built its credibility by exposing the entanglement of corporate money, regulatory access, and government power. It does not get a pass when those same relationships occur under the MAHA banner.
HHS has stated that its officials “were not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities” and were unaware of the arrangements described by Bloomberg. But that hardly answers what has happened here. This is not merely a transparency problem. It is a betrayal of what MAHA claimed to stand for. A movement built on exposing the corrupting relationship between corporate money, privileged access and government power is now holding a Summit where, according to Bloomberg, corporations were offered speaking slots, influence over panel composition and subject matter, and a private dinner involving the Secretary of HHS and the Administrator of CMS for packages reaching $300,000. The defense that Kennedy, Oz and other HHS officials did not know what was being sold in their names does not make this better. It raises the question of how an organization operating under the MAHA banner was permitted to commercialize access to them in the first place. The people who built this movement were promised an end to this kind of Washington influence-peddling, not a MAHA-branded version of it.
But much of the day is not devoted to the physicians, scientists, farmers, parents, patients, medical-freedom advocates and independent researchers who spent years building the constituency that ultimately became MAHA. In fact, almost none of them have been asked to speak. Instead, the program is heavily populated by executives from some of the largest health-care corporations in America, major hospital systems, health insurers, technology companies, venture-backed medical businesses and companies whose fortunes may depend upon decisions being made by the very federal agencies represented at the conference. The official agenda includes UnitedHealth, Elevance Health, AHIP, Walmart, GRAIL, ResMed, Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics, Hims & Hers, Noom, Advocate Health, Sutter Health, Anthropic and OpenAI, among many others. Senior officials from HHS, CMS, FDA, NIH, USDA and EPA are appearing alongside them. MAHA Summit 2026.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
I meant to post this a while ago. Seems that the swamp is so deep even someone with very good intentions, RFKJr, couldn’t do much.
Rooting out embeds in STEM fields is especially difficult since they do have credentials and do have some valid authority. Not at all like liberal crap fields where anyone with an IQ >90 can spot the lie .
It takes longer.
The medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex really got exposed during the covid plandemic.
“Where is the independent physician spending hours fighting prior-authorization denials? Where is the patient staring at a five-figure hospital bill despite having insurance?”
If you want insurance to cover more stuff then it will be more expensive.
“ meant to post this a while ago. Seems that the swamp is so deep even someone with very good intentions, RFKJr, couldn’t do much.”
People continue to put a timeline on President Trump v this centuries old, multi trillion dollar cabal
Silly
Partially exposed but not held accountable thanks to Fauci and company getting the RNA genetic modifiers rushed to approval, renamed 'vaccines' and granted immunity from liability - to rake in billions of taxpayer dollars with no regard for the consequences.
One would think such a horrible criminal conspiracy would generate interest from investigative reporters.
Real investigations have occurred but the MSM of course won’t touch anything.
Nov.3 coming up. Big changes. and not just referring to elections.
I never had health insurance so I don’t even know how it works.
https://truthsocial.com/@seckennedy/posts/117406305261260999
This week, I joined NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, and CDC Director Dr. Erica Schwartz at NIH to open a historic clinic dedicated to studying and caring for patients experiencing health problems following vaccination.
We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them. President Trump and I are building a health system that takes them seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer.
This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.
All were under contract with the DOD.
US healthcare has much inefficiency, FRAUD WASTE ABUSE.
Paragon Institute, CATO, HERITAGE, OPENTHEBOOKS have published much on healthcare FWA. Where will they be in this conference?
Where will the FRAUDSTERS be in this conference?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.