How Dare We?

Kim Bellard
Tincture

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The saying goes, out of the mouths of babes. Or, in the case of Greta Thunberg, the mouth of a teenager.

I had been vaguely aware of Ms. Thunberg these past few months, but wasn’t really sure who she was. Someone on Game of Thrones, perhaps? (Which, sadly, shows you how closely I follow either climate change or GoT). But after her scathing put- down of climate change deniers at the UN this week, I’m thinking: gosh, we need that outrage in healthcare too.

If you missed her speech, it’s worth your five minutes:

“How dare you,” indeed.

For anyone who missed Ms. Thunberg’s backstory, she is a 16 year-old student from Sweden, who has made climate change her mission. She’s been leading student protests about inaction on climate change for the past year, leading to a worldwide student protest last Friday that had as many as 4 million people participating. She was at the UN this week as part of the United Nations Climate Action Summit.

“Right now we are the ones who are making a difference. If no one else will take action, then we will,” Ms. Thunberg said at the New York City protest. “We demand a safe future. Is that really too much to ask?”

She excoriated our so-called world leaders while at the UN:

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean…you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

Noting that thirty years of science have made the dangers climate change “crystal clear,” she added:

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”

As Ms, Thunberg told Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic, about climate change but also applicable to gun violence and a host of other problems, “We are not the ones who are responsible for this, but we are the ones who have to live with these consequences, and that is so incredibly unfair.”

Parkland survivors Credit: Peter Hapak/Time

This is not the first time we adults have been called out for our inaction on important issues that impact not just our health but the health of generations to come. For example, survivors of the Parkland school shootings have been using their outrage and social media savvy to help mobilize action to finally break the logjam in America about reducing gun violence.

They’ve been advocating for a year and a half now, and all we have are more “thoughts and prayers,” as well as many more mass shootings. Young people are speaking up; again, it is adults who are not acting.

Think about some of the many other issues that we are also failing to act on that have intergenerational health impacts:

Anti-Vaxx Movement: If there’s something about which the science is even clearer than climate change, it is that vaccines work. Vaccines save lives, reduce misery, and improve health. So how is it that, in 2019, we have measles outbreaks? Kids are supposed to rely on their parents to make good choices on their behalf, especially about their health, and getting vaccinated used to be one. Now, people don’t believe even their doctor’s recommendation. They’re basing their decisions on what a friend told them, or the internet, or simply on their faith.

As Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease expert, told The New York Times, “Science has become just another voice in the room. It has lost its platform. Now, you simply declare your own truth.”

Maternal and child health: We claim to love babies and moms, but you sure couldn’t tell it by the state of maternal and child health in the U.S. We have the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world, and it isn’t any better for childhood deaths. A Health Affairs study found that U.S. children have a 70% greater chance of dying before adulthood than in other developed countries.

It’s not only mortality but also morbidity. We shouldn’t have, for example, more children who are obese, have diabetes, or have allergies, but we do. Those are things that will have lifelong consequences.

Lost Einsteins: a 2017 report lamented how we are producing a generation of “lost Einsteins,” children who would never live up to their potential (or survive birth/childhood) due to the socioeconomic situation they are born into. We live in a country to extreme economic and health disparities. Be born in the “wrong” place, to the “wrong” race/ethnic group, to the “wrong” parents, and your life choices may be greatly limited. None of that should matter, but it does.

It’s one thing for an individual to squander his/her own opportunities, but it is something else entirely when our healthcare system is complicit on squandering the opportunities of a significant portion of younger generations.

Infrastructure: The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s infrastructure a D+ — not just crumbling roads and bridges, but also schools, drinking water, and waste treatment. The drinking water crises in Flint and Newark are neither isolated nor have time limited impacts. The health of many children is going to be irreparably impacted.

It’s going to cost trillions of dollars to improve our infrastructure, money that we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren to pay, while adversely impacting their health and ability to pay it in the meantime.

Let’s not even go into how we fail to fund our social programs like Medicare, CHIP, Medicaid, or the Public Health Service, forcing future generations to deal with them, or how we allow silly but harmful products like vaping to be targeted at teens. We are failing our children and their yet-to-be-born children.

As Ms. Thunberg said about climate change, our children and our grandchildren are not responsible for the mess we’ve made of our healthcare system, but they are the ones who will suffer the consequences.

She’s right; it is unfair.

There should be student protests about the problems with our healthcare system. We should be joining them. We all know it is a mess, and still we tolerate it. Concern and even outrage are not enough. Action is needed. How dare we allow our existing inefficient, ineffective, unfair healthcare system to continue to fail us?

Please follow me on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard), and don’t forget to share if you liked the article!

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Curious about many things, some of which I write about — usually health care, innovation, technology, or public policy. Never stop asking “why” or “why not”!