Remarks: JD Vance Addresses the MAHA Summit in Washington - September 29, 2026

Thank you. [Laughs] So the Vice President and I, uh, both got caught in the President's executive order on super intelligence, um, back at the White House. Very grateful to Stephanie for, um, improvising for an extra 20 minutes.

[Laughs]

You guys must have said this is a really long panel. [Laughter] Uh, but I'm really grateful to them. And, and, uh, speaking of super intelligence, we, my, my agency, uh, I'm told has done more than any other agency in government driving super intelligence because we recognize from the beginning that we live in an inflection point and we have the capacity now with technology to solve our most daunting, um, uh, public health problems that are otherwise existential, but we actually have the chance to solve them right now.

And Sam Altman was, uh, over in our office a couple days ago and he said something interesting to me. First of all, he confirmed that my agency has done more than any other agency, um, which I don't know about. I'm sure the CIA probably knows more about it than we do, but he does.

[Laughs]

Um, but, uh, but he said that, he said, "Two years ago, I wouldn't have advised anybody to take medical advice alone from AI." He said, "But today, i- -- it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI." And AI, and one of the things that we're doing in our agency is we're making it easy for every American to use AI to, so that you'll have access, by the end, by the time we leave, every American will have access on their cell phones to their own medical records.

And you may have a medical record that is a thousand pages long. You have six minutes with a doctor today. He is not gonna be able to review it, but the AI can and he can distill it, it can distill it. It can give you a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country. So we have this tremendous potential and, um, but there's also some downsides.

Let me, let me talk about one other thing before I shut up and let the Vice President talk. Um, one of the things that is gonna change is that we're never ever again gonna be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, "Trust the experts," because e- -- every American will be able to check their own medical, uh, um, advice.

They will also be able to check the advice of public officials. And if somebody tells you, "Mask. Work. Trust the experts," AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you, "Social distancing works. Trust the experts," AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, "Oh, you need to take it to protect your grandmother," AI may say it actually doesn't do that.

So it really has the capacity to dominate us, to free us from medical tyranny. It has upsides and downsides. Can you talk a little bit about what your reservations and your, uh, your, your best hopes for AI is?

Yeah. So I guess I'm in the, in the wrong summit. I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not AI. [Laughter] But I'm, I'm, I'm happy to talk about whatever is on your mind, Bobby. But -- [Laughter] -- I me- -- I mean, look, I --

[Laughs]

-- [Laughs] I, I think -- [Laughter] here, here is the way that I think about it is AI, super intelligence, as we're now calling it, can create remarkable online software tools. And the most obvious offensive one is cyber hacking, okay? That is the thing. If you look at the risks, most of the risks and most of the downsides are all related to models that were literally trained to hack into your computer.

And then, a lot of the companies are saying, "Oh my god. This is the end of the world because the model that we trained to do something is doing the very thing that we trained it to do." So are there risks to it? Yes. I think the question is, "How to sort of deal with those risks?" And I would say, a pretty standard product liability approach makes a lot of sense.

If you create a product that harms people, you should suffer consequences for it. You should not be shielded by the government or shielded by regulation or shielded by Section 230-style liability. If you create something that harms, you have to pay for the harm as the creator. I think that basic principle is something that makes a lot of sense.

But to, to your point about the upsides and I, I do think that we have been so dominated by the doomers and the cynics and the, "It's gonna be Terminator 2 and the robots are gonna come and kill all of us," that we tend to ignore there are these amazing benefits to it. One, what you said, like, the experts are not the experts in the same way.

They don't have the same control or monopoly on knowledge. That's a very, very big thing. I mean, you and I have a mutual friend who dealt with a cancer diagnosis recently and she told me that she used AI to, like, help her, "Well, how do I deal with the nausea? And how do I, like, you know, take my drugs at a certain amount of time or with certain foods in a way to minimize the negative effects of the medicine, but also increase my chance of being able to recover the right way?" I talked to a guy literally this morning at the president's AI luncheon who told me that he used artificial intelligence to develop a new treatment model for his wife who sh- -- who herself was going through a cancer treatment.

The doctors basically said, "There's nothing that's gonna be able to help you." He came up with a combination of drugs, got the doctor's buy-in, and now his wife is alive when he didn't expect that she would be alive. There's drug discovery approaches. There's just, there's a whole host of things that are gonna be unlocked.

And so I think that we just have to be adults by -- about it. Every technology in human history has risks, every technology has downsides, but they also have incredible upsides. And part of our jobs as adults, as policymakers, and as leaders is just to balance the good with the bad. And I think that we have an administration that's very much optimized to do just that.

See, uh, the vice president is chairing a task force, and I'm one of the members of that task force, my agency. And I think there's probably been more theft from my agency than any other agency in government. I, I don't know if you would agree with that.

I think that's right. And your, your guys are all stars.

Yeah.

Uh, Dr. Oz, some of them are just amazing, amazing fraud fighters.

