Authored by Sandro Galea and Nason Maani.
In recent weeks, there has been an increasing conversation, including in prominent medical journals, about the failure of current U.S. political leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, the preventable deaths it has caused, and that it is time for a change. These contributions reflect the fact that, as Virchow famously said, “Politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”
Building on the challenges posed by this failure for the COVID-19 moment, we suggest that a fuller assessment of the role of leadership must also include an honest and unflinching assessment of longstanding shortcomings in our country’s health, which also contributed enormously to the challenges of the moment, and in which we all have a hand.
Before the pandemic, U.S life expectancy was lagging behind peer countries, and, uniquely, was declining. It suffered from double the chronic disease burden of the OECD average. It lacked universal health coverage. While some have wondered how the US fared so poorly considering its vaunted biomedical industry, world-leading hospitals, and history of medical innovations, the overall population health of the U.S before COVID-19 was far from the envy of its peers. Why?