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Health is community Investing in what really creates health By Edward Ehlinger, MD, MSPH
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n his 1994 essay “Health is Membership,” Wendell Berry wrote “…the community in the fullest sense…is the smallest unit of health…to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” Nestled within his statement is a bold challenge to Minnesota’s dominant narrative about what creates health. The Kentucky poet/farmer discovered, long before public health researchers did with the aid of Big Data and well-funded research, that health is mostly about living conditions and relationships. Individual habits and choices matter, but our health is largely determined by our community and our social circumstances.
Political divisiveness in health care Learning to work together By Ed Weisbart, MD
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ou wouldn’t know it by looking at the health care debate in America today, but one of our nation’s foundational pillars used to be political collaboration. Although the 2009 passage of the Affordable Care Act was intensely partisan, we have a proud, centuries-old legacy of collaboratively solving our problems despite our differences, and many of our past
solutions were made stronger because of our differences. I have had the honor of testifying on a variety of topics in a number of state legislatures across the nation. My experiences make me wonder how our noble national history led to political statements such as these that were said directly to me: Political divisiveness in health care to page 16
Despite Berry’s insight and the recent data that support it, this perspective is still not yet widely accepted or honored. The World Bank reports that the United States devotes more of its total gross domestic product (GDP) to health care expenditures than any other major developed nation. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook shows us how little we get in return—56 countries do better than us in infant mortality, and 41 other countries have longer life expectancy. Health is community to page 18