When it comes to health care policy, we keep failing to take seriously the value of human relationships. The cost of this oversight is staggering.
Interpretation
Human relationships play a crucial role in health care, and neglecting this value can have dire consequences.
In this quote, Robert J. Waldinger emphasizes the importance of human relationships in health care policy. He suggests that the failure to recognize and incorporate the value of these relationships not only impoverishes the system but also leads to significant costs, impacting both individual and societal health outcomes.
In practice
In a discussion on health care reform, one might invoke this quote to highlight the need for stronger community ties.
Being human means there's a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we're all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.
It's the quality of your relationships that matters.
The good life is built with good relationships.
It's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship. It's the quality of your close relationships that matters.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job.
In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.
If you don't do what's best for your body, you're the one who comes up on the short end.
There's a mental health problem in the sense that people are so afraid of the stigma that they don't get help. But there's absolutely a gun control problem in the country.
There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate.
I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it's one that's easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.
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