Reflecting on Gratitude, Health and Mission: A Thanksgiving Call to Action
Life Science Innovation Must Have a Welcomed Seat at the Table Everyday
Thanksgiving is a time to gather with family and friends, share a festival meal, and reflect on the year’s blessings. Chief among these blessings is health — an always appreciated but often overlooked gift until illness strikes. Yet, for millions of Americans, this season of gratitude will also be tinged with anxiety about accessing medical care. Worrying about health is natural; worrying about accessing care should not be.
For leaders throughout the health ecosystem, Thanksgiving can invite action — a moment to shape how the entire sector collaborates toward the nation’s health and economic stability. The health industry and government are mutually responsible for balancing financial sustainability with equitable access to health interventions. Communications and policy bridge these imperatives, demonstrating the sector’s ability to operate effectively and as a force for good.
George W. Merck, an early former CEO of Merck who led the company for 30 years, is best known for establishing its research division and cementing collaborations with academic researchers that led to life-changing medical breakthroughs; he also laid out an industry philosophy around profit. In his talk at the Medical College of Virginia at Richmond, he offered this timeless advice:
“We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we remember, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.”
When Congress seeks to make the life science sector its convenient villain, it bypasses its more significant, far more complex responsibility — making the vast, overarching (fractured) health ecosystem work for the American people. Congress must make care accessible without making innovation an evil by turning the life science sector into a convenient bipartisan pariah. This rhetoric makes society forfeit innovations and, as a result, absence at future Thanksgiving feasts.
This year, as I looked around my holiday table — at my seated guests — my focus wasn’t on the menu but instead on the bundle of health concerns represented: autoimmune, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis, orthopedic, rare disease, and more. What would my guests do without access to medical advances and expert care? Health innovation has no holiday and no long weekend to rest.
Health as a Catalyst for Thanks
Health is more than the absence of disease; it is the foundation for a fulfilling life. Access to health is a fundamental right, not a commodity to be rationed by income, geography, or circumstance. Yet, the reality for too many is starkly different. The uninsured or underinsured face barriers to preventive care, early diagnosis, and life-saving treatments. The consequences are both individual and societal — avoidable suffering, higher healthcare costs and lost economic productivity.
The challenge is that too many in power think that “the system” is the “customer” rather than the people it serves. Doctors are directed to be productive and given time limits (even penalties) for seeing too few patients. Insurance companies look at the balance between authorizing care and tightening purse strings. In every segment, the balance sheet and free cash flow become the indicators of a successful enterprise. But what is the system’s mission to keep people healthy or heal them?
In a conversation with the Patient Experience Journal, James Hildreth, PhD, MD, president and chief executive officer of Meharry Medical College, reflects on the health sector’s obstacles and responsibilities:
“I think in healthcare, one of our biggest challenges is that the people who are a part of healthcare need to reflect the people they care for. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case, and that’s important on a lot of levels.”
Purpose and Profit: A Difficult Balance
Like any other sector, the health industry operates within the constraints of economic realities. Innovation, research, and delivery require significant investment. Profit does not overshadow the industry’s core purpose: improving and saving lives. It provides the resources necessary to imagine tackling unmet medical needs instead of playing it so safe miracle therapies remain dreams.
Its leaders must ensure this balance by prioritizing affordability, equity, and sustainability, which influence state and federal government initiatives. Simultaneously, the industry must demystify its economic model, making the case that continuous research, education, social impact programming and marketing, and a company’s financial health are essential to supporting innovation. They can also help stakeholders understand these new therapies or technologies and translate them into broader societal benefits — how physicians learn about new science and patient-care applications.
In a pivotal 1991 Science article Are Prescription Drug Prices Too High, authored by iconic former CEO and Chair of Merck & Co., P. Roy Vagelos, MD, the researcher whose ideals reinvigorated an industry, wrote:
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been criticized because its products are perceived to be too expensive, yet prescription medicines remain the least expensive form of therapy. At this time, we are experiencing a dramatic increase in the risks and costs of pharmaceutical research and development (R&D). … Where such a risk is posed, there must continue to be the potential for profits. Pharmaceutical companies must set responsible prices, keep price increases down, and help improve access to essential medicines.”
Industry alone cannot be held to a standard that the government disregards — when one person’s vote determines citizens’ ability to access care.
