The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Why Our Current Healthcare System Keeps Us Sick And How To Fix It
Mon, 20 Jan 2025
Heart disease, cancer, and stroke are the leading causes of death—and premature death at that—in the US. These diseases all have several risk factors in common, like smoking, physical inactivity, and poor diet, which policy often views simply as personal choices. We need to begin looking at disease prevention beyond individual decision-making. In this podcast, I talk with Dr. Anand Parekh, Senator Bill Frist, and Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian on the need for government policymakers to address disease prevention. Dr. Anand Parekh is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s chief medical advisor, providing clinical and public health expertise across the organization, particularly in the areas of aging, prevention, and global health. As a US Department of Health and Human Services deputy assistant secretary for health from 2008 to 2015, he developed and implemented national initiatives focused on prevention, wellness, and care management. He is the author of Prevention First: Policymaking for a Healthier America. Senator Bill Frist is a heart and lung transplant surgeon and former US Senate majority leader. He led passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and the historic PEPFAR HIV/AIDS legislation that has saved millions of lives worldwide. As the founder and director of the Vanderbilt Multi-Organ Transplant Center, he has performed over 150 heart and lung transplants, authored over 100 peer-reviewed medical articles, and published seven books. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist, Dean and Jean Mayer Professor at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and professor of medicine at Tufts Medical School. He has authored more than 400 scientific publications on dietary priorities for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases and on evidence-based policy approaches to reduce these burdens in the US and globally. He has served in numerous advisory roles, including for the US and Canadian governments. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to Bioptimizers.com/Hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%.
What challenges does the US healthcare system face?
I mean, you were involved in the one campaign that was driving the AIDS and poverty relief in Africa. And it was a massive campaign against all odds. And it succeeded. And you were shepherding that through. And that was a huge achievement. We need a PEPFAR One campaign for the food system. We need a Manhattan Project for the food system.
How would you go about, given all your experience and knowledge and your work at the Bipartisan Policy Center, laying that out in a way that was a doable strategy, a winnable way?
Yeah. Well, I think, and remember, I did the 20 years in medicine, the 12 years in politics and policy, but for the last 12 years, I used the private sector. And the example, the food that I gave, the example that I gave to you really comes out of the importance of the private sector and investments that are made, that are cutting edge, that ultimately define policy.
I also work from the policy end. So even though I'm no longer majority leader of the Senate, you mentioned it, I'm on the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where we talk about the health of the community, the non-medical determinants of health,
being much more important than the health care, that the food and our behavior and where we live and how we live is much more important than Bill Frist, the heart transplant surgeon, you know, saving lives, doing dramatic things. That's where the drama isn't very important. Don't want to diminish it. But the sort of 60% of the impact is in the dimensions that we were talking about.
And that means we have to go to policy. People say, why did you leave medicine and go to the United States Senate? What drove you to do it? Did you lose your mind? And I guess I did lose my mind. But one of the reasons is to be able to participate in the system that we're talking about. And that is ultimately public policy matters. Today, a lot of people dismiss government, dismiss institutions.
But at the end of the day, the public policy matters. And you've written about it. You know, we've talked about nutrition and agricultural policy. The Bipartisan Policy Center always, which is a center in Washington, D.C., bipartisan. Tom Daschle and I run the health component. We stay on the issues of supplemental nutrition on agricultural policy. We're on that because it does affect health care.
and the health, the burdens of disease, and the sort of quality of lives we're going to live. So it really starts from the private sector all the way up to the public sector, and you don't have to be a politician to participate in the public sector.
Yeah, you don't. And so the key things that have to get changed, and you write about them, for example, in the bipartisan policy work, you know, SNAP, food labels, you know, reforms to Medicare, reimbursement around food as medicine, which you're talking about. How challenging do you think it is to get some of these things done? Because
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