Embedding Prevention at the Heart of the US Health Conversation

ABSTRACT

[...]the pandemic quickly made clear that despite our overwhelming global and national investment in health care and medicine, when the world faces an unprecedented surge in a novel disease, health care systems are simply not up to the challenge and our only viable approach to protect health is preventing the health problem to begin with. LEVERS FOR PREVENTION It is, of course, odd that it took a global pandemic to remind us that prevention of disease is a far preferable approach to promoting the public's health than is treatment once we are already sick. [...]perhaps underlyingthe first and second reasons, is that prevention simply is not at the heart of the US health conversation. Decades of investment in curative care, resulting in the most expensive health care system in the world, has resulted in a US system that privileges treatment, and, perhaps more importantly, treatment is seen as the fundamental purpose of the health system.