“Make America Healthy Again (MAHA).” Finally, something we can all agree on.
The new MAHA report with its pages of promises taps into something real, something we see daily in primary care practice: Many Americans feel unwell, unheard, and unprotected by the very institutions meant to support them. Compared to our peer countries, we live shorter, sicker lives, suicide rates are rising, and even our children are less healthy than they were a decade ago. Meanwhile, high health care costs drain resources from foundations of health and wellbeing: housing, food, transportation, and education. The need to reclaim health, both individually and nationally, is urgent, and MAHA is not wrong to say so.
But scratch beneath the surface and MAHA’s “plan” collapses into little more than a slogan of wellness platitudes, conspiracy theories, and anti-science detours that distract from real reform.
MAHA is right to call out the food system, environmental exposures, and perverse, profit-driven incentives. But the proposed solutions are not just wrong; they are dangerous. Undermining trust in vaccines and politicizing them, cutting access to vaccines, banning vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, and demonizing public health institutions puts us all at risk. Cutting lifesaving social programs and slashing Medicaid for a projected 10 million people is antithetical not only to good health but to our collective moral responsibility to all in our society, particularly the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, promoting misinformation and discredited wellness influencers while purging experts from the CDC and NIH, sows confusion and chaos, further dividing us all and even leading to violence against dedicated public health officials.
Our patients cannot “detox” their way to health if their communities lack clean water, safe housing, or access to healthy foods and medical care. We cannot rebuild trust in medicine by peddling fear and misinformation. And we cannot fix a broken system by retreating to individualism dressed up as “personal freedom.” What America needs is not disruption branded as reform; we need to return to the basics: primary care, prevention, trust in science and each other, and the social foundations of health.
Primary care is the backbone of a healthy society: it helps our patients prevent and better manage chronic diseases, improves health outcomes, and lowers health care costs. But that backbone is buckling and primary care is in crisis. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. adults do not have a primary care provider, and those who do often wait weeks or even months to see them. PCPs are underpaid, burnt out, and forced to spend twice as long on unnecessary paperwork than they do with patients. Many PCPs across the country are cutting their hours, moving to concierge practice, or leaving clinical practice all together. Meanwhile, medical students, riddled with mounting student debt, are flocking to specialties with higher pay and better hours. RFK Jr. and the Trump administration have noted, at least on paper, that primary care matters. While Medicare’s 2026 proposed plan to shift dollars from procedures to prevention would be meaningful progress, it is not enough to save primary care nor promote health if the rest of the system collapses.
Real reform requires restructuring our health care system to promote health and reforming a health care payment system that currently rewards filling hospital beds and expensive interventions instead of the care that actually keeps people well. It means putting primary care back as the foundation of American medicine by funding it adequately, closing the pay gap with specialists, and giving clinicians the time and support to care for both body and mind. It also means addressing the conditions that make people sick long before they reach the exam room by ensuring safe housing, clean air and water, access to nutritious foods, good schools, and a living wage. These are as lifesaving as any prescription.
Just as critically, it requires rebuilding trust in science by strengthening the CDC and NIH, insulating vaccine guidance from politics, and putting an end to the chaos we have witnessed this year: from RFK Jr. dismantling the vaccine advisory committee, firing the CDC director in the name of “trust,” and gutting critical public health and research programs. Rather, we need to fund these agencies, optimize their organizational structure for results, staff them with experts, and ensure their grounding in high-quality science. Primary care alone cannot carry the weight of a collapsing public health infrastructure.
Yes, let us make America healthy again. But let us do it with science, compassion, and an understanding that health is not just about individual choices; it is about the systems we build, the policies we pass, and the values we uphold.
RFK Jr. and MAHA diagnosed the crisis correctly. But they are prescribing the wrong cure.
Emily Doucette is a medical student. Wayne Altman is a family physician.
