The 12th annual Aspen Ideas: Health festival kicked off Sunday.
While there’s been a change in the White House since last year’s sessions, Ruth Katz, the director of Aspen Ideas: Health, said this administration change did not affect which guests they booked, as the Aspen Institute is a non-partisan organization.
However, it did affect which topics the festival covers, from scientific and clinical advances, to political upheaval, to natural and human-caused disasters.
One of this week’s speakers is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump-nominated National Institutes of Health Director, who will speak Tuesday evening in one of his first public appearances since being confirmed.
There will also be a panel on Wednesday that focuses on how court rulings can reshape health policy, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Arts & Culture Reporter Regan Mertz sat down with Katz to talk about this year’s programming.
The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
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Regan Mertz: We're in the midst of a Trump administration that's pushing a “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. It includes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has faced opposition for decades for supporting conspiracy theories about vaccines, and a National Institutes of Health that's cut several hundred research grants.
While planning for Aspen Ideas: Health this year, how did you reconcile all of this happening at the national level?
Ruth Katz: That's a terrific question, because in many ways, this has been a more challenging year to think about how to construct our programming.
There are many sessions where we will talk about, for example, what's happening in cancer and heart disease. We'll also have programming that talks about different policy issues related to health.
In all cases, our speakers will take note of and talk about the environment in which they're operating. But they will also focus on what lies ahead, what's promising, what we can do to address health problems that — for example, access to insurance, access to health care, generally — have been around before there was a Trump administration, before there was an Obama administration. Those issues are still with us, and we are bringing in experts to discuss it all across the board.
I would mention that from the Trump administration, we will have coming, I believe, for among his very first public interviews, the new director of the National Institutes of Health.
Mertz: From the event description, he's going to outline his vision for what he calls the “crown jewel of American biomedical sciences.”
Could you just tell me a little bit about that session?
Katz: The director of NIH will have a one-on-one interview, which will last about 50 minutes. As we understand it, he will be talking about the specific priorities that he has set forth for the National Institutes of Health, and that's what we're going to learn about and hear about directly from him, rather than just what you read in the paper.
Presumably, he'll be asked a lot of questions about how he's going to put those priorities into place, and how universities and others that are big players in the National Institutes of Health are going to continue to provide the important research that they have for decades.
Mertz: And you've mentioned a couple of administrations: the Bush administration, Obama administration, Trump's previous administration, (and) we had the Biden administration.
So how in the past decade or so has Aspen Ideas: Health reconciled with these different administrations and their different ideas?
Katz: We have had representatives of every administration as best I can remember to come talk about what their priorities are, those sorts of things.
We are a non-partisan organization. We welcome, encourage and have always hosted sessions where you have different points of view. We think that conversation is important, and we are carrying on that tradition again this year.
It does not matter what the administration is. We do our best to try to bring forth those points of view — whatever the administration may be — but other points of view as well, so that our audience has an opportunity to perhaps think differently about some issues they may have traditionally thought about one way or another.
It's an educational opportunity. If people can walk away and say, “I hadn't thought about it that way,” we've put together a successful program.
Mertz: Another topic in recent festivals has been the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Again, kind of bringing it back to the change in administration, Biden promised to overturn the decision. Trump praised the Supreme Court for the decision.
How is that being approached now, particularly in the vein of women's rights in America right now?
Katz: So we actually have a couple of sessions specifically on the topic of women's health, where, again, I would suspect that this issue will come up. But we also have a session toward the end of the program about important cases across the board, not just limited to the Supreme Court, that have an impact on health.
Roe v. Wade, the Dobbs decision overturning the Roe decision, I'm sure it will come up in some context, and we purposely put this toward the end because the Supreme Court often comes out with major decisions right when Aspen Ideas is being held, and we want to be able to address those big decisions.
We will be having on that panel in conversation two experts in Supreme Court decisions, particularly in the health field — one that would be considered more on the liberal side of how to view some of these decisions, (and one who is) more on the conservative side. They will be in conversation about how to interpret many of these laws and what the impact may be on health, not just for women, but for people across the country.
Editor’s Note: The 12th annual Aspen Ideas: Health festival kicked off Sunday and ends on Wednesday. Aspen Public Radio is broadcasting live and taped sessions from Aspen Ideas: Health and the Aspen Ideas Festival weekdays until Tuesday, July 1.
