COVID-19 and the Future of Aging: A Public Health Forecast
Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging: What has the COVID-19 pandemic shown us about the importance of investment in public health — are there opportunities for improvement that can be made in time to help?
Dr. Linda Fried: COVID-19 has unmasked so many areas where the United States has not invested adequately to protect its people. A key example is our public health system.
It should be responsible for creating seventy percent of the health of our population, yet it receives less than two and a half percent of U.S. health dollars.
The U.S. puts no more into our public health infrastructure and systems than we did in 1960, without even adjusting for inflation. Due to that disinvestment, our public health system has never had the resources to staff up, and its workforce is now half of what it was even fifteen years ago.
And while we have many people with immense expertise, they have not been empowered to lead. Compounding this resource challenge, we have fifty separate public health systems in fifty states. In the absence of public health system investment, our health status has sunk to the bottom of peer nations. And the ill health of our population has left us particularly vulnerable to a disease like COVID-19.
Read more @Next Avenue
