Why America’s Health Crisis Is an Incentive Problem

What It Covers

TrueMed founder Justin Maris explains how America's chronic disease crisis stems from environmental factors rather than healthcare failures. He traces the 1970s food system transformation through crop subsidies, discusses why 80% of adults are overweight, and presents TrueMed's solution: enabling tax-free HSA/FSA spending on preventive lifestyle interventions like gym memberships and better food.

Key Questions Answered

• •Crop Subsidy Reform: The US government spent $100 billion over the last decade subsidizing corn, soy, and wheat, making these ingredients artificially cheap. This led food companies to replace traditional ingredients with processed alternatives like high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil. Americans now get 20% of calories from soybean oil alone, a historically unprecedented shift that drives obesity and inflammation through widespread use in processed foods.
• •Healthcare Payment Mismatch: The current system pays hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to manage heart attacks but nothing to prevent them through exercise or diet interventions. TrueMed addresses this by enabling people to use tax-free HSA and FSA dollars on lifestyle interventions through letters of medical necessity. This redirects healthcare spending toward prevention rather than exclusively funding acute disease management after conditions develop.
• •Chemical Regulation Gap: The US allows 60,000 to 80,000 chemical compounds banned in the EU because American policy requires companies only to self-certify products as generally recognized as safe. European regulations require multi-year safety testing similar to pharmaceutical approval processes before novel compounds enter the food system. This regulatory difference explains significant health outcome disparities between American and European populations exposed to different environmental toxins.
• •GLP-1 Limitations: While medications like Ozempic reduce appetite and enable weight loss, they do not address underlying food quality issues. People eating the same ultra-processed foods in smaller quantities become deficient in protein and micronutrients, creating long-term health problems. Sustainable health requires fixing the food system itself rather than relying solely on appetite suppression drugs as a universal solution for 80% of overweight adults.
• •Metabolic Psychiatry Approach: Research shows that addressing physical health through diet, sleep, and inflammation reduction works better than talk therapy alone for conditions like depression. Ketogenic diets resolve symptoms in many schizophrenic, epileptic, and bipolar patients. This demonstrates that mental health conditions often have metabolic root causes, suggesting treatment should prioritize biological interventions before attributing issues to psychological factors requiring extended therapy.