The U.S. Public Health System is On Life Support
By Rishi Ganesh
Over the last decade, American – and indeed, the world – news has been a torrential overflow of one thing: public health crises. From the toxic spill of the Ohio train derailment, to the infamous Flint, Michigan water crisis, society has revolved around the responses from government and volunteer organizations making concerted efforts to combat the myriad of missiles Mother Nature has thrown at us. Even major issues such as the opioid crisis, the food insecurity issues in North and Central Africa, and the alarming rise of mental health issues in younger generations all fall under the massive umbrella of public health. For all the issues that public health agencies have to tackle, they don’t receive the same attention from the public as events such as wars and politics. Most of the spending on public health services by the government is at the state level, with even that decreasing from 2008-2018. Per capita, the mean spending on public health decreased by nearly 5 dollars per person (from $80.40 to $75.83, according to a research paper by Alfonso et. al.)
This begs the question: why hasn’t our government paid attention to these issues over the last 8 years?
The issues behind public health cuts got a foothold in 2014, with a slight federal budget decrease to public health being allotted to job creation, but really took off in 2018, when multiple attempted budget cuts of up to nearly $6 billion nearly occurred, but were reduced. However, cuts still occurred in some places, and the senior director for biosafety at the CDC was also removed as a role altogether. The leftover funding was then proposed to head towards the defense department – likely another byproduct of the public eye focusing on the “loudest” news, such as war and political tension. With this information, it’s pretty easy to conclude a logical solution to increasing public health funding would be to first educate the population on the hidden values of public health, attempting to raise infrastructure from the ground up. This would allow spending budgets to come more under scrutiny for falling within a single category, instead of distributing funding based on relevancy.
The COVID-19 pandemic, in its own way, offered a sort of education-by-fire towards not only the American population, but the rest of the world. Countries with strong public health infrastructure – New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea chiefly among them – were able to quickly overcome a crisis that held a tight grip on equally prosperous countries. The US in the beginning of the pandemic was objectively one of the most poorly equipped first-world countries against the pandemic, and the numbers reflect that neglect very clearly. The US has about double the cases and deaths all-time over the next country – India, with almost 5 times the population of the US.
Thankfully, the United States government has taken action at last, with over $7 billion being invested into the public health workforce in May 2021. Outside of the middle and upper class in the United States, especially rurally, conditions are significantly worse than the average American may realize. In Alabama in 2017, hookworms – a parasite that enters the body through mediums like raw sewage – had massive breakouts across rural areas, especially in minority communities. This underfunded system may be finally beginning to pick up the pieces, but we still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves ready for the inevitable next crisis.
