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Restoring American Wellness
America’s Current Health Paradigm is Unsustainable
Health is the foundation of strong families, safe communities, and a thriving nation. A nation in physical, mental, and spiritual decline cannot flourish. While America has led the way in prosperity and ingenuity, we have also seen a precipitous decline in health. Once rare illnesses are now common. These demand investigation, even when—especially when—that investigation threatens to upset consensus and conventional wisdom.
Transparency, nutritious food, and a healthcare system Americans can trust can lead to greater health sovereignty and reduced healthcare spending.
The Restoring American Wellness (RAW) initiative by The Heritage Foundation seeks to build and support a broad and effective coalition of Americans around an ambitious suite of policies to restore American health. This reckoning will challenge assumptions, threaten profitable enterprises, and force us to confront uncomfortable truths about choices we have made in the name of progress.
The stakes could not be higher. It’s time to restore a culture where health is possible, accessible, and supported at every level.
Our Areas of Focus
- The Biomedical Security State: Unraveling government overreach, censorship, and failed public health policies
- Drugs, Medical Research, and Practice: Challenging Big Pharma’s influence and restoring patient-centered medicine
- Food, Farming, and Human Environment: Fighting for clean, nutritious food and real solutions to chronic disease
- Medical Freedom and Health Markets: Empowering Americans with choice, affordability, and access to care
The health of our children—and through them, the vitality of our nation's future—hangs in the balance. We owe them nothing less than the courage to ask the hardest questions, to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to rebuild our policies upon a foundation of truth rather than convenience and complacency.”
Jay W. Richards, PhD
Director, Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing
Health is not just the absence of disease—it’s the presence of vitality, clarity, and purpose. Every American deserves to explore what it means to be truly well in mind, body, and soul. Health is apolitical and a sacred, sovereign right.”
Jennifer Galardi
Senior Policy Analyst, Restoring American Wellness, Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing
We are reclaiming health as something that belongs to the American people—not leaving it in the hands of bureaucracies, industries, or broken systems that profit from illness.”
Judy Riviere
Senior Associate, Campaigns and Partnerships
Our Experts
News and Events
News
- Red States Now Lead the Charge Toward Healthier Living, Jennifer Galardi, August 6, 2025
- How To Mount a Religious Liberty Challenge to a Childhood Vaccine Mandate, Jay Richards, August 5, 2025
- Trump’s Mission to Make America’s Kids Fit Again Is Way Overdue, Jennifer Galardi, August 3, 2025
- Time To Fix Doctor’s Medicare Payment Once and for All, Robert Moffit, July 31, 2025
- To Make American Healthy Again, the Country Needs a More Nuanced Farming Policy, Jennifer Galardi and Jay Richards, June 11, 2025
- Senate Report Confirms the Wisdom of Secretary Kennedy’s Revised COVID-19 Vaccine Schedule, Robert Moffit, June 9, 2025
- Reforming Public Health Agencies: A Post-COVID Agenda, Robert Moffit, June 4, 2025
- Restoring the Balance Between Children’s Interests and Public Health: A Commonsense Agenda for Childhood Vaccines, Catherine Pakaluk, March 12, 2025
- A MAGA/MAHA Coalition Could Realign American Politics, Jay Richards, November 2, 2024
- FDA’s Proposed Packaged Food Labels Won’t Fix Our Obesity Epidemic, Jennifer Galardi and Jay Richards, September 30, 2024
- Commonsense Medicaid Reforms for 2025, Nina Owcharenko Schaefer, April 4, 2024
Learn More: Health Care Reform
Events
- August 12, 2025: The Future of Farming: Exploring a Pro-Health, Pro-Farmer Agenda
- June 17, 2025: Shattered Trust: Parents, COVID, and the Vaccine Reckoning
- December 18, 2024: Restoring American Wellness: How Can Policy Help Make America Healthy Again?
Our Goals
- Reform the perverse incentives produced by the corporatist tangle of government regulators and funders, private business interests, media, and activist nonprofits.
- Constrain the purview and mandate authority of federal and state medical and health agencies.
- Support a comprehensive effort to determine the causes of the crisis of chronic diseases, especially among children—including the role of drugs, food, government-permitted additives, herbicides, pesticides, paints, plastics, batteries, and both FDA and non-FDA-regulated radiation-emitting devices.
- Advance greater medical freedom for individuals, families, insurance companies, and health providers. This requires rolling back unfair and unconstitutional mandates, expanding right-to-try provisions, and establishing price transparency in all health and prescription drug services.
- Expand the ability of parents, consumers, and patients to exercise truly informed consent in their food and medical choices.
- Reform, decentralize, and balance the power of medical and health research to ensure that recommendations are modest, don’t violate common sense, and are based on the best and latest clinical, scientific, and epidemiological evidence.
- Allow and encourage space for independent, heterodox, and dissenting opinions among scientists, especially on issues related to government policies and recommendations.
- Reform and decentralize the power of food and farming interests to ensure that policies and dietary guidelines are grounded in both common sense and the latest clinical, scientific, and epidemiological evidence—with clear pathways for heterodox and dissenting researchers, who are free from the distortions of special interests.
- Reform food and agricultural regulations to encourage greater freedom and innovation for small farmers and their customers.
