Why don't we spend more on public health? It is harder to see the bullets we dodged -- and then there is profit.

“It Saves Lives. It Can Save Money. So Why Aren’t We Spending More on Public Health?”  (New York Times, May 28, 2018). Actually, this is a terrific question. As so often, it is complicated. Let’s start with the benefits that authors Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt describe. First, there are vaccines. They eliminated smallpox and virtually eliminated polio in the United States. They have dramatically reduced the rate of common childhood illnesses including measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and Hemophilus influenza (H. flu) infection. They have the potential for essentially wiping out cervical cancer through immunization against HPV, and liver cancer (as well as many forms of chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis) through vaccines against Hepatitis B.

A huge public health intervention is making our environment safer. This means having good sewage and clean water, and lead-free gasoline and cleaner air. These changes have saved far more lives, and improved health much more, than all of the individual medical care interventions combined. If you have traveled abroad, especially to less developed countries, you know how important these are. Indeed, better sanitation, as well as better surveillance and treatment, have dramatically reduced other infectious diseases that were once terribly feared, notably tuberculosis. And inspection of our food supply, restaurant and otherwise, are another very important part of public health.

The other big public health measure is education. Of course, education can be and is provided to individuals by health professionals as well as populations via public service education, but it is major nationwide public health efforts that have made a big difference. These include the huge decrease in cigarette smoking, and the greater safety of automobiles and their exhausts. Cigarette smoking used to be ubiquitous (see any WW2 movie) and in what would shock young Americans today, widely practiced in restaurants and even college lecture halls. Today that is unimaginable, and smoking in most places is aberrant, with less than 15% of adults currently smoking and most of those trying to quit. Car accidents are still a major cause of death and injury, but deaths from cars are way down. Almost none of this is related to people driving more safely and almost all of it to safer design of cars (think seat belts, air bags, engines that collapse down instead of back in a collision) and roads. Lead poisoning of children is way down in most places in the US thanks to lead being banned from gasoline and paint.

There are still many challenges on the public health front. Reducing the rate of chronic diseases though education around eating huge numbers of empty calories still have a long way to go. The terrible infectious disease epidemic of recent decades, HIV, has been greatly reduced by treatment, but until there is a vaccine, high-risk sexual behaviors persist. The opioid epidemic is killing more and more people, and it is only through societal approaches that this is going to be reduced.

The epidemic of gun death is not abating; many studies and articles in the press have recently discussed the increase in the suicide rate, often prompted by recent high-profile suicides such as those of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain (How Suicide Quietly Morphed Into a Public Health Crisis; 5 Takeaways on America’s Increasing Suicide Rate, ). While neither Spade or Bourdain used a gun, guns are the cause of death in at least half of suicides, and suicide far exceeds homicide in terms of numbers of gun deaths. Those who believe it is not the availability of guns that causes deaths from both causes, and other methods could be used to kill oneself or others, are simply wrong. Easy availability of guns, far more effective and efficient at killing oneself or others than any other method, absolutely has been demonstrated to increase both homicide and suicide. Suicide by gun is over 90% effective; by drugs less than 5%. “Successful” suicide rates are far higher in high gun states (e.g., Montana) than in low-gun states (e.g., Massachusetts). Homicides are also more common where guns are at hand. And, in regard to school and other mass shootings, while you can kill someone with a knife or a baseball bat, but it is hard to commit mass murder with them.

So, why do we not spend more on public health? Why do we spend so much more on what is, from a societal point of view, much less effective individual health interventions, and less than 5% of that on public health? One reason, of course, is that when each of us is sick, we (usually) want treatment, as much as possible, especially if there is a chance that it could cure us, or at least ease our suffering. This is understandable, and it is tied to the fact that we have much greater awareness of treatment of something ailing us (curing our infection, relieving our pain) than of not having disease because of the presence of public health practices. As I would tell students, how often do we wake up thankful that we do not have cholera because we have a clean water supply? Indeed, when we find that the water in Flint, MI, is contaminated with lead, we are shocked because we assume our water is safe; when we find an E. coli outbreak from a restaurant, we are shocked because we assume our food is safe.

There is also, unsurprisingly, the issue of the money that to be made. The provision of public health is rarely a big profit center, and it is usually, therefore, done by government – local, state, and federal. Individual health care, however, is a huge money-maker for insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical and device manufacturers, nursing home companies, and on and on. All that money – over $3.3 TRILLION by recent estimate -- spent on your and other individuals, while it may (or may not) have a salubrious impact on you, is going into someone’s pocket. On the flip side, public health interventions often reduce profit, especially when they are very effective. The struggle against tobacco, which killed more people than any other cause by far, was fought long and hard by the tobacco companies (currently now plying their wares in the less-developed world).Each of the changes to cars that led to the great increases in safety was fought by the industry. Today, we continue to see tremendous opposition to rules that make our environment (air, water) clean and safe; sadly, under the current administration, many of these rules are being rolled back, which will absolutely decrease our society’s health.

