Senator Bill Frist
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Senator Bill Frist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That's right.
Yeah. Well, I think, and remember, I did the 20 years in medicine, the 12 years in politics and policy, but for the last 12 years, I used the private sector. And the example, the food that I gave, the example that I gave to you really comes out of the importance of the private sector and investments that are made, that are cutting edge, that ultimately define policy.
I also work from the policy end. So even though I'm no longer majority leader of the Senate, you mentioned it, I'm on the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where we talk about the health of the community, the non-medical determinants of health,
being much more important than the health care, that the food and our behavior and where we live and how we live is much more important than Bill Frist, the heart transplant surgeon, you know, saving lives, doing dramatic things. That's where the drama isn't very important. Don't want to diminish it. But the sort of 60% of the impact is in the dimensions that we were talking about.
And that means we have to go to policy. People say, why did you leave medicine and go to the United States Senate? What drove you to do it? Did you lose your mind? And I guess I did lose my mind. But one of the reasons is to be able to participate in the system that we're talking about. And that is ultimately public policy matters. Today, a lot of people dismiss government, dismiss institutions.
But at the end of the day, the public policy matters. And you've written about it. You know, we've talked about nutrition and agricultural policy. The Bipartisan Policy Center always, which is a center in Washington, D.C., bipartisan. Tom Daschle and I run the health component. We stay on the issues of supplemental nutrition on agricultural policy. We're on that because it does affect health care.
and the health, the burdens of disease, and the sort of quality of lives we're going to live. So it really starts from the private sector all the way up to the public sector, and you don't have to be a politician to participate in the public sector.
It is. It is. And again, you've written so much about it, but you know, the food stamp program of the 1960s, a program that you've written about is, was mainly, you know, can people afford the food and let's just get them food. Let's just get them calories and some protein, but let's get them calories.
And then in the seventies, when, when sort of, I was coming through in the medical school, in medical school, we first began to say, well, that's not going to be enough, but we really need to start looking to sort of better nutrition, but it took another, 15 years to a healthier food and not just any food.
But it took another 15 years, really, and the SNAP actually became SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Program, after I left the Senate. But the fact that nutrition was put in the title, that was good. But then it took another five or six years before people say, what does nutrition really mean? And I think the SNAP, the Bipartisan Policy Center report that you mentioned, basically said three things.
Instead of taking the big policy issue and just arguing for it, it said, let's take three things. Number one, that food is medicine and healthy food has to be an objective of SNAP. That wasn't the objective back in the 60s. So do that, number one. Number two, sugary beverages.
We know, science, you've known for a long time, but for the last eight years, we know there's probably the number one killer out there today in terms of when you look at metabolic disorder. That's just so prominent, and I'm exaggerating a little bit and oversimplifying. But we made that number two.
And then number three, in that just one report, and that one report goes to the 450 sort of policymakers out there, the United States Congress. We made the healthy reading in terms of fruits and vegetables and to lower making them both affordable, but also in the SNAP program itself. So we focused on all that. We took it.
Now, that's not because of that report, but obviously the Obama administration came in, made huge progress. We have, based on the science, And that's been evaluated. The health, the metabolic conditions are probably 40% healthier, some reports say, than we did with the old SNAP program. And now you have President Trump coming in trying to roll that back.
And that rollback, now the only thing that's going to stop that, again, as you said, all the lobbying is out there against it, is going to be the science. If we're 40% healthier... We're 40% more productive at work. There's 40% less absenteeism. The GDP, the economy is growing. The jobs are being created.
And it's that sort of reasoning that ultimately we need to push through, continue to push through. Again, you've written this whole story, but things like the Bipartisan Policy Center and other foundations need to echo that directly into the policy centers.
Well, that's hard to read because it's a fragmented system. We have our executive branch, which can sort of be out there voice and can do a lot through regulations. Then we we have our legislative branch where all the money is and people forget that. And the house of representatives is where all the sort of money starts and therefore ultimately has to be translated.
But then even after the law is passed, it goes back to the execution. And those are different people. The only thing I can say is it comes back in this reason. I'm talking to you now and you're talking to me and we've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of listeners. It comes back to the American people.
And how educated, how knowledgeable they are that they can translate that up through their mayors, through their school boards, through their city boards, through the state. And ultimately it gets through the system itself. And that's why democracy is a tough, tough system of government to implement. and execute because it takes so long to get through it.
But again, the HIV age is a great example for our listeners to listen to because it was killing 3 million people a year, not 60,000 a year, 3 million people a year globally. Huge stigma around it, impossible to do. And by coming together, Democrats and Republicans
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