My son hasn’t forgiven me for school.

He’s 22 and he still brings it up.

And this wasn’t public school. It was the best school money could buy.

I was working in the White House. Our values mattered, and so I hunted down the most faith-based, boy-centric school I could find. All boys. All male teachers. Sports in the middle of the day. Kids hanging off tree branches instead of chained to desks. I walked in and thought: this is a boy’s paradise.

He hated it. Intensely.

It wasn’t the school I picked. It was school itself.

I sat down with Casey Harper at The Washington Stand’s Outstanding podcast to talk about this - about why our boys are cratering (5x lonelier than men their age a generation ago, 70% of overdose deaths, falling behind in every educational metric we can measure), and what I wish I’d understood before I made the choices I made for my son.

We get into:

• Why I’m not sure I believe in school for boys anymore

• How we medicalized normal boy behavior of risk-taking, stick-wielding, wall-bouncing and called it a disorder

• The “chickified” culture (thanks, Rush) and now we can’t tell the difference between a boy who wants to climb a tree and a boy who needs Adderall

• Why the same fire that drives a 9-year-old to beat dents into an oak is the fire that makes a 19-year-old willing to die for his country (and what happens when we extinguish it)

• And the question I’m wrestling with live on the air: what would it actually take to homeschool my grandkids while running my businesses?

I don’t have the answers.

(I keep telling people this. They keep asking me anyway.)

I’m a Gen X mom with a son who won’t let me forget the choices I made. I’m also a naturopath who’s spent years watching the “health” system manufacture sickness in adults, and I can see how we are doing something similar to our boys in real time.

Nobody at HHS is coming to save your son. Nobody at his school is either.

His teachers are lovely women. They don’t love him.

Read the article. Watch the full conversation.

Share it with the dad getting pressured into signing his 5-year-old up for kindergarten. Send it to the mom who just filled an ADHD script and feels weird about it. Forward it to the grandparent who still thinks daycare is progress.

We’re going to have to raise this generation ourselves.

Radically. Creatively. Generationally.

Health policy stars in DC do not grow up dreaming about ERISA and the House Ed & Workforce committee. They dream about Ways & Means, or Senate Finance. So that’s where they go. Because, for decades, that’s where the health care fights happen.

And that’s why we end up fighting forever over the 20 million people in the ACA exchanges while 160 million Americans on employer-sponsored plans get fleeced by PBMs, carriers, Big Pharma and fake-charity hospitals - and nobody in this town lifts a finger for them.

Then, when a new administration shows up and needs political appointees, they go to the committees where the staffers are, and stack HHS with people who have never done serious policy work for employer-sponsored market.

Nick Solheim at American Moment had me on the Moment of Truth podcast this week and we went through all of it.

• How I watched us try to do Repeal and Replace in 2017 with a Congress that hadn’t written a replace bill (and then watched the Frankenstein that came out of that process die in the Senate - and thank God it did).

• Why price transparency actually got done (the internal fight with our own libertarian wing was brutal).

• Why insurance is now more expensive than paying cash most of the time.

• Why every time Bobby Kennedy or Marty Makary tries to do the job we hired them for, our own side lets them get torched — when what we should be doing is laying our bodies on the train tracks for them, the way the other team does for their own.

Also, the apology email I wrote to Bobby Kennedy after I helped run him out of the first Trump White House. He was gracious. I self-flagellated. You can tell I’m Catholic.

Give it a listen. Let me know what you think.

The thing I didn’t understand until I was well out of government is that the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. It profits from your sickness. It has no structural incentive to produce your health.

I helped build parts of that machine, and I still got screwed by it - which either means I was naive, or the thing is more powerful than any of us on the inside wanted to admit.

(Both. It was both.)

What I know now - as a naturopath, as a former White House advisor, as someone who finally cleaned up her own health after watching her sister die too young - is that the best defense is to stop needing the system so much.

Sleep like a human. Eat like a human. Get some sunlight on your face. These aren’t woo. They’re species-specific requirements, and we’ve been talked out of them by a culture that profits from our dysfunction.

I spilled all the tea. Check it out and let me know what you think.

The free Diet Coke in the West Wing was the highlight of my day.

I am not joking. I would sprint over from my office multiple times before lunch to refill. I was in charge of health policy for the President of the United States, and my sole hydration was a product I’ve since described as fridge cigarettes. (I have since written a whole article about this. It is embarrassing. You should read it.)

That is who the 600 Pound Down podcast invited onto their show.

Coaches Justin and George are leading a weight loss and wellness movement comprised of people doing the hard, unglamorous work of actually changing their lives — not the Instagram version, the real version. Blue collar workers, middle class families, people who’ve been failed by the system and are figuring out what to do about it.

They are not policy wonks. They are not DC insiders. They are exactly the kind of people I spent two decades in Washington wanting to help.