I guess I also need to address the people who believe that vaccines are unsafe. They are a major threat, and presumably haven’t seen children dying of measles, of the suffering of chicken pox and mumps, of the morbidity from H. flu infections of the middle ear (my students have never seen it!) or deaths from H. flu epiglottitis. Yes, there can be minor side effects from some vaccines, but the benefit is overwhelming.

Finally, as always finally, it is the poor and disenfranchised who suffer the worst. While sometimes we have the perverse satisfaction of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in well-to-do communities, anti-vaxxers unconscionably campaign in immigrant/refugee communities telling people to not vaccinate their children. The poor and minority city of Flint suffers a poisoned water supply. The oldest, cheapest houses are likeliest to have peeling lead paint and be located near polluting factories and dumps. Tobacco and junk food manufacturers advertise most heavily in minority neighborhoods. And, of course, the murder rate is highest in poor and minority communities.

Good medical care for individuals is valuable when it is needed, and could be less expensive. Public health measures are even more valuable and cost-effective. We need to increase the money and effort spent upon public health interventions, and certainly not scale them back.

Benjamin Franklin said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s true, and is a great argument for greater investment in public health.

More wealth, more health: what can we do to mitigate disparities?

The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” reviewed a report by economists discussing “The stunning — and expanding — gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor” (Max Ehrenfreund, Sept 18, 2015). One focus of the article, which is based on a report from the National Academy of Sciences, is that (in the words of the alternative title of the Wonkblog piece that displays in the URL), “the government is spending more to help rich seniors than poor ones”. A big reason for this is that the greater life expectancy of the more well-to-do means that they collect benefits from Social Security and Medicare for longer. But, of course, the real issue is that there is such a difference in the life expectancy of rich and poor. Ehrenfreund illustrates this with two dramatic graphs:

This is a pretty significant difference. What are the reasons for it? The report (and the article based on it) indicate that while differences in “lifestyle” (smoking and obesity, mainly) account for some of the difference, it is less than 1/3. The study also alludes to the impact of “stress”. This may seem vague, non-specific, or ubiquitous: aren’t we all stressed? Don’t rich people have a lot of stress because wealth is often accompanied by great responsibility? Such interpretations sometimes leads "stress" as a factor in longevity to be discounted by many commentators. But the impact of stress on health is a real thing, and it is well documented. Many people are familiar with the old terms “Type A” and “Type B” personalities, and how being Type A (more stressed) can lead to a greater risk of disease, particularly heart attack. But the real concern is a kind of stress that is more common in poorer people. This is the continuous stress, from worrying about whether you and your family will have enough food to eat and a place to live, whether you will have a job, whether it is safe to walk down the street, whether (especially if you are a young Black man) the police are going to stop you at any moment, that has major negative health effects. The mechanisms through which this occurs are incompletely elucidated, but certainly involve the neuroendocrine system, the release of hormones that prepare the body for “fight or flight” by refocusing blood flow to muscles, increasing heart rate, etc. Such a response is very useful in an emergency, but when it is happening most or all of the time, and the body does not have the time and rest to fully recuperate, it results in real health damage. This hormonal response allows a person to run fast, from an attacker or for sport, for a short time, but if the challenge never stops, the body eventually wears out

This sort of stress on the body may be the “final common pathway” through which many of the negative life situations that poorer people are more likely to find themselves in exact their toll, but there are also other factors. People’s health, and thus their life expectancy, is to a large extent determined by their early childhood experience. The relative income of their families of origin that affects their childhood nutrition and education, their warmth in the winter, and the amount of transmitted stress that their parents felt, is also a big determinant. While this disparity at the start of life is something that can be mitigated, by some, through future success, it can never be completely erased. That is, while rich people from poor backgrounds may have better health later in life than those who stay poorer, they have on average worse health than those who started out wealthy and stayed that way. “Choose your parents wisely,” I tell my medical students, “if they are both long-lived and rich, it bodes well for your future health.” Luckily for them, the majority of medical students come from at least upper-middle-income families.

