Yves here. Frankly, it had never occurred to me to consider the carbon footprint of hospitals and whether it was unduly large. And then we have the way hospitals now make great use of disposables, often plastic, that require special handling as biohazards. Can readers pipe up about what becomes of them? Are they treated before they wind up in landfills?
By David Introcaso, Ph.D., a health care research and policy consultant and Eric Reinhart, M.D., a political anthropologist of law and public health. Originally published at Undark
Health care in the United States — the largest industry in the world’s largest economy — is notoriously cost inefficient, consuming substantially more money per capita to deliver far inferior outcomes relative to peer nations. What is less widely recognized is that the health care industry is also remarkably energy inefficient. In an era of tightening connections between environmental destruction and disease, this widely neglected reality is a major cause behind many of the sicknesses our hospitals treat and the poor health outcomes they oversee.
The average energy intensity of U.S. hospitals is more than twice that of European hospitals, with no comparable quality advantage. In recent years, less than 2 percent of hospitals were certified as energy efficient by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, and only 0.6 percent, or 37 in total, have been certified for 2023. As a result, in 2018, the U.S. health care industry emitted approximately 610 million tons of greenhouse gases, or GHGs — the equivalent of burning 619 billion pounds of coal. This represented 8.5 percent of U.S. GHG emissions that year, and about 25 percent of global health care emissions.
If U.S. health care were its own country, it would rank 11th worldwide in GHG pollution. If every nation produced an equivalent per capita volume of health care emissions, it would immediately consume nearly the entire global carbon budget required to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2030. Without even considering their global impact, air pollution from U.S. emissions accounts for an estimated 77,000 excess deathsannually in the U.S. alone. And according to one 2016 study, emissions from the U.S. health care system lead to the loss of more than 400,000 years of healthy life among Americans. This level of harm is commensurate with the tens of thousands of deaths attributable to medical errors each year, around which a massive patient safety movement has been organized in response. But despite these human costs — along with sizable financial costs — there has been no parallel policy movement to address the health care industry’s role in undermining health through its GHG emissions.
The climate crisis is not just another problem among many. It is instead a meta-problem that layers onto countless other problems, exacerbating their consequences for health. Research suggests that particulate matter resulting from burning fossil fuels can damage every organ in the human body. In light of this, efforts to improve public health, health care quality, and patient safety without confronting the role of emissions are, at best, compromised once one accounts for the health care industry’s substantial contribution to a climate crisis that is driving an ongoing and accelerating sixth mass extinction.
In addition to the general disaster this presents for global public health, it also constitutes a specific problem for U.S. health policy, as the health harms associated with GHG emissions disproportionately harm the populations who constitute Medicare and Medicaid’s roughly 145 million beneficiaries, including the 30 million patients treated at community-based Federally Qualified Health Centers. These care systems are meant to protect poor and vulnerable populations, but the means by which they attempt to do so are causing the very harm they seek to address. Consistent with what Ivan Illich described in his 1975 book “Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health” as cultural iatrogenesis — a phenomenon by which the supposed means of treating disease under capitalist health care regimes becomes not a cure but rather a cause of the debility it claims to alleviate — what we are seeing now is a form of environmental iatrogenesis.
Largely because of fossil fuel combustion, nearly the entire global population now breathes air that exceeds the World Health Organization’s air quality limits, but exposure to unhealthy air and associated health risks are not evenly distributed. In the U.S., Medicare beneficiaries, who are 65 and older and far more likely to suffer chronic lung disease, are particularly threatened by bad air quality. This is inseparable from the fact that fossil fuel-related air pollution, the leading environmental cause of human mortality, accounts for 58 percent of excess annual U.S. deaths, which joins 8.7 million — or one in five, prior to Covid-19 — excess deaths globally, according to a 2021 study.
Beyond breathing polluted air, Medicare seniors, already compromised by higher incidence of comorbidities, are also at greater risk of serious outcomes from climate-related arthropod-borne, food-borne, and water-borne diseases. The climate crisis can exacerbate the spread of over half of known human pathogens. And risk from extreme heat is especially severe: Globally, over the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among seniors has increased by over 50 percent.
Children, 46 percent of whom are Medicaid beneficiaries, are also especially vulnerable. Fine inhalable particles resulting from burning hydrocarbons, called PM 2.5 (particles 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter), are particularly harmful because children breathe more air than adults relative to their body weight, giving these particles more opportunity to diffuse into their bloodstreams and throughout their bodies. Research published last year found that climate-related adverse health effects to fetuses, infants, and children include low birth weight, death, hypertension, kidney and lung disease, immune-system dysregulation, structural and functional changes to the brain, and a constellation of behavioral and mental health diagnoses. Furthermore, evidence published by UNICEF in 2016 indicates that air polluted by fossil fuels contributes to more than half of the 1 million annual pneumonia deaths worldwide among children aged five and younger.
With respect to racialized and economically dispossessed groups, a study published in 2021 found that racial and ethnic minorities, regardless of income and geographic location, are disproportionately exposed to higher levels of 11 of 14 sources of particulate air pollution. In a United Nations report titled “Climate change and poverty,” Philip Alston concluded that governments “have failed to seriously address climate change for decades,” and that “climate change threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health and poverty reduction.”
The health care industry’s environmental disregard can be explained in part by what three bioethicists recently termed “lifeboat ethics framing.” In their book “Bioethics Reenvisioned: A Path toward Health Justice,” Nancy King, Gail Henderson, and Larry Churchill argue that bioethics has operated in a way such that any problem outside the lifeboat — that is, beyond the hospital bedside — is dismissed as irrelevant.
U.S. health officials have often exhibited the same narrow, clinically focused tunnel vision when it comes to health care emissions and the climate crisis. Public health’s widespread takeover by narrow medical mentalities that sideline root-cause analyses and associated policy action is now one of the most pernicious threats to health.
To add insult to injury, it is in the health care industry’s financial interests to decarbonize. New solar and wind energy are now the most affordable source of generating electricity in 96 percent of the world and cheaper than existing fossil fuels in 60 percent of the world. It is more expensive to continue to operate 99 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants than to build and operate entirely new solar or wind energy generating stations.
Today, it is cheaper to save the climate than continue to destroy it. But federal policymakers and health care leaders continue to allow the industry to contribute to the climate crisis, which in turn is harming or killing those who are the most vulnerable. And if not stopped, GHG emissions could irreversibly undermine the possibility of health for all. Health care institutions should take a leading role in implementing immediate change to their own energy-use practices. As a core part of their ethical obligation to care, they should also use their enormous lobbying power to demand broader policy action to stop the environmental destruction to which they have been world-leading contributors.
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The US healthcare system is a profit stream, not a system to promote actual health. People in the US depend too much on doctors for maintaining or regaining their health. Whether people want to believe it or not, for the most part you heal yourself, whether a doctor is involved or not. Doctors, if they are good, can help with certain illnesses, conditions and broken bones, but they don’t make you better, your body does that all by itself. If doctors were really interested in health they would never use the “lifeboat” method, they would instead urge people to live healthy lifestyles rather than prescribing gobs of drugs. A good diet, lots of exercise and clean air and water are the main drivers of health. But in the US, people want a pill for everything. I have friends who have actually said they just want a pill for their problem. It is an unhealthy mindset in the midst of an unhealthy healthcare system, and very often outcomes are negative rather than positive. People should take their health into their own hands whenever possible, and only use the US healthcare system when all else has failed.
Hear, hear!
And I say this as one who survived a near death event because EMT’s saw my condition was critical and administered oxygen immediately; ER doctors sensing a body scan was needed (pulmonary embolism) provided intense intervention that saved my life. My hospital experience in recovery (3 wks.) was disastrous: noisy, bright lighting, no sleep time to recover. The food was good, but my billing included a certified nutritionist ($450) who did nothing but peek into my curtain enclosure and ask, “How’s the food.”. The three week stay was nearly 500K.
As Mr. Moffet admonishes: Eat right, exercise…
Totally correct. In my opinion as 75 year Kaiser patient. Test and raid Medicare, no liability if your patient is disabled ( I’ve been disabled three times), specialists 50/50 know nothing to know something, procedure happy all of them except surgeons. Recent SF Bay Area news has Kaiser liable for hazardous dumping.
Not a good system for patients.
Spot on.
Can’t really speak on this problem with any experience so went to see the scale of this problem meaning how many hospitals were adding to this problem. Much to my surprise, I found that there are only 6,129 hospitals total in the US. That does not sound like a lot for 335 million people-
https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals
@The Rev Kev: Small hospitals, especially in rural areas, are closing, while if Cleveland is emblematic, and I believe it is, gigantic urban “hospital complexes” are metastasizing like virulent cancers:
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/03/600-hospitals-in-danger-of-closing-per-study-is-yours-on-the-list.html
Statista.com has a chart showing the number of all hospitals in the U.S. from 1975-2021. “In 1975, there were 7,156 hospitals in the United States, whereas in 2021, there were 6,129 hospitals.”
U.S. population was 211,274,535 in 1975 and 331,893,745 in 2021.
I work at a Level 1 Trauma Center that serves a multi-state area (Washington. Alaska, Montana, Idaho). Patients for many conditions get airlifted to Seattle, even for things like bowel obstruction, which shocked me because I thought that was a form of general surgery. The most heartbreaking, for me, is when folks are airlifted from Alasla because of the monumental cost. Also, families are either separated or they need to fly down themselves & then secure ongoing lodging because there aren’t many sleeping areas for families because Covid caused things like visitor amenities to cease.
Biohazardous waste is kept separate from regular waste and gets autoclaved/sterilised(or autoclaved/sterilised after pickup), and then picked up by a company like Stericycle. Some of it is incinerated, some things like needles are put into plastic sharps containers, closed up, picked up, and disposed of in landfills.
This has some helpful information.
For research, we have to autoclave our own biohazardous waste, and then it is picked up. Hope that helps shed some light.
“To add insult to injury, it is in the health care industry’s financial interests to decarbonize. New solar and wind energy are now the most affordable source of generating electricity in 96 percent of the world and cheaper than existing fossil fuels in 60 percent of the world…”\
As expected, cheaper sources of electricity don’t “trickle down” to the public: here in California, we pay ever increasing rates (PG&E) and with another double-digit hike next year. The costs of solar panel installation, electrical equipment, etc has increased significantly as well. Either way, we will get gouged.
I would say that institutionalized corruption will prevent cost-savings to trickle down, which is a damn shame as the potential for “too cheap to meter” green electricity is great. Instead we will just get extorted.
I wish I could install my own apartment solar panels.
“Children, 46 percent of whom are Medicaid beneficiaries” seems excessive. A quick search shows 46% of medicaid recipients are children, and historically has been this level.
Equipment suppliers contribute, as they routinely label reusable tools and supplies as “one use only”. This includes ones that have a track records of multiple re-clean and reuse, without issues. Then, infectious disease prevention “rules” are changed, so that implants (like metal orthopedic screws) should not be re-sterilized if the package was opened, even if never used or even touched by any patient.
Pharmacy regulations contribute in many states (?most or all, keeps changing) by saying all drugs expire in a year, regardless of prior research showing most last (at full strength) for a decade or more. Instead of testing to confirm how long drugs last, then freely sharing the results, we have captured regulators looking out for BigPharma profits and not dealing with shortages – frustrating.
“It is the sick who need a doctor”. Doctors specialize in treatment of patients, including some training in risk factors but little in primary avoidance. Prevention works, including healthy whole foods from healthy soil (support your local food movement), meats raised with natural methods (grass fed and finished for ruminants, pasture for poultry), get some exercise, develop a supportive community, and lay off hype, such as vested-interest driven algos.
A friend of mine training to become a paramedic one day shared a photo of the small mountain of medical equipment used and discarded after their trainings – valve masks, oxygen masks, surgical masks, eye protection, splints, catheters, IV tubes, intubation equipment, various pump attachments, syringes…
It was a strikingly HUGE pile.
But it has always struck me that if we’re to degrowth and deindustrialize so as to tackle climate change we’d need to tackle the problem of finding non-plastic alternatives for all the plastic equipment used in hospitals. I posed this on NC a while ago but someone (sorry, I forgot your name) pointed out the medical industry at one point recycled, sterilized and reused almost everything, that for example sterilizing and sharpening needles for syringe re-use was an actual skill at one point.
So a solution may be for the industry to revert to a previous state, it may be easier than it seems.
I cannot figure out where this story sits in context of the larger one discussed here; except that there sure must have been a lot of money looking for something to do. From the story:
“Just how did the city’s public hospitals, which serve as a safety net for the poor and uninsured, come to be in possession of such a collection? It is still something of a mystery. There seem to be incomplete records of how pieces were acquired, and, if the records exist, they have been buried in the municipal archives.”
A Dazzling Art Collection, Hiding In Plain Sight (NYTimes)
It’s likely that much of healthcare is a madoff-esque ponzi scheme.