The Senate’s confirmation of Robert Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) concludes a particularly contentious nomination. He will be the Secretary of HHS, whether one likes it or not. So, I’d like to do something somewhat out-of-character in today’s Washington: call a truce. Perhaps we Catholics are politically naïve. Perhaps politics really is just war by other means (Clausewitz) and that really everything is just politics (Thomas Mann). But I’d rather not think so and, given what all sides claim to be at stake, shouldn’t we come together? Given that, regardless of where you stood or how you voted, Robert Kennedy will be HHS Secretary, shouldn’t everybody work together to ensure his success — which, in the end, is America’s success?

Robert Kennedy has called for a MAHA movement: Make America Healthy Again. You don’t need reams of data to confirm America isn’t healthy. Nor can you deny there are powerful interests that want to preserve the status quo. Regardless of what one thinks of every detail of MAHA (e.g., approaches to certain vaccines), its overarching vision is that getting a healthier America requires a more natural and comprehensive vision of health that emphasizes prevention over cure. America is not going to get healthier one pill at a time. That vision of a more natural health ecosystem that takes account of the whole person is very much the Catholic vision of healthcare, cura personalis (care of the person). I suggest that Catholic vision can and should play a part in MAHA.

Now, I am perfectly aware that there are those who will rail against “sectarian” elements in healthcare (usually because their notion of “healthcare” involves killing unborn children through birth and/or amputating healthy genitalia). There is a strong current (which had something of an ear in the previous HHS under Xavier Becerra) that deems Catholic healthcare to be substandard (read Lori Friedman, Bishops and Bodies). I’d remind those folks that hospitals (like universities) were a Catholic invention and that Catholics have been in healthcare long before the state. We’ve got some useful experience to share.

Modern medical specialization has parceled up the person. To Dr. X, I am a heart; to Dr. Y, a knee. General practitioner Dr. Z may attempt a more global perspective on me but, as soon as something looks unusual, I’ll be sent off to specialist A. Watch American television: The pharmaceutical ads hawk the latest medicaments for diseases you’ve never even heard of. In a particularly bizarre synergy, the pharmaceutical promoter twins with the disclaimer lawyer who, talking faster than Abby Sciuto on a CafePow overdose, counsels that pill X gives clearer skin but can also result in permanent seizures, suicidal ideation, and hair loss. We need a better vision of “health” than this. To the extent that Robert Kennedy might think outside that established box, let’s see what he comes up with.

To Catholics, of course, HHS is implicated in a variety of issues we care about, on “right” and “left.” On the “right,” under Biden-Becerra HHS was a major promoter of abortion while ignoring conscience rights of health care personnel unwilling to participate in those procedures. We can hope a Kennedy HHS changes course. On the “left,” too many people find healthcare inaccessible or unaffordable. Games hospitals and insurers play to jack up costs (I was kept two nights in a hospital for stenting which, had it been classified as “inpatient,” would have been covered by my insurance but because they called it “outpatient” left me with an $1,100 bill) continue to deter people from seeking the preventive health care Kennedy argues America needs.

So, as the Kennedy HHS begins, can we put aside political acrimony to recognize that everybody benefits from “making America healthy again” and that the process works better if we all work together? Likewise, can we recognize that the MAHA vision of health may very well usher in a “Catholic moment” for our long tradition of healthcare and of the patient as person (to steal Paul Ramsey’s phrase) to contribute constructively to a country looking across party lines for a healthier way forward?

(With acknowledgements to a Belmont House Washington meeting for some ideas on this topic).