The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: Why Our Current Healthcare System Keeps Us Sick And How To Fix It
20 Jan 2025
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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