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Me vs. Us: A Health Divided
How can we care so much about health care yet so little about public health?
Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people.
In Me vs. Us, primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care. He offers eight reasons why our interest in the technologies and delivery of health care supersedes our interest in public health and its focus on the core social, economic, and environmental forces that shape health. Stein documents how public health has continually "lost out" to medicine--from a loss in funding and resources to how we view our personal priorities--and suggests how public health may hold the solutions to our most concerning crises, from pandemics to obesity to climate change.
Me vs. Us concludes that individual and public health are inseparable. In the end, Stein argues, we need to recover and sharpen our sense of health based on a reverent appreciation of both perspectives.
Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people.
In Me vs. Us, primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care. He offers eight reasons why our interest in the technologies and delivery of health care supersedes our interest in public health and its focus on the core social, economic, and environmental forces that shape health. Stein documents how public health has continually "lost out" to medicine--from a loss in funding and resources to how we view our personal priorities--and suggests how public health may hold the solutions to our most concerning crises, from pandemics to obesity to climate change.
Me vs. Us concludes that individual and public health are inseparable. In the end, Stein argues, we need to recover and sharpen our sense of health based on a reverent appreciation of both perspectives.
Kindle Edition
Published July 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 16, 2024
I wanted to learn more about public health and was hoping this book would help. It did, to a certain extent. The book did go off on tangents at times. I really liked the examples of public health Stein highlighted to show what can happen when we focus on a problem in solution-oriented ways.
September 30, 2022
This book makes some great points in a very accessible way. I got rather frustrated by how often the author would walk up to an important argument before wildly changing direction and never coming back to the main point.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews