Dear colleagues:

In November 1948 APHA approved the creation of the Medical Care Section.  When we meet this year for the APHA Annual Meeting in San Diego we will be just shy of 60 years old.  Until this year I didn’t know anything about our section’s history: How it is that Medical Care became a section in APHA?  Funny you should ask.  Let me refer you to an extraordinary article by Arthur Viseltear (AJPH, November, 1973, 63(11): 986) that looks at the time before we were created, 1926-1948.  If you can’t lay your hands on it, then make it a point to come to our Section booth in San Diego -- we’ll have reprints thanks to Ollie Fein.  Also, make it a point to come to this year’s  “Evening with…” because we will not only be honoring this year’s Viseltear Award winner, but we’ll be celebrating our history and the extraordinary work of doctors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein.

A big anniversary is coming up for us, and that creates a big opportunity to reach out to others to come and join us.  To that end we are re-examining our Web site and our exhibit area.  As part of that re-examination, one of my esteemed colleagues in Medical Care, Dr. Sidney Socolar, has long argued that the Medical Care Section stands for much more than a national health plan; that we are much more than a “Johnny (or Jill) One-Note,” which is apparent if you look at our history and our causes.  He noted that as a Section we are concerned about all the inputs to health, i.e., the social determinants, and should include those determinants on our Web site.  So, we began looking at models of inputs to health.  While I struggled with copyright permissions, Sid focused on the content.  I had found a model that we could, and did, get permission to use, but Sid, after reviewing it, pointed out the missing element –- there was no explicit mention of social hierarchy/class/ power.  Socio-economic status explains a lot of variation in health, but not all of it, as anyone who saw the recent PBS series “Unnatural Causes” can attest to.   

Sid, as usual, is right.  A model that does not explicitly include class, or social hierarchy, or power as a social determinant of health is an incomplete model even in our so-called classless society.  And so, within the next 1-2 months you will see something new on our section Web site when you come to check e-communities, AND you will see something new when you stop by the Section booth at the Annual Meeting and at the “Evening with...”  We don’t know that it will become any easier to explain to your colleagues what “Medical Care” is, but hopefully it will demonstrate that we are a big tent Section, one that they’d like to join.  Make it easier on yourself; bring them with you.

Medical Care is far from being a “Johnny one note.”  The fight for a national health program is essential to what we are, but what we are does not stop at that.  As you’ll read in this edition of our newsletter, Section members are also concerned about other threats to health, including the threats posed by highly enriched uranium (Vic Sidel) and climate change (Mona Sarfaty); Section members are concerned that Churchill was right that we will see a single payer solution but only after health care as we now know it totally decomposes (Wayne Myers). 

I guess that’s all for now.  Drop me a line, let me know what you think of what we’re doing and what we’re planning.  Get involved!

Gail