How Do You Picture Health Care?

Our usual perception, when asked to visualize health care, is a television image of an emergency room, a physician, a sympathetic nurse, and perhaps a paramedic. In reality, our images symbolize a failure of health care and its end-stages. We should be visualizing poor quality unsanitary food, poor quality housing, cultural conflicts, gang warfare, excessive (and often underage)alcohol use, poor quality water, poor quality and insufficient quantity of preventive health services, poor environmental conditions, the prenatal visit not done within the first trimester, the mammogram not done in the vulnerable woman, the testicle not palpated in the adolescent male who has a cancer mass which could be found and successfully treated, the school nurse whose services have been lost because of insufficient funding for our children.

Health care is a lot more than physicians, nurses, hospitals and ambulances. The determinants of health are often those issues which are arrogantly dismissed by politicians and planners because their political contributors don't want them to pay attention to those complex issues, and it is easier to provide political benefit to wealthy voters and their corporate allies than to the poor, nonvoters and our kids.

After all, how many minutes of political advertising, or seats at a campaign dinner, can the poor and children buy?