America’s Public Health Emergencies, Continued...

America is in urgent need of moral, innovative, and inspiring presidential and bipartisan political leadership to attend to unresolved and growing public health crises.

Earlier this year I had written an opinion piece titled “America’s Public Health Emergency Trifecta and Access to Care” with a focus on the opioid epidemic, the rising tide of suicides, and psychiatric patients in overwhelming numbers presenting themselves to America’s hospital emergency rooms and having nowhere to go for follow-up treatment.

The crisis has not abated. Also, no immediate solutions have been provided by either American political party to remedy our country’s inexcusable lack of access to care, inclusive of psychiatric care, although we spend more than $3 trillion a year and more than $10,000 a person a year. No other developed country’s citizens are in such a fragile predicament.

Another additional and enduring American public health emergency is the unrelenting gun violence across our country, with the heartbreaking episodes in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, both occurring the first weekend in August. Preliminary evidence indicates the use of highly powered weapons with possible political and discriminatory undertones.

Both public health emergencies referred to herein, the trifecta identified earlier this year, as well the unrelenting and daunting tide of gun violence challenge all of us to rise to this occasion to develop and implement immediate, comprehensive solutions.

They would include allocation of necessary human and financial resources to new research (no public funds available for public health violence research since the 1990s); implementation of universal access to care for all Americans (we are the only high-income economy that does not have it); a bipartisan policy collaboration to address gun legislation; toning down of the political rhetoric; a public, private, philanthropical, and spiritual coalition supporting all of the above with progress closely monitored by all involved; and a well-informed media facilitating a bipartisan, healing dialogue. ■

ELIOT SOREL, M.D.

Washington, D.C.