public health funding – Rudy Owens' Blog

Policy, systems, and environmental change: the current, faddish, cow-patty flavor of public health

April 27, 2014October 4, 2015Rudy Owens2 Comments

One thing I have never shaken since my days as a rookie reporter is my penchant for calling out the obvious. This is one of the sacred duties of the press: to speak truth to power. This also means calling a spade a spade, and bullshit for what it is, and what it smells like.

Anyone who has ever worked in the business of reporting news and telling facts knows this is one of the press’s sacred trusts—and myths—and the clearer we are in doing that, the better our society is from having that unbiased information.

I captured these various images on Google when I typed in a few keywords, and clearly this concept has a lot of widespread acceptance by people who know a cow patty when they smell one.

Today, I stumbled on Marcy Wheeler’s blog, the Empty Wheel, which tackles many hot-button policy issues. Last year she blogged about climate change in a piece called “The Cost of Bullshit: Climate Change, National Security, and Inaction.” She pointed out that the cost for maintaining the status quo was too high, even when major government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of State concluded that the issue was a critical concern to U.S. national interests. Yet, no actions were being taken by the government, and all of the reports on the emerging crisis were “mere bullshit—more wasted government employees’ time and taxpayer money.”

Sure easy for a blogger not on the payroll to diss hard-working public workers and policy-makers, right? Or, is Ms. Wheeler simply calling out the obvious, like reporters have always done, or thought they were doing.

Will a public health fad meaningfully address the main killers of Americans?

The cost of bullshit has been on my mind late, particularly regarding public health jargon that inflates busy-looking arm-waving, but does not change reality.

For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of working in the public health is the field’s faddish way it labels its collective actions to address chronic disease issues, such as obesity, using fancy sounding concepts like “policy, systems, and environmental change.” Mon dieu, what big words, what big ideas.

This is an expression coming from the top, from the venerable U.S. Centers and Disease Control (CDC), to explain national efforts to tackle the monster that is chronic disease—the leading causes of death in our ever-fattening and ever growing income-unequal country.

These diseases kill seven in 10 Americans, and of the CDC’s meager budget of under $7 billion for our national public health effort is a mere drop in the bucket compared to other priorities of the $1.2 trillion national budget that is so-called “non-discretionary spending.”

The Congressional Budget Office released this info graphic on government spending and revenues for 2013. Go here for original: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45278. — The Congressional Budget Office released this infographic on government spending and revenues for 2013. Go here for original: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45278.

The CDC still estimates 18% of U.S. GDP spending is on healthcare, and a third of it at the place where the most outrageously overpriced and at the same time least effective primary care interventions can take place—hospitals.

So what do public health officials do, when faced with a handful of breadcrumbs thrown to them from Congress? They invent concepts that make it appear that public health is doing something, when there is little or no clear evidence population benefits are accruing based on investments at this level in the large ocean. Yes, I am talking about the catchy and jargon-laden ideas like “policy, systems, and environmental change.”

This is a hodge-podge of activities that encompass everything from starting farmers markets to promoting smoke-free buildings. Here are a couple of definitions I randomly found from some online sources:

State of Mississippi: “Our environment and the policies and systems in it shape the pattern of our everyday lives and have a profound influence on our health. The design and walkability of communities, the availability of low-cost fruits and vegetables, and the smoking policies in our workplaces have a direct impact on our physical activity, diet and health.”

State of Maryland: “Policy, systems, and environmental change (PSE change) refers to public health interventions that modify environments to provide healthy options and make healthy choices easy for everyone.”

Fairfax County Virginia: “Policy, systems and environmental change is a way of modifying the environment to make healthy choices practical and available to all community members. By changing laws and shaping physical landscapes, a big impact can be made with little time and resources. By changing policies, systems and/or environments, communities can help tackle health issues like obesity, diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases.”

Budgets for this kind of intervention exist in most public health jurisdictions, and public health leaders are doing to the talk, because they have so few funds to do the walk. But public health experts end up playing in a small sandbox when these investments are measured against other spending, and then we spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves through published papers, webinars, conferences, and the like that this is working. The illusion is powerful, like the illusory power of the Iron Throne in the Game of Thrones, except the shadow from a fad still does not make meaningful change when the numbers are crunched and the costs are calculated regarding chronic disease.

From the Game of Thrones, a lecture on power and illusion, for Westeros and beyond.

Public health departments who get funding through competitive grants from the CDC spearhead these efforts and then spend extensive amounts of time documenting their work trying to prove the bread crumbs made a difference to the overall health crisis facing Americans.

About $200 million was doled out from 2011 and 2012 through an effort called Communities Putting Prevention to Work (the amount initially announced in 2010 was about $380 million). In one case, Public Health-Seattle & King County published findings that show its CPPW-grant-funded efforts in schools cut youth obesity in specific schools by 17 points. Great job, except the funding was not permanent and it was not renewed when the grant ran out. The program is now in the past tense.

In 2014, public health professionals learned another funding source, the Community Transformation Grants, which also promote the policy, systems, and environmental work, is being cut too. Some can argue the money is being allocated to other programs that tackle chronic disease, focusing on heart disease and diabetes.

More musical chairs without really changing the big picture again?

I do not mean to belittle the work of public health people doing this work. They are my colleagues. I respect them. And the work being done, like promoting activities to reduce tobacco use and get more people eating healthy food, should be continued.

But as a field, I am convinced this type of work is self-delusional because it hides the nasty realities of how much larger issues shape the public’s health, such as how transportation budgets are allocated, how cheap petro-based energy is spurring obesity in measurable ways, how legislation is crafted by special interests at the state and federal level, and how the principle of health care is considered a privilege not a right in the United States. (In Denmark, by contrast, the public funds about 85% of all health care through taxes, and the system is rooted in both law and a social contract that is premised on system where all citizens are provided free and equal access to quality health care.)

Emilia Clark, mother of dragons in the smash HBO TV series Game of Thrones, is a good visual metaphor of what public health is not in the bruising world of budget appropriations at the state and federal levels of government.

The nasty realities we do not want to think about, using a contemporary TV metaphor, would be what happens when the violent kings of Westeros cut deals and cut heads, to maintain order in that mythical, lovable place with White Walkers, a giant ice wall, and fire-breathing critters. Mother of Dragons, public health is not, that is for sure!

I imagine a new fad will emerge in public health in the next three years, like it does in management. We might change the concept, but we likely may even have a smaller piece of the government pies.

No, public health jurisdictions cannot stop working until we see changes on these fronts. But the more we in public health delude ourselves that we are making a difference with scraps from the table, the more easily we are duped into accepting that the larger model is as it should be, and how it shall always be.

We will continue kvetching about farmers markets and soda machines, but not moving in a rigorous way upstream, where budget deals are made with transportation dollars, for starters. And I think we have to start being honest with ourselves about what we are accomplishing in the sandbox and whether this is the best use of our meager and diminishing resources.

How the 10 essential public health services handicap a weakened profession

January 12, 2014January 14, 2014Rudy Owens2 Comments

Public health, as a profession and system to improve population health, continues to fall short in the United States.

Since the start of the Great Recession, nearly a quarter of all employees working for local health jurisdictions have been downsized or laid off because of funding cuts to already meager budgets. The National Association of County and City Health Officials pegs the attrition at nearly 44,000 workers–a fact reported on this blog before.

Proportional changes in inflation adjusted spending for public health (CDC) versus health care spending in the United States.

Today, most Americans have little idea what public health does, why it matters, and why its funding is critical to improving health outcomes at the population level. For that matter, half of all Americans cannot even identify what the core elements of health insurance plans are.

From its start as a profession in the United States in the early 1900s, public health was deemed to have a political-activist function. In fact, noted public health pioneer C.E.A. Winslow, Yale’s first chair of public health, promoted universal medical care in the 1920s as a principle of sound public health policy, backed later by other public health practitioners in the next two decades who unsuccessfully called for a form of universal health care.

Winslow’s often-quoted definition of public health called for the “development of the social machinery which will insure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.” Such efforts were overt and unashamed calls for political action and advocacy, the likes of which are mostly not heard today from the profession.

10 essential public health services: a recipe for political impotence?

Since 1994, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control has pushed the “10 essential public health services” model as the gold standard for defining public health’s realm of practice. As far back as 1999, the CDC claimed, “The overall goal for public health’s infrastructure is to have every health department fully prepared with capacity to fulfill the Ten Essential Public Health Services and every community better protected by an efficacious public health system.”

The 10 essential public health services is the U.S. model, not a global model, for defining the profession. — The 10 essential public health services is the U.S. model, not a global model, for defining the public health profession’s realm of practice.

This model has rippled outward to every public health agency, every school of public health, and all professionals in the field as the benchmark to measure quality and effectiveness. Logic models have been developed to see how well health departments were doing according to this standard. Anyone who works in the field is told that these services define who we are and what we do.

All the while, public health budgets have been slashed nationally, and at the state and local level, workers have fled or were pushed out of the profession. Still the field of public health continues to push its competent but still toothless model for what is considered a best practice—the 10 essential services.

While evidence-based and certainly valid, this 10-step model is also a self-defeating set of quasi-religious commandments that fails to address the harsh political realities related to developing legislation and orchestrating fights over budget appropriations. It also fails to call for advocacy and political activity, which can and have pushed public health efforts far greater than these prescribed activities.

Politics, money, and real power

For-profit entities working in the health sector thrive because advocacy and political engagement are fundamental to their business models and bottom lines, unlike the model of inefficacy promoted for the public health profession.

For instance, pharmaceutical powerhouse Pfizer unabashedly states, “We believe that public policy engagement is an important and appropriate role for companies in open societies, when conducted in a legal and transparent manner. … The Pfizer Political Action Committee makes contributions to candidates for federal office, and fully discloses its contributions on a regular basis to the Federal Election Commission.”

Pfizer, multinational pharmaceutical firm, published its political spending activities in the United States for the first half of 2013. — Pfizer, the multinational pharmaceutical firm, published its political spending activities in the United States for the first half of 2013.

While for-profit health interests march forward, with ever more dollars and clout, public health continues to retreat. The President’s budget request in 2014 for the CDC, the agency charged with protecting America’s health, is a measly $6.6 billion (for its program level expenditures)—a drop of $270 million over 2012.

This dip likely reflects pushback by GOP lawmakers in the current Congress, who view CDC’s public health activities as synonymous with overt advocacy. Language in funding measures, in the current session of Congress, has attempted to limit federal dollars for grassroots efforts by public health practitioners to lobby on behalf of specific legislation, particularly on efforts to address chronic disease and obesity.

Generally, public health advocacy is not lobbying, which is prohibited when it involves federal or earmarked funds. Exceptions include study or research and discussions of broad social problems.

So it is not surprising that government-funded public health bodies have been generally shy, and in the case of firearms legislation, nearly totally muzzled, from discussing firearms deaths since congressional language banned funding of firearms research starting in 1996. (In my opinion there has been a failure of leadership in public health when such leadership was needed on the issue of firearms violence, which is a legitimate public health concern.)

But should bans on using public funds for lobbying mute the profession from pushing for advocacy approaches and political engagement?

Daniel Callahan and Bruce Jennings’ 2002 article in the American Journal of Public Health examined the ethics of public health advocacy. They noted, “Politics is a necessary component of public health, moreover, precisely in order to achieve public health policies and practices consistent with American traditions and values. Politics is the messy arena in which ultimate questions of the public good are worked out.”

Public health’s failures in the political mosh pit

A perfect example of what happens when public health was not fighting tooth and nail was President Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2009, which ultimately squashed efforts for a single payer system—the long-held dream of public health advocates from the 20^th century—and advanced a health insurance industry, market-based model for “health care” reform.

All told, advocacy groups in 2009 spent $3.47 billion for D.C.-based lobbyists to parse out issues, according to left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics. Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of that spending went to fight the health reform battle. Businesses and organizations that lobbied on “health reform” spent more than $1.2 billion on their overall advocacy efforts.

APHA lobbying 2013 — Source: The Center for Responsive Politics

For its part, the American Public Health Association (APHA) spent less than $500,000 annually on lobbying at last count in 2013. (See spending chart for lobbying expenditures by APHA from 1998 to 2013.)

The good news is that this marked a jump of more than 300 percent from what APHA spent in 2012. It would appear that some in the field are waking up to the realities of fighting for public health where the most meaningful impacts can be achieved – through policy and legislation.

By comparison, just one big pharma company, Pfizer, spent more than $800,000 in the first six months of 2013, from local to congressional candidates and political parties nationwide (see chart above).

What is most discouraging is that future leaders entering the profession continue to be shortchanged by graduate programs that do not know how to prepare practitioners to win in the bruising political environment known as “upstream.” This is my general assessment of not just my graduate MPH program, but of the field that I still see through its obsessive and yet parochial obsession with the 10 essential public health services.

The CDC's 10 essential public health services. — The CDC’s 10 essential public health services.

A very smart resource guide developed by the California Endowment sharply noted: “… many public health faculty do not possess the skills or experience to teach advocacy effectively. Faculty surveys show, for example, that despite advocacy for health being recognized as an ethical responsibility and required competency of health educators, many health education faculty do not see themselves as competent for teaching advocacy and lack instructional materials to do so. Degree-granting programs in public health need to provide systematic training in social advocacy. In the absence of formal training in social change, public health graduates must learn this information and develop these skills on a catch-as-catch-can basis. Working in this way means that some will be less effective than they otherwise could be in advancing the health of the public.”