CMS’s $100 Million ‘MAHA Elevate' Is a Blessing

New Innovative Care Program to Prevent Disease and Improve Quality of Life

By Louis Conte, Health Freedom Editor, The MAHA Report

In December, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly launched a new initiative, MAHA Elevate, which stands for ‘Make America Healthy Again: Enhancing Lifestyle and Evaluating Value-based Approaches Through Evidence.’ The initiative is part of the administration’s bold plan to reform America’s health systems en route to addressing the chronic disease epidemic.

As described on CMS’s government website, “The model will provide approximately $100 million to fund 3-year cooperative agreements for up to 30 proposals that promote health and prevention for Original Medicare beneficiaries. The proposals will utilize evidence-based, whole-person care approaches — including functional or lifestyle medicine interventions — currently not covered by Original Medicare.”

CMS plans to release a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) in the coming weeks, with a launch of the model program set for September 1.

In making the announcement, CMS Innovation Center’s Abe Sutton said, “​​For decades, health policy has focused too much on flashy, expensive surgeries and too little on the unglamorous work of prevention. At the CMS Innovation Center, we’re changing that. I’m excited to announce MAHA Elevate. MAHA Elevate is the first of its kind initiative to test evidence-based approaches that treat the root causes of health problems before they turn into emergencies…These programs will support innovative care that works alongside conventional medicine to prevent disease and improve quality of life without any added cost to people. We’re thinking outside the box, because we believe a healthy society is one that makes it easier to stay healthy.”

As the CMS sees it, functional or lifestyle interventions can “slow or prevent chronic disease,” but in order to help older populations the government needs more evidence “to understand which interventions work best for older populations and can be applied across Original Medicare to promote healthy lifestyles.”

And then there’s prevention.

Few people realize that the federal government’s CMS system does not pay for preventative healthcare. If you’re chronically ill with diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or another chronic disease – as six in ten Americans are – the government helps pay for your treatment. But preventative care – everything from changing one’s diet from empty carbohydrates to organic vegetables and protein, to regular physical activity – is rarely studied, and not covered.

In other words, statins and GLP-1 receptor agonists are covered, while organic broccoli, wild caught salmon, and gym memberships are not.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently told a gathering in Nashville, Tennessee, “We now know that the things you eat are driving mental illness as well as physical health. And we’re asking people now, eat real food. Eat protein. Eat fruit, eat vegetables, eat high-fiber grains. And, like Governor Lee said, this is just common sense.”

It is common sense. But to ensure that the best health advice reaches millions of Americans, we need to study the benefits of positive preventative healthcare.

This is not to say information from MAHA experts on living healthy, that you read here on The MAHA Report or hear every week on our MAHA Media Hub, is not valid. It is, but gold standard research on what makes us healthy needs to be done and the public needs to be made aware of it.

Case in point: look at the research into Vitamin D3, long suppressed, as Dr. Eric Berg, a frequent speaker on the MAHA Media Hub, explains here.

It’s time to reach more people with information based on gold standard science.

By testing whole-person approaches to healthcare, MAHA Elevate aims to help transform the U.S. healthcare system to one that proactively addresses the root causes of chronic disease rather than merely responds to symptoms.

This outside the box initiative deserves bipartisan support.