By LifeZette News Staff
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined a sweeping critique of the nation’s rehabilitation and addiction treatment system, arguing that its current structure lacks coordination, rewards failure, and creates financial incentives that perpetuate relapse rather than long-term recovery.
Kennedy said the existing model fails to integrate housing, law enforcement, health care, and mental health services, resulting in fragmented care with no single authority responsible for an individual’s outcome.
He described the system as one driven by fee-based services that reward repeated treatment episodes instead of sustained recovery.
“Occurring in the response to responses. You know, there’s no coordination between all of the needs and the institutions that could help with this problem, that housing and law enforcement and health care and mental health care. There’s no coordination, and it’s a fee-based service system,” Kennedy said.
According to Kennedy, the structure of the system itself creates perverse incentives, regardless of the intentions of individual caregivers.
“So people are just like the medical system. People have an economic incentive to make sure you don’t get well. And that’s not saying people who work in these you know, in as caregivers, don’t want you to be well. Of course, they do. The system itself is designed to keep you sick,” he said.
Kennedy argued that repeated relapses benefit treatment providers financially while driving costs higher across the system.
“Every time you relapse, the rehab makes more money, and the costs go up,” he said.
He also criticized the role of insurance companies, saying their financial calculations favor repeated treatment cycles rather than permanent recovery.
“And the insurance companies, you know, you think the insurance companies are going to lose money every time you go, but they are looking at the entire cost, because they collect friction from those causes like Lloyds of London,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy used an analogy to explain how insurers benefit from higher overall activity.