So when they asked me to come on and just... tell the truth? I did.

We covered a lot of ground; here are a few of the highlights:

The medical cartel you’ve never heard of.

The AAMC, the American Association of Medical Colleges, is the trade group for medical schools. Their entire business model depends on scarcity.

Fewer doctors = higher salaries.

They fight like hell against any effort to open new medical schools, diversify curricula, or let anything other than petroleum-based pharmaceutical products count as medicine.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. I was lobbied by these people. I watched them frame issues for my colleagues before anyone else could get in the room. That’s how the game is played.

The Rockefellers figured this out in the 1930s. They needed a profitable use for petroleum byproducts. They commissioned the Flexner Report, which conveniently declared that the only legitimate medicine was the kind that prescribed petroleum-based pharmaceuticals - and formed state licensing boards to shut down every homeopathic, naturopathic, and osteopathic school that disagreed. The word “doctor” comes from the Latin for teacher, by the way. Not “prescriber of symptom-suppressing drugs.” Teacher.

We have been living inside that rebranding project ever since.

The PBMs are the real bond villains.

People assume the pharmaceutical manufacturers are the worst actors in this system. They’re not. They’re sub-demon tier. (A meaningful distinction.)

The real carnage is happening at the level of the middlemen - specifically the three PBMs that control 80% of the market: ExpressScripts, CVS Caremark, and OptumRx. Check your insurance card. If one of those logos is on it, your employer is being systematically robbed, and they probably don’t even know it.

In the Trump administration, a colleague of mine came in from the PBM industry to help us figure out how to lower drug prices. He put together a plan that would have cost the PBMs and pharmaceutical manufacturers real money.

He fell off a balcony in DC.

It was ruled a suicide. He had a family. Small kids. He was not miserable.

I’m not saying I know what happened. I’m saying nobody ever talked about it again.

Your body is not attacking you. It’s trying to save you.

We spent a long time on this one, because Justin and George’s audience lives it. The chronic pain, the infertility, the weight that won’t move no matter what. They are not random “failures.” They are your body doing exactly what it was designed to do when it thinks you’re being chased by a bear.

The problem is that the bear is your Instagram account. Your boss. Your commute. The fluorescent lights you’ve been sitting under for eight hours while eating from a vending machine because there was nothing else and you didn’t have time anyway.

Your body is not safe to reproduce. Your body is not safe to digest or detox. Your body is running every non-essential process on minimal power until the threat passes.

The threat doesn’t pass.

When I was a teenager with debilitating period symptoms, no doctor ever said: get more sleep, eat real food, reduce your stress, get outside. They just handed me birth control, which suppressed my symptoms beautifully while everything causing those symptoms festered for another two decades.

By the time I was ready to have children, the damage was done - well… maybe, but that’s a story for another time.

I am not anti-medicine. I want to be very clear about that. If you have a bullet in your belly, there is nowhere on earth I would rather be than a U.S. operating room. Broken arm? Go.

But chronic disease - the stuff that is killing us at scale, the stuff that half the country is now drowning in - conventional medicine cannot cure that. It can suppress it. Manage the decline. Slow the bleeding. But it cannot teach your body to heal, because it was never trained to do that, and the cartel that controls its curricula has a vested interest in making sure it never is.

Nobody is coming to save you from this. Washington is not coming. Your doctor is not coming.

They are working with the tools they have, inside a system designed to get paid only for those tools, and they mostly believe they’re doing the right thing.

You have to become the authority on your own body - and if you think about it honestly - you already are.

Which is either terrifying or the most liberating thing you’ve heard all week. I’m told it depends on the person.

If this kind of thing makes you furious (and it should), this is what we’re here for. Every piece I write is an attempt to hand you a weapon: something you can know, something you can do, some corner of this machine you can refuse to fund.

In this workshop, I break down how to assess each type of holistic practitioner to figure out which type is more likely to match your needs and priorities. A good match dramatically increases your likelihood of success with that type of practice. We also talk about the finances - what insurance covers, what your HSA secretly covers. How to spot red flags before you shell out too much.

Would love to know what you learn and which parts you find most helpful.

And thank you for being a paid subscriber. You’re the ones making AllBetter possible.

Katy

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(We missed you though!)

Most of us walk into the healthcare system blind. We sign forms we shouldn’t sign, don’t ask questions because we don’t know what to ask, get bills that make us want to cry and pay them because we don’t realize we can negotiate. We leave appointments confused but too intimidated to push back.

After 20 years inside the system — and my own disasters as a patient — I’ve learned a few things about fighting back.

That’s what this workshop is about.

I walk you through the financial stuff (including the one question that cuts hospital bills in half), the medical stuff (how to spot doctors worth trusting versus ones you should fire), and the mental/spiritual stuff (what to do when scary news shuts your brain off).

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. You’re the ones making AllBetter possible.

Katy

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