Vice President JD Vance appeared at the second annual Make America Healthy Again (Maha) summit in Washington DC, where he positioned himself as an inheritor of both the Make America Great Again and Maha movements. Political observers view the appearance as a strategic calculation by Vance to build support among Maha devotees ahead of the 2028 presidential election, in which he is widely considered a leading Republican candidate.
At the event, Vance highlighted his work with an anti-fraud task force examining Medicaid, Medicare and Affordable Care Act programs. He claimed to have identified close to $250 billion in fraud and asserted that undocumented immigrants were receiving benefits from these programs, though the administration has released limited details about specific cases. Vance criticized state administrators for not enforcing these programs, saying they were providing benefits to undocumented people. According to an AP-KFF survey, however, more than two-thirds of rural Maha supporters reported that Trump’s health policies have had negative or no effect on health outcomes in their communities.
The summit revealed tensions within the Maha movement between grassroots activists and corporate interests. Multiple companies paid substantial sponsorship fees, with those contributing $300,000 receiving speaker slots and private dinners with HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz. Grail, an experimental cancer-treatment company with pending FDA approval, was a top sponsor. Some Maha activists expressed concern about the direction, with vaccine critics and environmental advocates questioning why their voices were excluded from the event’s programming.
Kennedy, who has historically criticized corporate influence on public health, did not address corporate power at the summit and instead praised companies like OpenAI. Observers noted the apparent shift from grassroots activism toward political and corporate priorities, with some prominent Maha figures describing the movement as having been captured by the interests it originally opposed. Vance also engaged in lighthearted exchanges with Kennedy about internet culture and memes, further signaling alignment between the two figures.
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