RFK Jr. Spars With Democrats Over Fraud, Vaccine Policy (2)

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Thursday offered up his own answer for justifying cuts to the department, kicking off a marathon of budget hearings before Congress.

Kennedy told House lawmakers that the administration’s budget request, which would slash the department by nearly $16 billion, “invests in prevention because preventing disease costs less and delivers better outcomes than treating it.”

During a series of tense exchanges, Kennedy faced off with several House Ways and Means Committee Democrats over the administration’s efforts to go after fraud and the health secretary’s changes to childhood vaccine schedules. Democrats continued criticizing Kennedy on vaccines, measles outbreaks, and the termination of National Institutes of Health grants during the afternoon hearing before House Appropriations lawmakers.

The secretary tried to emphasize preventative medicines and focus less on vaccines, which the World Health Organization considers a key preventive measure for more than 30 life-threatening diseases.

Fights Over Fraud

Democrats grilled Kennedy over President Donald Trump’s pardoning of people found to defraud health programs and bringing back brokers suspected of committing fraud on the Affordable Care Act—a move they said apparently contradicts the administration’s efforts to root out what they say is fraud in social programs.

“It’s the people at the top that help to perpetuate this fraud and the administration’s position seems to be that it’s only the recipients and not the providers that commit fraud,” said committee ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.).

Kennedy said that concerns over fraud is a bipartisan issue, he doesn’t see Democrats as eager to do something about it. “The application, the implementation of anti-fraud has not been bipartisan,” he said.

Waivers that allow states to send Medicaid payments to family members for caregiving services are “rife with fraud” because the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services doesn’t have a way to oversee whether those services are being provided, he said.

“It’s one of the reasons that Medicaid doubled during the Biden administration because we are paying for fraud now as much as for medicine,” Kennedy said.

In opening remarks, Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) focused on preventive care, increasing access to health care in rural areas, and tackling health care fraud.

“Our health system is full of misaligned incentives, the most glaring being that reimbursement is concentrated to patients who are already sick and does too little to help Americans stay healthy,” Smith said.

Vaccine Policy

Democrats also pushed the health secretary on his efforts to change broadly accepted vaccine recommendations. Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) pressed Kennedy on the recent uptick in US measles cases and what she says is a lack of a vaccine public messaging campaign.

“The anti-vaccine rhetoric you ran on and the anti-vaccine actions you have taken over the last year clearly correlates with the dramatic increases again in preventable diseases,” she said. “As a mother, this horrifies me.”

Neal also blasted the secretary’s impact on vaccine policies.

“Nothing has changed about the science of vaccines,” Neal said.

When pressed during the House Appropriations hearing on whether he thought the measles vaccine was effective, Kennedy responded that he thought it was “safe for most people.”

Proposed NIH Cuts

House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) during the afternoon session rejected the Trump administration’s requested budget cuts to the NIH and HHS.

“The president’s budget proposes to cut funding for NIH research by $6 billion. We are not going to do that,” DeLauro said. “You propose cutting CDC funding by 30%. We are not going to do that.”

DeLauro noted that Congressional appropriators had rejected Trump’s deep proposed cuts to the agency that Trump proposed last year.

“I was extremely disappointed to see that the White House budget request did not build on that progress we made, but instead it proposed extreme cuts to programs that the American people rely on,” said DeLauro.

Labor-HHS Subcommittee Chair Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) acknowledged that Trump’s proposed cuts to HHS will likely never become reality.

“Like last year, I doubt that we will be able to agree on areas for reduction. I’m a strong supporter of investments for NIH,” said Aderholt. “I respect that to fit the president’s objective, you had to make some hard decisions.”

Surgeon General Nominee

Kennedy also was asked about Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, who hasn’t received a committee vote even though her confirmation hearing was in February.

Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.), who, like Means and Kennedy, is an ally of the Make America Healthy Again movement, asked the health secretary to explain why the Stanford University-trained health influencer was the right pick for the nation’s top public health job.

Kennedy responded that “Casey Means is the most articulate, eloquent, and erudite evangelist for the MAHA movement,” and that both Democrats and Republicans should support her nomination.

Kennedy is expected to testify before the House Education and the Workforce Committee Friday, as well as four more committees in the coming days.