Dr. Williams Gives Insight on What Costa Rica Knows about Public Health
We are in a public health and health-care crisis that began long before Covid-19. Much of this deterioration is the unfortunate consequence of the uncoupling of our increasingly expensive for-profit medical care system from public health, in a process that began nearly a century ago. The pandemic was a reckoning that made our institutional failings impossible to ignore, and our shocking excess death rate is only one metric of the cost of that neglect. Costa Rica, however, a Central American nation of five million with a per capita income that is one-sixth of that of the United States, is a living laboratory of what can be accomplished when public health comes first, instead of dead last.