PERSPECTIVE: U.S. Preventive Medicine Recommends Changing CDC Name to Centers for Disease Prevention and Control

Christopher T. Fey  Chairman & CEO

The same type of change that has come to Washington is now needed in health care. As the new administration brings new faces and policies to our capital, the time is right to bring a fresh new outlook to our approach to health care. We all know that our health care system is broken, so let us now broaden our conversation and move from talking about it to actually fixing it.

President Obama made an historic and symbolic train ride from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. We should now consider a change that would symbolize our leaders’ commitment to building a truly modern health care system for the a 21st century. Our nation needs to consider changing the name of CDC from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.

As we embrace health care change in the 21st century, we need to consciously break with ‘health care’ norms of the last century and establish a new preventive health care paradigm. The federal government’s focus on disease control is long-standing and is driven by our seemingly endless fight against infectious diseases like polio, tuberculosis and malaria in the last century. Having won these 20th century public health care battles for the most part, preventable conditions like diabetes and chronic heart disease are replacing infectious diseases as our largest threats. And so it is now time to place prevention at the forefront and explain to the nation why this makes sense.

While it may seem an unusual suggestion, I think it will effectively symbolize the shift in health care priorities that President Obama has said we must make. The projection of health care spending at 4.3 trillion dollars in 2017, or 20 percent of our GDP, is not a joke.  We must now face the fact that our own health, or lack thereof, could be the downfall of our great nation in a competitive global economy.

U.S. Preventive Medicine agrees that prevention is the solution and is ready to join with our new leaders to build preventive health opportunities into everyday life.