Small city hospital emergency room entrance, Gritman Medical Center in the northern Idaho city of Moscow.
Reinhart is an M.D. and political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health. He lives in Chicago. @_Eric_Reinhart, consuming substantially more money per capita to deliver far inferior outcomes relative to peer nations. What is less widely recognized is that the health care industry is also remarkably energy inefficient.
In addition to the general disaster this presents for global public health, it also constitutes a specific problem for U.S. health policy, as the health harms associated with GHG emissions disproportionately harm the populations who constitute Medicare and Medicaid’s roughly 145 million beneficiaries, including the 30 million patients treated at community-based Federally Qualified Health Centers.
The health care industry’s environmental disregard can be explained in part by what three bioethicists recently termed “lifeboat ethics framing.” In their book “,” Nancy King, Gail Henderson, and Larry Churchill argue that bioethics has operated in a way such that any problem outside the lifeboat — that is, beyond the hospital bedside — is dismissed as irrelevant.To add insult to injury, it is in the health care industry’s financial interests to decarbonize.
Today, it is cheaper to save the climate than continue to destroy it. But federal policymakers and health care leaders continue to allow the industry to contribute to the climate crisis, which in turn is harming or killing those who are the most vulnerable. And if not stopped, GHG emissions could irreversibly undermine the possibility of health for all. Health care institutions should take a leading role in implementing immediate change to their own energy-use practices.
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