And I think that they're gonna, I think you heard from some of them today. I think Dr. Oz talked about the, you know, how there's a lot of organized crime that is ripping us off. And this was all enabled by my predecessor who's now running for senat- -- or governor in, in California who came in and dismantled the entire program integrity, uh, infrastructure in my agency.

So when I, when he came in, there were 80 people who were doing program integrity. This is not completely inadequate. My agency spends $2.3 trillion a year. We do a billion transactions a year, uh, 2.75 million transactions a day in 50 states in five territories. And there's no way that 80 people can, uh, can monitor for corruption and that, but we only get 80. His move was to fire 74 of those.

So when I came in, there were six people doing program integrity. And it opened the floodgate to all this fraud that we saw with durable medical equipment by the Cuban government in Miami with the hostels that we saw in Los Angeles, with the Somalis in Minnesota, with the Chinese mafia and the, you know, the elderly care facilities in New York, billions, tens of billions of dollars being sold, but also just on a more pedantic, mundane level.

And, but huge fraud because we have perverse incentives in the department and we gave the people opportunity to steal. And we made it almost irresistible. And I'll give you one example. Skin substitutes in which are, which are, uh, simulated skin that you put on certain wounds after dressing them carefully, said, we were selling or th- -- we were beginning billed for $200 million worth of skin substitutes in 2014. But there was a problem.

These skin substitutes were being, were, were, the, the doctors who prescribed them would get 6% of the sales cost. And so they were incentivized to prescribe more expensive products. In Europe, they spent 35 cents a cubic inch. We were spending $1.35. And that went up to $2,000 a square in- -- a cubic inch.

And we were paying by, so 2019, we were paying 200 million. Last year we spent 14 billion. All stolen. It's all stolen. And we were on par, on track to spend 23 billion this year. It was $135 for everybody on Medicaid and Medicare in this country. And we stopped it, we put an end to it, and we, we now have driven that down, that cost down to somewhere around a billion dollars.

And we saved that money. But it was allowed to get out of control. And you're seeing, I mean, we can tell horror stories. You and I can sit here all day long and just tell insane stories about the level of theft.

Yep. So we found close to $250 billion in fraud just since I've been leading the anti-fraud task force. And one of the things that is genuinely shocking to me about this work is how many of the programs that we have that are meant to be generous to our fellow Americans have no real eligibility criteria. In other words, whatever it says in the law, like for example, to receive food stamp benefits, you have to be a certain income, you have to be, you know, a certain family situation, et cetera.

There are these eligibility standards, but we don't enforce them, or at least the states that administer the programs don't enforce them at all. And so, you know, like a very basic thing, you have to be an American citizen to benefit from the Medicare program. I think that's a pretty common sense thing. We don't wanna give healthcare to literally everybody, including people who have been here, uh, in the country illegally.

And yet, because we don't check eligibility sufficiently, we were giving billions and billions of dollars to both, to people receiving benefits who weren't entitled to receive them, to phantom people who didn't even exist, and then to phantom businesses who were billing for services they weren't providing to people who didn't actually exist.

And there was just so much of this stuff, and frankly, there probably is still much, so much of this stuff. I really do believe that we've just started to scratch the surface here. Uh, your, your people, Dr. Oz, um, and, and, and your deputy secretary, you've been amazing, amazing at working with us on this, but there's just so much fraud out there.

And, you know, one of the things that my, my co-chair of the task force, Andy Ferguson, he's the head of the FTC, an amazing, amazing guy, he makes this point that most of America's social programs, the programs were, were generous to low income people, to people who got down on their luck and can't afford a doctor, those programs are built on the back of social trust.

But at the same time that they're built on the back of social trust, you had a generation of American leaders who eroded American social trust. And so a lot of people have internalized this idea that these programs are ripe for taking advantage of and getting rich from, and that has created a whole host of perverse incentives.

And I think that there are two things that we have to do. Number one, we have to rebuild the social trust. Like, I don't want the, I don't want Americans to think that when they pay their money to the IRS, it's gonna go to a fraudster. I want them to know it's gonna go to the purposes that they pay their taxes for.

But secondly, and, and very importantly is we have to discourage people from taking advantage of the stuff, to begin with. And the only way to do that is to prosecute people, to collect the money that they stole, and to make sure that if you defrauded the American taxpayer, you go to prison. And that's very much what our task force is geared towards.

Uh, I saw an article yesterday that we were cutting 700, my agency, was cutting 750,000 Americans from Obamacare. And this was, you know, a, a direct attack by President Trump on Obamacare. But the, the background explanation for that is that we found a million people on Obamacare who did not have Social Security numbers.

Uh, we don't think these people exist. Why would they be on Obamacare? Because they get their premiums paid. So the insurance company wants that because they get the premiums and the brokers get their commissions. And so you had all these crooked brokerage, which you're now breaking up, which were collecting, uh, names and commissions to sign up people who did not exist.

And we've been paying them year after year after year. And we're just cleaning up the list now. And that's, you know, but it yields bad, you know, President Trump is trying to save Medicaid and Medicare and, and the exchanges.