Another big determinant is education, and many studies show the correlation of higher levels of education with longer life and better health. Of course, education is highly correlated with income, both on the front end (children from higher-income families are more likely to achieve higher educational levels) and on the back end (those children from families of lower socioeconomic status who are successful have usually become so through education). In the US, income is related to education in part because our schools are largely funded by local tax bases, so that wealthier people live in better funded, and educationally better, school districts. People from other countries often have difficulty understanding that we have “good” and “bad” school districts; as one friend said “where I come from all schools are the same! No one would choose where to live based on the quality of the schools!” This concept is so alien to me that I had difficulty understanding them!

In addition, education does not take place only in school. Children from upper-income families are more likely to have educated parents, who not only encourage them to pursue educational success, but read to them and talk to them from the very beginning of their lives. These are also families in which survival needs do not displace the priority of children getting an education. In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of needs; survival must come before self-actualization. This was originally conceived of for the individual, but is also true of families and communities. A similar pyramid has been developed to describe the impact of Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs). ACEs are a ways of thinking about the combination of negative impacts including hunger, homelessness, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neighborhood dangerousness, etc., that have been shown to have a lifelong negative impact. In addition to being associated with higher future rates of drug abuse and mental illness, they are associated with higher rates of just about everything bad. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study conducted by Kaiser Permanente beginning in 1995-97 is the most significant study on this topic. It is ongoing and being replicated in many other countries.

 

Of course, lower income people are exposed to other risks beyond these. People living in “worse” neighborhoods have a greater likelihood of being homicide victims. Those neighborhoods are much more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants in the air and water and even from the earth (such as toxic waste dumps). Many lower-income people work in more dangerous jobs, especially true in rural areas (farming, ranching, logging, highway construction, etc.) Indeed, the potential for “confounding” results from such exposures was the reason that Michael Marmot and his colleagues did their classic series of studies showing the direct correlation of higher socioeconomic status (class) and better health by examining people who worked for the government in the same offices in London (thus the name “the Whitehall studies”).

Wealthy people have a longer life expectancy than poor people, and wealthy countries have longer life expectancies than poorer countries, and those with wider gaps between the rich and poor have wider gaps in life expectancy; in this regard the US is at greater risk than wealthy nations with smaller gaps. The neat interactive website from Gapminder allows you to track wealth with life expectancy over time since 1800. The GINI index measures the income disparities within countries, and its use allows correlating income inequality with life expectancy; like several other health measures (e.g., infant mortality) life expectancy goes down with increasing inequality even when a country (such as the US) is rich overall.

So yes, our Social Security and Medicare systems mean that those who live longer will have more financial benefit, and that they are more likely to be more well-to-do than those who die younger. In addition, those who are poorer are more likely to live longer with disability. But the real news is that poverty and social deprivation work in many synergistic ways to decrease the health of the poor. This is what we need a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to address.

And the first step is recognizing and acknowledging it.

More guns and less education is a prescription for poor health

Within the span of one week, my state of Kansas was headlined in two pieces in the New York Times, unusual for a small state. Unfortunately, neither was meant to be complimentary. “What’s the matter with Kansas Schools?” by David Sciarra and Wade Henderson appeared as an op-ed on January 8, 2014, and “Keeping Public Buildings Free of Guns Proves Too Costly for Kansas Towns”, by Steve Yaccino, was a news article (middle of the main section but top of the web page!) on January 12. Both are political and social issues; for example, the thrust of the “guns” article is that Kansas municipalities (like Wichita) that want to keep guns out of public buildings (like the library) are financially stymied by the cost of the security requirements the legislature has put in place in areas where carrying guns is not permitted. Like abortion (and neither of these pieces addresses Kansas’ virulent anti-abortion laws), guns are a very hot-button issue that inflames deep-seated passion in places like Kansas, and so is (sometimes) education. I will, however, focus my comments on the health impacts of these laws.

First, guns. Guns are, very simply, bad for people’s health. (Obviously, even when used as “intended”, for hunting, they are bad for some animals’ health, but this is not my focus.) Having guns around increases the risk of death or injury from them. Having guns intended for hunting stored locked and unloaded is the safest, but this doesn’t work for guns intended for self-defense since that renders them less available for that purpose. Carrying guns on your person, in your car, in public, on the street, and into businesses, public buildings, schools, and health care settings increases the risk. This is not what gun advocates, and concealed-carry advocates believe. Their idea is that there are bad guys out there carrying guns, either criminals who might want to rob you or crazy people who might want to shoot up your school or post office, and that carrying a gun allows one to protect oneself, and possibly others, by shooting down the perpetrator before more damage can be done. Thus, it protects your health, and that of others.

