Coronavirus's Biggest Lession: America Needs A Public Health System For All, NYT
- 'Coronavirus's Biggest Lesson: America Needs A Public Health System For All,' New York Times, April 9, 2020.
A once-in-a-century public health crisis is unfolding, and the richest country in the world is struggling to mount an effective response. Hospitals dont have enough gowns or masks to protect doctors and nurses, nor enough intensive care beds to treat the surge of patients. Laboratories dont have the equipment to diagnose cases quickly or in bulk, and state and local health departments across the country dont have the manpower to track the diseases spread. Perhaps worst of all, urgent messages about the importance of social distancing and the need for temporary shutdowns have been muddied by politics.
Nearly all of these problems might have been averted by a strong, national public health system, but in America, no such system exists.
Its a state of affairs that belies the countrys long public health tradition. Before the turn of the previous century, when yellow fever, tuberculosis and other plagues ravaged the countrys largest cities at regular intervals, public health was generally accepted as a key component of the social contract. Even before scientists identified the microbes that cause such diseases, governments and individuals understood that a combination of leadership, planning and cooperation was needed to keep them at bay. Some of the nations oldest public health departments in Boston, New York and Baltimore were built on that premise. By pushing infectious disease outbreaks to the margins, those health departments helped usher in what scientists refer to as the epidemiological transition: the remarkable leveling off of preventable deaths among children and working-age adults.
That leveling off continued in the second half of the 20th century, as new federal laws ensured the protection of food, air and water from contamination, and national campaigns brought the scourges of nicotine addiction and sexually transmitted infections under control. So great was the effect of these public health measures that by the time the century turned again, life expectancy in the United States had risen sharply, from less than 50 years to nearly 80. Public health is the best bang for our collective buck, Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. It has consistently saved the most lives for the least amount of money. One would never guess as much today. Across the same century that saw so many public health victories, public health itself fell victim to larger forces.
It was like a great forgetting took place, Wendy Parmet, a public health law scholar at Northeastern University, told me. As the memory of epidemics faded, individual rights became much more important than collective responsibility. And as medicine grew more sophisticated, health began to be seen as purely a personal matter. Health care spending grew by 52 percent in the past decade, while the budgets of local health departments shrank by as much as 24 percent, according to a 2019 report from the public health nonprofit Trust for Americas Health, and the C.D.C.s budget remained flat. Today, public health claims just 3 cents of every health dollar spent in the country.
The results of that imbalance were apparent long before Covid-19 began its march across the globe...
More, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/coronaviruss-biggest-lesson-america-needs-a-public-health-system-for-all/ar-BB12n2cl?ocid=hplocalnews
erronis
(14,955 posts)If not, we are doomed to repeat our stupid mistakes (including electing stable geniuses.)
appalachiablue
(41,053 posts)soon it's definite there will be even more suffering and collapse of society. Yesterday someone commented that it took the global World War II and the bombing of hospitals and infrastructure for Britain to establish the NHS. But they did it. The US has to get there, it's now or never.