The Weaponized Complexity We Live In
- haileycrawford3
- Jun 25
- 10 min read
Katy Talento is an epidemiologist, a naturopath, a veteran health policy advisor and health benefits consultant. She is the founder and CEO of AllBetter Health, an insurgent benefits advisory firm building lower-cost, higher-quality health plans for employers. Prior to starting AllBetter, Katy was the health policy lead in the White House on the Domestic Policy Council where her portfolio included ending secret health care prices, lowering drug prices, expanding health IT interoperability, combating the opioid crisis, protecting conscience rights in health care and promoting bioethics in the life sciences.
Episode Highlights:
3:32 – Radicalization of COVID-19. “Well, I got radicalized during COVID and started questioning. I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist, so I thought COVID was really cool and kind of the Super Bowl for epidemiologists. It exposed me to realize the scientific and medical enterprise is broken and I started chasing down what real health is. Also, right before COVID happened, my 39-year-old sister died of colorectal cancer. It was obviously the worst thing that ever happened to my family, and it put me on my own health journey. My life of Diet Coke, four hours of sleep and vending machines - it was time for most of that to change. I started trying to figure out how that doesn’t happen to me, and I learned so much. I realized I might as well get a credential, so I became a traditional naturopathic doctor. Recently, I've become very interested in the obstetrical industrial complex, how damaging it is to moms, babies and families, and the instinct injury it inflicts on all of us. I've started really looking at free, sovereign, and home births where agents of the state in the home and helping women/families start to consider having a home birth to take control over their own births.”
5:42 - Natural immunity is beautiful. “People who were dying from COVID were people who were already sick, yet our immune systems are amazing. Natural immunity is one of the most beautiful things out there. As I realized the power of vitamin D, I realized the way people have been living and the way our bodies are designed is not based on our modern life. We are living unbiological lives that are not fit for humans. We need to really think about if the cavemen could live this way. Because our bodies can't evolve fast enough to keep up with modernity. Our bodies are still cavemen bodies, and they run best on cavemen lifestyles. That's not to say we live like cavemen, but what are the practices in terms of sleep, sunlight and ancestral food? If your great grandmother wouldn't recognize that thing as food, it's not food, so don't eat it. I went down the rabbit trail of regenerative farming and raised livestock, animal fats and saturated fats, raw dairy and all the things like that. We always hear, especially in public health school, mortality was so bad back in the day. It wasn't like everyone just keeled over at 45. A bunch of babies and moms at childbirth were dying. Everyone who made it past those moments lived for a long time because they were living healthy lives. They moved a lot. They were in the sun all day. They got up with the sun and went to sleep with the sun. They ate real food.”
11:18 – Obesity is engineered by design. “They need us to be sick for life, and they're getting exactly what they want. We are the sickest, fattest, saddest, most infertile, medicated population in human history. It's working for the health care swamp really well, but it's not working for us. When I was growing up, I had this idea that if I struggled with my weight or whatever, it was my fault. We've learned so much about processed food and screens, sleep and vitamin D deprivation, the impact of saturated fat versus good healthy raw grass-fed butter or proper cholesterol in grass-fed beef and organ meats and all the things that we're not feeding anyone anymore. These actually create the neurotransmitters in our bodies that give us energy, happiness, drive and purpose to help us to get off the couch and get up in the morning. When we are drowning ourselves in addictive by design and live a processed toxic lifestyle, there is a reason why people are struggling with these things. The new FDA commissioner, Marty McCary, was saying we've been blaming people for their obesity for too long when actually that obesity is being engineered by design by the food companies.”
20:17 – Bobby Kennedy as the HHS Secretary. “I love Bobby Kennedy, and I think he is super smart. I respected and watched his career since I got radicalized during COVID. I read his book that's about the public health enterprise and why it's so corrupt. That really helped me concentrate my thinking in some way. I really credit him and reached out to him actually after reading the book because we had some interactions during the first Trump term that I'm embarrassed about. We did not take the so-called anti-vax philosophy very seriously, but now I’ve had a repentance of heart about all that and wanted to talk to him about it. President Trump took it seriously and really wanted to bring Bobby Kennedy into his circle in the first term. The rest of us were confused by this, but as I've studied his work, I get more impressed. When I would listen to his podcast, he educated me a lot about many subjects. I was literally thrilled that he was becoming the HHS Secretary. I know that there were concerns from the conservative right and some of my friends in the faith community, but so far, he's been excellent. One thing though - making statements is a very, very, very important first step and those statements have never been made before; therefore, they are extremely important and I'm grateful for them. Of course, policymaking is the hard work of rolling out a regulation, getting notice and comments on it, redressing those comments and then actually defending it in court when the big healthcare industry sues you. You have to surround yourself with a bunch of lawyers who know how to write these 400-page regulations that can survive court scrutiny. That's where the next challenge is going to be. All the executive orders and new announcements are amazing statements and events, but they’re just announcements that they’re working on this. When they don't, they're going to need to actually use the tools that the executive branch has to write those regulations - it's going to be hard, and they will be sued. The hardest work is still ahead of them, but just the mainstreaming of these conversations is amazing. The more mainstream it becomes, the less we actually need government to act, right? Because people start investigating themselves.”
