Means was seeking funding to launch a nonprofit whose purpose was to end chronic disease, in part by lobbying the federal government to allow Americans to buy wellness items with HSA dollars—the very purchases offered by his company Truemed.
Not everyone was happy to see him. One former Stand Together employee who was there viewed an alliance with him as “reputationally a third rail,” citing Means’s lack of medical credentials and the shakiness of his public-health claims.
Regardless, in June 2024, Stand Together’s health care director, J.C. Hernandez, became the executive director of End Chronic Disease, Means’s nonprofit lobbying group. He has since changed his title to “co-founder” on his LinkedIn account. According to his page on the social media site, he overlapped at both organizations for six months. Previously, Hernandez had worked as a registered lobbyist for another Koch organization, Americans for Prosperity. (Neither Hernandez nor Stand Together responded to requests for comment.)
The press release announcing the launch of End Chronic Disease listed 20 members of its coalition including Means and his Truemed partner, Mares. It made no mention of specific donors, referring only to “funding through a bi-partisan group of leaders,” and its website includes no financial disclosures. The nonprofit’s registered address leads to the same office complex in Arlington, Virginia, where Stand Together, Americans for Prosperity, and the Charles Koch Foundation are headquartered. Of the original 20 coalition members, 12 had either invested in or partnered with Truemed. Today, the coalition has grown to 28, including boldface names in the wellness space, from functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman to Jillian Michaels. Both sell their products on the site, and Hyman was an investor.
The End Chronic Disease website until recently directed patients to contact their legislators, urging them to support the HOPE Act (Health Out-of-Pocket Expense Act), which would allow HSA dollars to be used more expansively. In May, House Republicans passed their reconciliation tax bill, which in addition to preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and gutting Medicaid, contained a number of provisions that could expand HSA use significantly. Even without that expansion, one report estimates that by the end of 2026, HSA accounts will hold more than $175 billion in assets.
Many of the End Chronic Disease coalition members are selling products that would potentially benefit from such legislation: infrared saunas and cold plunges, herbal medicines and protein powders, and ketone drinks. Some are available through Truemed’s platform.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Representative Jake Auchincloss says of the MAHA takeover of HHS: “Their self-designation as oracles of health care gives them license for corruption…. They are out there using tax-preferential dollars for wealthy people to buy saunas, and they are going to turn our entire health care system into one big GNC store.”
On May 22, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat shoulder to shoulder at the White House to deliver a report from the MAHA Commission, “Make Our Children Healthy Again.” Over 72 pages, the paper, which Means helped to coordinate, calls out the scourge of ultraprocessed foods, antidepressants, toxic pesticides, and the “possible role” of childhood vaccines in making our children “the sickest generation in American history,” as Kennedy put it. (The MAHA Commission is scheduled to deliver its follow-up strategy paper in mid-August.)
The press event was in many ways the apotheosis of Means’s whirlwind rise, with the two men he’d connected less than a year earlier driving a splashy news cycle.
Means was in the audience, sitting dead center, absorbing it all. In little more than a week, it would emerge that the report cited a number of studies that didn’t actually exist. A White House press secretary said that “formatting issues” were to blame. Means took to X to argue that special interests were “quibbling with footnotes” while the report had fearlessly tackled “taboo subjects.”
Additional reporting and research by Liz Rosenberg.
This story has been updated.
