Citizens United for Public Health

 In Preventive Medicine Column

 

Citizens United for Public Health

There was a brilliant, in my opinion, recent column in the New York Times entitled The Conservative Case for Campaign Finance Reform. The author, Richard Painter, whom I do not know, is a law professor at the University of Minnesota, and obviously, a conservative.

I love that this well-crafted, citizen-centric essay is from a place in the political spectrum with which I am not associated. I am not shy about expressing my views, and admittedly, I do tend to lean left of center. But I follow the evidence where it leads, and refuse to be held hostage by the confines of any given political pigeonhole. I am not inevitably “liberal,” although when I am, I am proudly so. I am not afraid to be “conservative” when it seems the right answer.

That’s the point- none of us should be held hostage by any such partisan designations. At the extreme, the constraints of such labels are like being obligated to choose one favored letter as the answer to every multiple choice question, no matter how obviously wrong. I am a “b” guy, so I must choose “b” even though “a” sure looks like the right choice this time… is nonsense we should all renounce. We might also consider that we are far more likely to learn something when attending closely to a well-articulated point of view we don’t already own. I commend Professor Painter’s fine column to my “liberal” readers accordingly.

In this season of roiling politics and abundant cause for discontent, we should advance our ideals. When a label reflects what we care about, fine. When what we care about is subordinated to the tyrannies of a label, something has gone badly awry.

Richard Painter and I agree; it’s as simple as that. How silly it would be to overlook or discount that agreement because our divergent labels don’t allow for it. He makes his case on the basis of conservatism; I make mine in the service of public health.

Public health is all about doing the best we can for actual people, not a statistical and anonymous horde that exists nowhere outside of actuarial tables. That doesn’t always align with the greatest profits for some large corporation. In fact, it almost never does, because of the time horizons involved.

Politicians work in election cycles. Companies work in financial quarters. Companies may have a 1, 2, or even 5-year plan, even as they focus on the next quarterly statement, if not today’s stock price. But they almost never have a 30-year plan, or, for that matter, a 100-year plan. And yes, companies spin off other companies that then go on to have their own 5-year plan and focus on quarterly statements.

But human beings spin off other human beings, with a good chance of living the better part of 100 years. Those human beings spin off more human beings. These divestments go by names we all know, worn by the very people we love most in the world: children, and grandchildren.

If you care deeply only about yourself, your own children, and your own grandchildren- you still have a time horizon of acute concern about 140 years longer than even the most far-sighted of companies.

Companies are not people. And the time horizon of almost everything that matters most to health is too long for companies to notice or care. They care a bit about productivity in the next quarter. But climate change? The slow toll of a culture pretending that multicolored marshmallows are a reasonable part of anyone’s complete breakfast? The hypocrisy in marketing implying that copiously sugar-sweetened beverages are all about fun rather than trips to the endocrinologist in an age of epidemic obesity and type 2 diabetes among adults and children alike? The fact that cutting down rain forests will not only scar the lungs of the world, but inevitably crash us into the next, new, devastating pathogen? Somebody else’s problem.

For us, actual people, the timeline that matters runs cradle to grave. What matters most to us, the people, involves both the immediacy of our days, and also the legacy of our generations. We care a whole lot about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit from us. We citizens, loving parents and grandparents all, of whatever political stripe, are surely united in that.

Everything is public health, and political decisions all matter accordingly. Renouncing control over the flow of cash that controls those decisions is not just calamitous folly toxic to the spirit of democracy, it is a veritable cancer we let grow unchecked in the body politic.

So go the arguments from both poles of the political spectrum. Because we, the people, are truly united- by the love of family- in our deep devotion to the common imperatives of our humanity. Because no corporation…has ever had a child.

-fin Dr. David L. Katz;www.davidkatzmd.com; author, Disease Proof; founder, True Health Initiative

Dr. David L. Katz
DAVID L. KATZ MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM, is the founding director (1998) of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, and current President of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He earned his BA degree from Dartmouth College (1984); his MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1988); and his MPH from the Yale University School of Public Health (1993). He completed sequential residency training in Internal Medicine, and Preventive Medicine/Public Health. He is a two-time diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and a board-certified specialist in Preventive Medicine/Public Health. He has received two Honorary Doctorates. Dr. Katz has published roughly 200 scientific articles and textbook chapters, and 15 books to date, including multiple editions of leading textbooks in both Preventive Medicine, and nutrition. Recognized globally for expertise in nutrition, weight management and the prevention of chronic disease, he has a social media following of well over half a million. In 2015, Dr. Katz established the True Health Initiative to help convert what we know about lifestyle as medicine into what we do about it, in the service of adding years to lives and life to years around the globe.
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