The nation’s largest provider of Medicare Advantage plans is urging policymakers to bring the Make America Healthy Again agenda into an unexpected arena: health insurance.
Centene, one of the country’s largest managed care organizations, recently called on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to remove regulatory barriers that limit Medicare Advantage plans from covering “food as medicine” interventions. The proposal would allow insurers greater flexibility to offer nutrition-based treatments and services aimed at preventing and managing chronic disease.
For a movement that has largely focused on food ingredients, dietary guidelines, and nutrition policy, the development signals an important evolution. If MAHA’s goal is to reduce the burden of chronic illness in America, reforming the incentives within the healthcare system may prove just as important as reforming the food supply itself.
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Over the past year, MAHA advocates have scored notable victories by persuading companies and consumers rather than relying solely on government mandates. The push to remove artificial food dyes from popular products has demonstrated the movement’s ability to work with the private sector while responding to growing consumer demand for healthier options.
This approach stands in contrast to many previous public-health initiatives, which often relied on top-down directives and regulatory mandates. Efforts to improve Americans’ eating habits have frequently focused on changing what institutions provide rather than empowering individuals to make healthier choices and encouraging businesses to meet that demand.
The MAHA movement’s greatest strength has been its ability to build a coalition that includes parents, consumers, health advocates, and, increasingly, private sector partners.
Health insurance is a natural next frontier.
Chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease account for the vast majority of healthcare spending in the United States. Yet the U.S. healthcare system often spends far more on treating the consequences of poor nutrition than addressing the nutritional causes themselves.
That is beginning to change. Programs providing medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and nutrition counseling have shown promising results in helping patients manage chronic conditions and reduce costly hospitalizations. As the evidence supporting these interventions continues to grow, insurers have strong financial incentives to make them available to patients.
The challenge is that existing regulations make it difficult for Medicare Advantage plans to offer these benefits broadly. CMS should evaluate whether current restrictions unnecessarily limit innovation and consumer choice. If an insurer believes nutrition-based interventions can improve health outcomes and lower costs, patients should be free to select a plan that offers those benefits.
Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on people, these reforms would create greater diversity within the insurance marketplace by allowing consumers to choose between traditional coverage models and plans that place a greater emphasis on preventive nutrition-based care.
Competition among insurers could then determine which approaches deliver the best results. Plans that successfully improve health outcomes while reducing costs would attract more enrollees, creating market-driven incentives for innovation. Rather than expanding bureaucracy, policymakers would be removing obstacles that prevent consumers and insurers from experimenting with new solutions.
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The MAHA movement has already demonstrated that improving public health does not require treating businesses as adversaries. Bringing that same philosophy to health insurance could help reshape the relationship between food and medicine in America.
If policymakers are serious about reducing chronic illness, lowering healthcare costs, and giving people more control over their own health decisions, expanding access to food-as-medicine benefits is a logical place to start. It represents a rare opportunity to advance public health, consumer choice, and economic efficiency at the same time — a combination that could give the MAHA movement lasting influence well beyond nutrition policy alone.
Sam Raus is the David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices. Follow him on X: @SamRaus1.