Beyond Sicko

 

by Marty Kaplan

Because this was happening a short taxi ride from the White House, I half expected someone from Dick Cheney's office to burst in at any moment, grab the microphone and proclaim the conference kaput, dissolved like an inconvenient parliament.

"I think this may be the best day of my life," Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at the opening of the 2008 Leaders-to-Leaders Conference she convened the other week, along with the country's state and county public health officials. The agenda: To build a bottom-up coalition to change how America deals with health, to shift our focus from health care to healthiness and to the bigger social factors that determine our national healthiness.

Over two days, I heard so many encouraging ideas from the conference stage that didn't reflexively demonize public policy-making as nanny-statism that, well, as I said, the whole thing left me looking nervously over my shoulder for political-correctness enforcers from The Cato Institute or The Heritage Foundation.

As one speaker after another pointed out, America today ranks first among industrial nations in terms of how much we spend on health care, but last in terms of how healthy we are as a country. Pick any national metric of healthiness -- life expectancy, infant mortality, birth weight, chronic diseases incidence -- and America's comparative performance is in the cellar. It's true even when you adjust for European populations' relative homogeneity: if you only count white Americans, we are still the low man on the healthiness totem pole.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/beyond-isickoi_b_113955.html