Trusting Markets, Empowering People: A Pro-Growth Blueprint for a Healthier America

By SBE Council at 28 August, 2025, 7:57 am

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By Karen Kerrigan -

America faces a crisis in chronic disease - one that demands effective, forceful, and thoughtful action. For some time, market trends have been moving powerfully to meet Americans' growing concern over health and wellness. The Make America Healthy Again movement (MAHA) has fueled that momentum. Pro-growth, pro-market leaders have a unique opportunity to shape the conversation and influence the outcome of policy initiatives that address health and wellness by reinforcing the time-tested principles that have led to America's success across the decades: free enterprise, personal responsibility, and innovation.

Now is not a time to abandon those values. Policies to make America healthy must embrace the power of innovation and markets with clarity and purpose.

A Shared Goal, Different Paths

The MAHA movement is rooted in sound outcomes: reducing chronic illness, improving healthcare access and wellness resources, and promoting a healthier lifestyle and lifespan for all. These are goals shared across the political spectrum. How we get there, however, matters. The most effective path forward is grounded in freedom, innovation, education, and the proven power of the marketplace.

Progress for a Healthier America

America's medical progress and the growing interest in health and wellness are fueled by informed action, personal responsibility, open competition, innovation, and a sensible approach to government intervention. These principles have made the United States the global leader in healthcare innovation - producing cutting-edge digital tools and medical devices, life-saving drugs, and wellness enterprises catering to consumers who want to take charge of their health.

Consider the positive trends and results:

● Cancer death rates have fallen 33% since 1991.

● Childhood cancer survival has jumped from 58% to over 85% since the 1970s.

● Gen Zers and Millennials are "obsessed with wellness." Younger generations are purchasing more wellness products and services than older generations, placing a high priority on physical fitness and mental health, according to McKinsey.

● The U.S. wellness economy - valued at $2 trillion and growing - is the largest in the world and represents 32% of the global wellness industry. It recorded 8.3% annual growth from 2019 to 2023, expanding 37% beyond its pre-pandemic size in 2019. As noted by the Global Wellness Institute:

"The US is a global innovation leader in many wellness sectors, pioneering new products, services and therapies in many spaces - from food and beverages, fitness programs, and mind-body treatments to recovery, sensory experiences, and diagnostic technologies that meet the emerging and diverse wellness needs of consumers."

Indeed, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and private capital are driving breakthroughs in biotech and wellness. These are the businesses that will continue to deliver positive results and outcomes for improving America's overall health and wellness.

Such progress and action did not emerge from government mandates - it flourishes in an environment of consumer demand, market-driven competition and incentives, robust intellectual property protections, and private-sector participants who have a passion for improving the health and wellness of communities and individuals.

Protecting Innovation and Patient Choice

Innovation thrives in freedom. As policymakers consider new health proposals, they should be cautious of approaches that:

● Shift decisions from patients and doctors to distant bureaucracies, replacing clinical judgment and individual choice with one-size-fits-all mandates and socialized medicine.

● Impede entrepreneurship and investment in the emerging products, therapies, and services that promote health and wellness.

● Upend established science by casting doubt on the safety of proven vaccines, mandating redundant placebo trials, or delaying patient access to treatments already shown to be safe and effective. These approaches - especially when based on misrepresented or nonexistent evidence - politicize science and create unnecessary regulatory barriers that slow the delivery of life-saving care.

● Import foreign price controls - including Most Favored Nation pricing schemes - that reward the socialist policies of other nations and undermine the competitive edge that drives American breakthroughs in health and wellness. An MFN approach will reduce drug access, discourage investment and innovation, and shift medical decision-making from the private sector to Washington.

The actions and approaches such as those listed above are well-intentioned and may be perceived as "quick fixes," but they carry unintended consequences - not only for larger players in the healthcare system, but for the small businesses, independent pharmacies, health tech startups, and wellness entrepreneurs and practitioners that are the backbone of our healthcare economy.

Standing with Small Businesses

Several recent policy ideas aim to rein in large corporations. In reality, they will hit individual innovators, small businesses, and consumers the hardest.

For example, proposed food and wellness mandates could require small grocers to monitor shopping carts and regulate product selection - an unworkable burden for businesses with limited staff and resources. Across the food, retail, wellness, and pharmacy sectors in general, new mandates, based on unestablished science, could significantly raise compliance costs.

These new rules add red tape and costs. They also drain time and resources from small business owners and their teams who work every day to serve customers and build healthier communities.

Main Street entrepreneurs and small business owners are not asking for loopholes, but for clarity, flexibility, and the freedom to innovate. A healthier America will be built on a business environment that allows entrepreneurs and small businesses to meet the needs of the growing health and wellness market, not through government restrictions or one-size-fits-all mandates. Policies need to empower and support businesses and local entrepreneurs who already know how to meet their community's needs.

Empowering Patients, Not Bureaucracies

Empowering individuals - not the federal government - is key to better health outcomes. When people have choices and innovators have space to operate, everyone benefits. We can accelerate progress by:

● Expanding and improving Health Savings Accounts and allowing more flexibility in how Americans use them - including for wellness, fitness, and on-site medical clinics. The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) bolsters and modernizes health coverage by expanding HSA eligibility to include individuals enrolled in direct primary care arrangements and bronze and catastrophic ACA Exchange plans. The bill also made the telehealth safe harbor for High Deductible Health Plans permanent, allowing for pre-deductible telehealth coverage.

● Advancing Custom Health Option and Individual Care Expense Arrangements for small businesses, which was included in the U.S. House version of the OBBB, but dropped in the final bill. This includes improving tax incentives and credits for small businesses and allowing lower-priced transitional plans for entrepreneurs, the newly self-employed, and "gig" workers.

● Increasing transparency in drug pricing and coverage - and encouraging competition to lower costs.

● Speeding the approval of innovative tools, medicines, and health products - without unnecessary red tape.

● Supporting tax reforms that reward entrepreneurship and incentivize high-risk investment. Thankfully, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included important and permanent features that will promote innovation - such as immediate R&D expensing and bonus depreciation - and other incentives to invest in innovative startups and small businesses.

● Fully supporting American AI leadership, laid out in President Trump's plan "Winning the AI Race: America's Action Plan." The plan will bolster America's innovative potential - most critically in health and wellness - and address the incentives and hurdles to fully harness AI innovation, including investing in human capital and physical infrastructure required to cement U.S. leadership.

● Protecting strong intellectual property rights. Supporting legislation that defends IP ensures entrepreneurs and small businesses can attract investment, compete, and deliver the next generation of health and wellness innovations to patients.

These policy approaches, along with renewed educational initiatives at the local level, don't rely on mandates. They rely on people - patients, providers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and investors - to make decisions and choices that work best for their needs.

Leading with Principles

MAHA priorities raise important issues and represent a significant opportunity to transform the health and wellbeing of Americans. Now is the time to answer with solutions that spur action and innovation. Rather than withdrawing from time-tested practices and policies, we should double down on reforms that empower individuals, reward innovation, and protect the entrepreneurs and small businesses that are building healthier communities.

By offering a constructive, market-driven vision, elected leaders can help shape the next chapter of American health by maximizing an approach rooted in freedom, flexibility, and proven results.

Access a PDF copy of "Trusting Markets, Empowering People: A Pro-Growth Blueprint for a Healthier America" here.

Karen Kerrigan is President & CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council.