Senator John McCain’s Legacy: A Vote for Compassion
One of the most memorable moments in the effort to preserve access and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) came in July 2017. Senator John McCain, the late war hero and a Republican party leader then diagnosed with brain cancer, cast the decisive vote against repealing the ACA. This dramatic gesture was a moment of principle over political party. McCain understood that health access is not a political issue but a moral one.
The government can learn from Senator McCain’s action by addressing systemic barriers disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations. It can embrace McCain’s moment of moral courage by ensuring all have access to care — the employed, those able to purchase plans that meet their family’s needs, and citizens under the poverty line whose “Exchange” plans are equivalent to urgent care.
The Cost of Inaction
The consequences ripple through society when access to care is delayed. Chronic illnesses worsen, emergencies escalate, and lives are lost — tragedies that are preventable with timely intervention. The financial cost is staggering. The U.S. spends as much as double per capita on health than other developed nations, yet outcomes often fall short — as much as 20 years less — particularly for underserved populations. Limited care is costly to society.
By humanizing care and focusing on people’s needs, advocates for access can work within the public consensus around the need for change, not as adversaries but as courageous champions. Advocates for access must use this momentum to push for policies and new partnerships that address gaps in care delivery.
Representing Stakeholder Voices
The health sector comprises diverse stakeholders: patients, providers, policymakers, and product innovators. Leaders must take responsibility for effectively representing these diverse communities — in collaboration — not as combatants seeking to overcome each other when the known villains are disease, despair, and death.
Communication is always part of care, and our physicians, policymakers, and biopharmaceutical leaders must be taught to listen to the patients and communities they serve, ensuring that their needs drive system-wide priorities. Public policy experts must turn constituent insights into actionable proposals, advocating for policies reflecting lived realities. We are always people and sometimes — eventually — patients.
Bernard Tyson, the late CEO of Kaiser Permanente, a transformational leader in health care, health equity, mental health care, and addressing social and structural drivers of health whose influence was recognized widely, once said:
“We cannot have a healthcare system that only takes care of the privileged. We must create pathways to care for everyone because our collective health and prosperity depend on it.”
A Thanksgiving Call to Action
As we sit with our Thanksgiving leftovers, we must remember that health sector leaders have a unique opportunity to reflect on their role in shaping the industry’s future by aligning mission and purpose with profit and policies, expanding access and equity, and rebuilding public trust and collective support for the sector’s continued contributions — medicines, devices, and clinical approaches — that keep us enjoying our family’s and friends’ (healthy) company.
Five Concepts to Ignite Change:
1. Stop blaming and work toward sensible change. We know the health ecosystem is fragmented, resulting in rising costs and poorer patient outcomes. But what are we doing about it? Preventable disease is the common villain. Put people’s health at the center of the solution and organize, fund, and implement policies and programs that keep them far away from pending sickness. That includes making diagnostic exams available to higher-risk people without jumping through hoops.
2. Ensure access to care is available to address the needs of people with genetic or rare diseases. Sickness is a cost sinkhole, and people become trapped in their sickness. People don’t ask to be born — let alone born ill. Please don’t add to their burdensome journey by having them access the system via Medicaid.
3. Prioritize health equity, preventive care, and affordability. Advocate for expanding programs like Medicaid and Medicare, school lunches, after-school programs, and physical education, and build coalitions with nontraditional partners, such as tech companies, to address the social determinants of health. Disease is expensive — more expensive than medicine and emergency care.
4. Acknowledge that physicians are burning out. Make technology — such as AI, ChatGPT, LLMs, telemedicine, and wearables — work for health professionals. Making technology training part of their professional training is critical to preparing these lifesavers to work within a health information and innovation system that prioritizes people.
5. Revitalize primary care medicine — the early warning system for illness — as meaningful and economically rewarding. The ecosystem must understand that we have empowered sick care to take center stage with a kick-the-can down-the-road approach to preventive health. We wouldn’t allow our cars to break down continuously on the road; why turn our bodies into scrap heaps?
A Healthier, Stronger Future
Imagine a future where healthcare is readily accessible, innovation benefits everyone — particularly those with chronic medical needs — and where public trust in the system is renewed. Industry leaders can help bring this vision to people’s lives. Thanksgiving reminds us of the importance of gratitude and giving back. By shaping public perception and policy, we can ensure that health is a blessing available to all — not just a holiday reflection but every day.
