Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

uh changing the um the relationship between americans and their health care system but you know it's like turning a a giant oil tanker you have to keep hitting it and hitting with the tugboat and the bow and then ultimately it will start to turn and then you know you hit that um you hit it just enough times that don't flip them flip fast

Yeah, I mean, the problem with addiction is that the costs of the addict, you know, we at HHS, we're the fiduciary, the medical costs of the addict.

So we can look and say, okay, if we can cure you from addiction, you know, I have a cousin who, you know, Patrick Kennedy, who was in Congress, but he had 17 rehabs, and he was telling me,

During that period of his life, he was at the emergency room every two weeks, and he had irritated bowel syndrome, and he had contusions, and he had all of these other illnesses that he didn't even associate with addiction, but they were all associated with it, and you know that.

Oh, yeah, it gets deep.

And he said in 15 years that he's been sober, he's never been to the emergency room once.

Wow.

HHS is able to look at those costs and those trajectories and all those collateral damage in the healthcare system.

The addicts costing elsewhere a lot more money with law enforcement, with broken families, with lost jobs and inefficiencies, and those aren't internalized anywhere.

And what we're trying to do is bring together all of the agencies, the VA, labor, HUD, and HHS, all the agencies, HHS together to look at that addict and then follow him over.

Have somebody responsible for following him over the lifespan of his addiction.

And nobody does that.

And so now it's the same problem that we have with the health care system is that it's everybody's financial benefit to keep that addict sick because everybody is making money from them.

And so you don't have anybody who's accountable for the outcome.

And what you need to do is, you know, we're doing these pilot programs called Street and eight different locales to figure out how to do this, to bring all the agencies together, do early interventions, confront the addict on the street, get them out of crisis into treatment, out of treatment into, you know, rehab, out of rehab into sober housing, long-term care.

Help them find a job and to stabilize their lives and have one person who's responsible for that whole trajectory.

Amen.

And then everybody checks the boxes.

Everybody.

I found him a house.