Dear Friends of America!

Ever since my medical school days, the health care cost and its impact on accessibility of my patients has been my ongoing concern. Besides, the idea of having to accept a fee to help poor out of their misery never got past the threshold of my conscience! A la Albert Schweitzer, I have worked on many voluntary initiatives for free clinics, from New Delhi to New York and registered to volunteer with Health and Human Services for Katrina Relief. My volunteerism has been recognized with an ‘Outstanding Volunteer’s Award’ by the oldest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School lauding ‘a commitment to excellence and generosity of spirit’!

It was in this spirit that, in July of 1991, I approached Harvard Business School seeking a doctoral program in health care cost. As it did not have a faculty with such an interest to guide me, I was advised to go for an MBA program instead. Evidently, in the summer of ’91, the cost of health care was not a subject worthy of study even at the premier business schools. Hence, I continued with clinical research and public health as the most relevant available strategies to economize the healthcare costs. For example, in those pre-statin* days, I believed that if a pill could reduce the risk of a heart attack; the total cost of expensive by-pass surgery to our society could also be minimized. This lead to my eventual move to New Jersey winning a ‘Business Excellence Award’ in R&D for my work on one of the first statins to be approved by FDA: since then the promise of statins has been realized for the good of us all!

The very next year, at President Clinton’s pre-inaugural seminar in Arkansas, I was astonished to hear Leonard Polling, then CEO of Ford, rue the fact that the total healthcare costs of Ford workers was greater than the steel used to make Ford cars! Time had arrived to recognize that a healthy economy needs health economics! Now we could tell how Honda won! Once again my public health concern lead me to volunteer on Mrs. Clinton’s Taskforce for Health. I have tracked various attempts to reform our healthcare ever since. Nearly two decades, and this lesson has still not been learnt.  The recent documentary ‘Sicko’ highlights the human cost and personal dimensions of a broken health care system and the sad contrast with other comparable societies.

I have maintained a healthy general interest in our environment going back to1980s with personal contributions to Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and the PBS documentary on Alaska. As amateur photographer, I have documented wild-flowers through-out the North East from mountain tops of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire to verdant valleys of Pennsylvania.

I believe, my concerns about escalating health care costs and our deteriorating environment are widely shared by the residents of this great Garden State. I would use my concerns and considerable experience to devine smart solutions to reduce the health care costs via various policy intiatives focussed on improving our environment and encouraging a healthy living.

I also believe that war is a health and social behaviour problem. It persisits as a long term consequence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that manifests in victims victimizing others: to compensate for the dehumanizing stress they experienced due to devastation around them, even if they were not personally affected, if they were not consumed by depression and suicidality as other significant effects of war and widespread violence. Any solutions to prevent or end violence and war shall have to be cognizant of the subtle apsects of collective human behavior (see tab 'On War...' for my article) and institutions would have to anticipate and be ready to treat the groups with stratigies to counter effects of PTSD.

Thank you,

Wasim Khan, MD, MPH
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*Statins reduce bad-fat deposits in your blood vessels.