Nice idea, but completely unsupported by the facts.  Guns kill lots of people, injure many more, and virtually never save lives. This is the case even when used by police, and even more true when use of guns by police officers is excluded. It is true despite the widely-publicized, often repeated on the internet, and frequently invented stories about a virtuous homeowner shooting an armed robber. I have no doubt that such cases occur, but with such rarity as to be smaller than rounding error on the number of deaths and serious injuries inflicted by guns.  Suicides and homicides are among the leading causes of death in the US, most are caused by guns, and almost none of the homicides are “justifiable manslaughter” from a person protecting him/herself from an armed invader. The mere presence of easy-to-access guns in the environment increases dramatically the risk of successful suicide (see my blog, Suicide: What can we say?, December 12, 2013, with data from David Hemenway’s “Private Guns, Public Health”[1]). In addition, the number of “accidental” deaths (where someone other than the intended victim was shot, or someone was shot when the intent was “just” to threaten or show off, or by complete accident, sometimes when an unintended user – say a child – gets hold of a loaded gun) from guns is way ahead of any other method of harm (knives, bats, etc.)

When we go beyond having guns to carrying guns in public places, the data is less well collected. However, the trope of the heroic law-abiding, gun-carrying citizen drawing down on the evildoer in a public place, like say a movie theater or the waiting room of your clinic, is a terrifying thought. First of all, almost none of them are Bat Masterson or Wyatt Earp or Annie Oakley (except maybe in their own minds) and the idea that they will hit who they are aiming at is wishful thinking; the rest of the folks are caught in a gunfight. It is scary enough when this involves police officers, but if half the waiting room pulls out pieces, the results will be, um, chaotic. Harmful. Not to mention what happens when the police show and don’t know who to shoot at (maybe if you are a gun-toting good guy you can wear a white hat…).

So, having guns around, and the more easily they are available, is absolutely harmful to the health of the population, and generally you as an individual. If people, including legislators, and Kansas legislators in particular, want to encourage gun carrying for other reasons, they should at least be aware of and acknowledge the health risks. But what about education? The cuts in state education will, quite likely, harm the education of children (or if, as the article notes, the state Supreme Court forces the legislature to fund K-12, the education of young adults since the money will likely come from higher education), but what about health?

There is a remarkable relationship. More education leads to better health. Better educated people are healthier. The relationship is undoubtedly complex, because better educated people also have better jobs and higher incomes, which is also associated with health. This is addressed with great force in a recent policy brief “Education: It Matters More to Health than Ever Before”, by the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Society and Health sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; for example, while lifespan overall in the US continues to increase, for white women with less than 12 years of education, it is currently decreasing! The RWJ site also includes an important interview with Steven Woolf, MD MPH, Director of the Center. “I don’t think most Americans know that children with less education are destined to live sicker and die sooner,” Dr. Woolf says. He discusses both the “downstream” benefits of education: “getting good jobs, jobs that have better benefits including health insurance coverage, and higher earnings that allow people to afford a healthier lifestyle and to live in healthier neighborhood,” and the “upstream” issues, “factors before children ever reach school age, which may be important root causes for the relationship between education and health. Imagine a child growing up in a stressful environment,” that increase the risk of unhealthy habits, poor coping skills and violent injuries.

In several previous blogs I have cited earlier work by Dr. Woolf, one of the nation’s most important researchers on society and health, notably in "Health in All" policies to eliminate health disparities are a real answer, August 18, 2011. I included this graph, in which the small blue bars indicate the deaths averted by medical advances (liberally interpreted) and the purple bars represent the potential deaths that could be averted if all Americans had the death rates of the most educated. I also included a link to the incredible County Health Calculator (http://chc.humanneeds.vcu.edu) which allows you to look at any state or county, find out how the education or income level compares to others, and use an interactive slider to find out how mortality and other health indicators would change if the income or education level were higher or lower.

In the US, the quality of one’s education is very much tied to the neighborhood you live in, since much of school funding is from local tax districts and wealthier communities have, simply, better schools. (This last is completely obvious to Americans, but not necessarily to foreigners. A friend from Taiwan was looking at houses and was told by the realtor that a particular house was a good value because it was in a good school district. She called us an asked what that meant; “In Taiwan, all schools are the same; they are funded by the government. No one would choose where to live based on the school.”) This difference could be partially compensated for by state funding for education, which is why cuts in this area are particularly harmful, including to our people’s health. In fact the most effective investment that a society can make in the health of its people is in the education of its young.

An educated population is healthier. Wide availability and carrying of guns decreases a population’s health. Unfortunately, the public’s health seems to carry little weight in these political decisions.

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[1] Hemenway, David. Private Guns, Public Health. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor. 2007.