Sustainability and Health Care: What's the Green Connection?

A good place to start when it comes to understanding the integral relationship between health care and sustainability starts with understanding sustainability. On a very simplistic level we can understand it as the human population living in such a way that doesn't prevent or inhibit future generations from meeting their needs.

Ironically, one of the very systems that's been put into place to help keep us healthy and thriving—our country's current health care system--isn't so good for us or the diversity of life throughout the world. Fiscally, it's unsustainable too. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, selling insurance separately to each of the country's millions of employers wastes at least $64 billion in underwriting, sales commissions, marketing and billing costs alone. And thanks to sky-high insurance premiums and health care costs, many of our country's citizens (with many of them unemployed in our current economic climate) simply can't afford medical care, period.

One of the biggest questions we must ask ourselves is: when citizens don't have access to emergency and preventative medical services, how can we as a human population rise up and think beyond our medical concerns to tackle something as big as climate change?