Yes. Yeah.

And, uh, he's, and, but we need, we can't do that with, if we're gonna continue to pay for the crooks and thieves.

That's exactly right. And I, I always find a little ironic that congressional Democrats who say that they care a lot about Medicare and Medicaid and working people and the working people who benefit from these programs don't do anything to try to cut down on the fraud. I believe in these programs too. In fact, there are members of my family who would not have been able to live their lives without these programs, but those programs will not exist if we allow them to be defrauded by people who have no right to be in the country or sometimes don't even exist.

But you raised the Obamacare thing. And, you know, of course the media was dishonest about this. I will say the Washington Post, shocking to me, ran a very honest opinion piece sort of correcting. They ran an editorial correcting the record on this. But what happened under the Biden administration is that we created a brokerage program whereby we would pay a broker, I think $25 if they enrolled somebody in Obamacare.

Okay, sounds reasonable. However, we would also, at the same time, we massively relaxed the eligibility criteria and also the checks. So imagine what happens when you make it much, much easier to enroll fraudulent people in Obamacare while simultaneously paying brokers to enroll people in Obamacare, you get a lot of fraud.

It was totally predictable. We've cut down on it, and it's one of the reasons why, frankly, the exchanges work better today than they did three years ago, because we're cutting out the fraud. I, I -- this, this thing, Bobby, really, really bothers me because when people say that they care about Medicare, they're trying to protect social security, they're trying to protect, uh, Medicaid, give me a break.

If you are encouraging illegal aliens to sign up from social security and steal social security benefits, you're not protecting social security, you're destroying it. So cut that shit out and be honest about your intentions. It's about giving benefits to illegal aliens. It's not about saving the program.

You know, uh, part of running a, a $2.3 trillion agency is navigating through all the pressure you've got to make decisions that, you know, sometimes they're not good decisions. They're, um, self-interested sources. And, um, you know, one of the big pressure campaigns that I've faced, and I really haven't talked about this, is when Brooke Rollins and I did the food pyramid.

We got tremendous pressure from the White House at the last minute to put Oreo ice cream at the top of the food pyramid. [Laughter] And I heard that that came from the vice president's office. [Laughter] And I want to just ask you face to face in front of an audience, is that true? [Laughs]

Look --

[Laughs]

-- I like ice cream, which, uh, which, which I'm, I'm like, I'm like the Brett Kavanaugh of ice cream. He liked beer, I liked ice cream. I say I liked because thanks to this crazy diet Bobby Kennedy put me on, I don't eat very much ice cream anymore. So, you know, I, I, I, as you know, Bobby, on, uh, I guess it was, it was, uh, Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday for us Christians, the day when the Lenten season starts, I call Bobby and I'm like, "Hey, man, I'm thinking about giving up sugar for Lent.

Like what are the health benefits of giving up sugar?" He's like, "No, no, no, no, no. Have I got the thing for you?"

[Laughs]

And again, that was Fat Tuesday, and thanks to Bobby Kennedy, Fat Wednesday never came. So yes, I like ice cream, uh, but no comment on, on that particular question. [Laughter]

And you're on, uh, you were on a carnivore and, and a ferment diet for a while.

That's right. That's right.

Um -- good.

[Laughs] Is that Sean O'Mara back there?

Last question. Why does, uh, Marco get all the good memes? [Laughter]

Oh man, that's a good, that is a good question. Well, one, I, I do think the Fat JD singing Free Bird is the best meme to come out of the Trump administration. If you haven't looked at it, please do so. Um, you know, I, one, obviously, like, you, you and I know Marco very well. He's got an amazing sense of humor.

He's got a lot of personality, and he's one of these people who, like, I'd love to play po- -- poker with Marco 'cause he doesn't have a great poker face. So, like, my favorite meme of Marco is, comes from, I, I think a lot of people have seen the meme of him sitting on the couch looking really pissed off.

Well, people don't, people forget that meme came from the Zelenskyy blowup meeting where the president and I were kind of going back and forth with Zelenskyy and Marco was just sitting there like, "Oh shit, what's going on, right?" You know, you could just see the internal, the internal monologue going, going on, but it makes absolutely incredible memes.

And, you know, to, to the point now where, you know, Bobby and I are on a, on a, on a text chain with a bunch of cabinet secretaries where we almost like are beating the social media to the memes, right? So I, I, I, I think it was, you know, somebody -- I, I, I forget exactly who. Oh, that's right. It was, um, when, when Dolly Parton passed away, rest in peace, Dolly, amazing, amazing person.

It was a cabinet secretary who sent me a meme of, like, Marco in a big blonde wig because he's got another job he's gonna have to do. [Laughter]

[Laughs] Mr. [Inaudible] uh, we get tremendous support from the MAHA agenda from the White House, but not from nowhere as much as the vice president's office. And I wanna thank you for that, for your commitment to our country, to our children.

Of course.

And thank you very much.

Thanks, man. Thank you, all.