24:33 – Tricky legal matters. “The first industry that's going to sue him is going to be pharmaceutical industry. For instance, the executive order about international pricing on drugs and how the United States should pay the lowest global price for drugs instead of the highest by three or four times, which is what we're paying right now - that is going to lead to litigation immediately. The secretary has been talking about taking drug commercials off TV like every other country except New Zealand, although even New Zealand's policy is much better than ours. That's going to be a big litigation. We didn't ban ads under Trumps’ first term, but we did put out a rule that required if you're going to have a drug ad where you say how this drug could kill you or give you a four-hour erection or whatever, why not also give the financial side effects and put that price out there? We had a regulation that required that, and the drug companies sued right away. If he's going to think that he can take drug ads off, he is going to get sued over First Amendment compelled speech or prohibited speech. We will see how he navigates that. There is authority that he can use. Now I would argue that the health care system is either free nor a market, but there are capitalism rules that especially Republicans are very sensitive to. He's going to have to be very careful because so many members of Congress are really bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. They're not intending to be corrupt, but there are three or four pharmaceutical lobbyists for every single member of Congress. They're not just in their offices, framing issues for them, but they're writing checks and holding fundraisers for their campaigns. They're bundling. That doesn't necessarily corrupt a politician exactly, but if someone's written you a big check, you're going to take the meeting with them. If you take the meeting, they get to frame the issue for you. That can corrupt the process, but it's hard to shut that down. We have a constitutional right to redress our government. These are tricky legal matters, and we got sued in the first term for almost every single thing we did. We had a lot of very, very smart lawyers who protected us.”
28:21 – Next in the suing order. “I think there might be some public health groups and some doctor groups that are complaining about vaccines. There might be states suing because they are dependent on the federal government when it comes to Medicaid and grant programs. All the public health programs and funding are through grants, whether they're formula, block, or just discretionary grants. The president has the authority to exercise discretion and set policy for how those federal dollars are spent, but the states will come back and scream and cry that you're violating their sovereignty. When you start to take money away from entities that already have it, there's going to be problems. He's already encountered that with sanctuary cities, with DEI policies, with Title IX and transgender policies that he's threatening to pull funding from. All of that is very ripe for litigation. It doesn't mean he'll lose, but it's a huge pain.”
29:54 - Trump really believes in what Kennedy's trying to do. “100%, probably more than the staff. Little Republican children don't grow up wanting to work for Bobby Kennedy and a lot of people are finding themselves disoriented by the populism of the president and anti-corporate spin of the MAHA movement. I don't say that to be critical. It was the president who taught me better and inducted me into the populist way of thinking. I think that the president was always much more aggressive on these things than the staff were. I remember the president wanting to negotiate drug prices in Medicare, which Republicans were always opposed to that for many years. There is no price transparency. There's no price competition because the government pays for everything. One of the challenges that they have is that there are MAHA experts. There are people who are steeped in these policies and then there are experienced government staffers who have grown up on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch as political appointees. Those are not an overlapping Venn diagram. Those are separate. You can have a bunch of Republican political appointees or a bunch of MAHA activists from the outside who've never been in government and will get eaten for lunch by the deep state. That is a huge challenge because you need so many people to carry out these policies.”
32:45 - A leadership issue. “Yes. It's true. It's just that it's a skill set. I remember working for senators and they would literally think that train monkeys could do our jobs, but there are actual skills involved in writing a regulation that can survive court scrutiny, right? This is tricky and you can't just become that person because you want to. I agree with you – it’s leadership and it's inspiring. I think the inspiration of the people who already have these skills, including bureaucrats who have been there, may have lost their way but want to find it again.”
33:57 – Are people out of touch or do they know what's going on? “I actually think most people in Washington don't know what is up. They don't know how normal people live in the rest of the country, first of all. These are the five richest counties in the country, so the economic populism is a complete mystery to them. They are elite, educated, wealthy. But I would say the larger problem is they don't actually understand the industries they regulate and the business models behind those industries. Those business models aren't just this value neutral thing. Incentives predict outcomes, so the business model of healthcare absolutely determines the outcomes of healthcare. Healthcare is a fifth of our economy and is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. Nobody can be an expert in the whole picture. Most people who think they're healthcare experts are only expert in this tiny, tiny little niche that they operate in and that is even more true for policy experts in Washington. As a Capitol Hill staffer, I thought I understood healthcare. I had never seen how healthcare really operates from a healthcare sharing ministry's perspective, who's actually involved in negotiating with hospitals, or from an employer plan sponsor's perspective, who's building health plans and actually guaranteeing health outcomes on behalf of plan sponsors. There's so much that Hill staffers don't understand and they can't possibly understand. It's gotten too big to fail, to be regulated, to be overseen. It's a problem.”
41:46 – Your agency is the only one that will save you. “It's true that costs are going up every year, higher than the rate of inflation and the increase in wages. It's tempting to despair. When DOGE comes in and tells the secretary that he has to cut this and that, he probably looks at his budget and questions how he is going to do this? He has to pay for Medicare. He has to pay for Medicaid. But I think he's the only secretary in the history of secretaries who actually could because the best way to lower what we're spending on health care is to need less health care. We spend all our time and talking about how to lower the cost of health treatment, but if we were able to get 5-10% of people to need 20-30% less health care, that is the only way we're going to turn this ship around. People talk about the Pentagon budget, but that is chump change compared to Medicare and Medicaid. If Medicare were a country, it would be the eighth largest country We need to get healthy as a nation and stop using all this healthcare by continuing these conversations and allowing people to take agency over their lives. No white coat is coming to save you. No government program is going to save you. Your own agency is. Grow those tomatoes in your backyard. Make your own butter. Get off the pesticides and processed foods. Get up with the sun and start needing less healthcare. Find your purpose and find connection with people. All of that is a huge predictor of health outcomes. There is no other expert who can possibly save you the way you can save yourself and your own family. It is such a radical mindset shift. Washington loses its power when you have a free and intelligent people. That is why people who want government to grow can't have a free and intelligent people - they have to have coercion, control and mindless drones on their Instagram feeds. It's really important for us to take agency and to change our own lives.”
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