“Make America Healthy Again” presents a marketing and communications challenge for healthcare, food, and other industries 

What’s in the order: The executive order establishing the President’s “Make America Healthy Again” Commission raises the significant issue of the American health system’s effectiveness at preventative medicine and the state of US health compared to other countries.

The order sets out the scope of a multi-faceted commission to explore how to aggressively combat the critical health challenges facing America including the rising rates of mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. The commission will have a special focus on childhood chronic diseases.

Inferring what this means for companies:

• The healthcare industry will need to prepare for new scrutiny around preventative medicine and the “overutilization” of drugs—especially for children. Conversely, this will open up new opportunities to highlight proactive innovation in preventative solutions.
  
  
• The farming industry will be charged to ensure United States’ food is the “healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world.” This presents opportunities to communicate best practices and creates reputational opportunities for all those in the food supply chain that are already promoting and delivering healthy, affordable food.
  
  
• Packaged food producers will need to prepare to answer concerns that exposure to certain common food ingredients and chemicals pose risks to children. This is an evergreen topic for producers and regulators, but the pressure will intensify under the new administration, and R&D teams must raise their game even further in delivering innovative solutions.

The TCB take: According to the OECD, the US is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and yet it lags in key metrics like life expectancy, obesity rates, mental health, and others. The introduction to the executive order highlights some of the data that gave rise to this conclusion and suggests the situation is getting worse—a charge corporate communicators must be prepared to answer.

Healthcare, insurance, pharmaceutical, agricultural, food, and retail industries may all face heightened examination, but this will also offer an opportunity to stand out by highlighting good practices, smart innovations, and effective solutions.