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  • WORLD VIEW

Public-health experts should be more political, not less

Health has always been political, long before Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr took power. Denying this is what’s been killing us.
By
  1. Eric Reinhart

    1. Eric Reinhart is a political anthropologist, social psychiatrist and psychoanalytic clinician based in Chicago, Illinois.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has abated, mortality from other causes in the United States has kept climbing, reflecting disturbing trends not seen in any other high-income country. Despite US health-care spending being about US$13,500 per person in 2022 — twice that of peer nations — its people are more likely to die younger, of preventable and treatable causes, by suicide and drug overdose or from complications of childbirth (see go.nature.com/4i41oqc). This is not owing to any law of nature, but system-wide failure.

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Nature 639, 278 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00728-6

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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