Me vs. Us: A Health Divided

How can we care so much about health care yet so little about public health?

Before Covid-19, public health programs constituted only 2.5 percent of all US health spending, with the other 97.5 percent going towards the larger health care system. In fact, the United States spends on average $11,000 per citizen per year on health care, but only $286 per person on public health. It seems that Americans value health care, the medical care of individuals, over public health, the well-being of collections of people.

In Me vs. Us, primary care doctor and public health advocate Michael Stein takes a hard, insightful look at the larger questions behind American health and health care. He offers eight reasons why our interest in the technologies and delivery of health care supersedes our interest in public health and its focus on the core social, economic, and environmental forces that shape health. Stein documents how public health has continually lost out to medicine-from a loss in funding and resources to how we view our personal priorities-and suggests how public health may hold the solutions to our most concerning crises, from pandemics to obesity to climate change.

Me vs. Us concludes that individual and public health are inseparable. In the end, Stein argues, we need to recover and sharpen our sense of health based on a reverent appreciation of both perspectives.