We’ve been asking the wrong question.
For most Americans, “health care” means one thing: the insurance plan sitting in their wallet. What’s covered, what’s not, which doctors are in-network. That’s the definition we’ve inherited. But what if it’s the wrong one entirely?
Real health care isn’t something you access when you’re sick. It’s something you practice every single day. It’s what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, how you manage stress, and how deeply you invest in the relationships around you. That is health care — the daily, intentional act of caring for and supporting your body.
When the System Fails the People Inside It
In my work as a holistic wellness coach, I hear a version of the same story over and over again.
A client knows something is off. They feel it. They go to their doctor. And they’re told to wait — come back when it gets worse. One client was denied a referral to a specialist because, in the system’s eyes, she wasn’t sick enough yet. She had to get sicker before anyone would take a closer look.
Ask yourself: is that health care?
Another pattern I see constantly is what happens when the body is treated as a collection of separate parts rather than one interconnected system. We have cardiologists, endocrinologists, gastroenterologists — each brilliant within their lane. But who is looking at the whole picture? And perhaps most telling of all: how often does a GI doctor ask their patient what they’re eating? The gut is literally a digestive organ — and yet diet is rarely part of the conversation.
This fragmentation isn’t accidental. It’s the architecture of a system that was built to treat illness, not build health. And when no one is looking at the body as the complete, interrelated system that it is, things get missed. People get sicker. And the cycle continues.
The Numbers Behind the Pattern
This isn’t just anecdotal. A landmark 2023 peer-reviewed study from Boston University School of Public Health — published in PNAS Nexus and titled “Missing Americans: Early Death in the United States, 1933–2021” — found that 1.1 million American deaths in 2021 alone could have been prevented if the U.S. simply had the same mortality rates as other wealthy nations. Nearly half of those who died were under the age of 65. The gap has been growing steadily since the 1980s and had never been larger.
The U.S. spends more on “healthcare” than any other nation on earth. And yet here we are.
At some point, the question worth sitting with is this: who benefits when we stay dependent, fragmented, and focused on managing symptoms rather than addressing root causes?
So What Do We Do?
This isn’t a call to abandon medicine. Emergency care saves lives. Acute illness needs treatment. There is a real and important role for the medical system — especially when things go seriously wrong.
But there is a difference between reserving that system for what it does well, and outsourcing your entire health to it.
The most powerful shift you can make is reclaiming what health care actually means in your own life. Not as pressure. Not as perfection. But as a daily practice of showing up for your body before it reaches a crisis point.
What you eat matters. How you move matters. How you sleep, how you breathe, how you manage the weight of daily stress — it all matters. These aren’t wellness trends. They are the foundation of a body that functions, heals, and thrives.
You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Start with one thing. One meal. One walk. One night of real rest.
That is health care. It always has been. And it starts with you.
Reference: Bor et al., “Missing Americans: Early Death in the United States — 1933–2021,” PNAS Nexus, Vol. 2, Issue 6, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad173