University of Michigan political scientist Scott L. Greer shares decades of studies documenting the shaping of political engagement and poor health and negative health care experiences.
Greer, professor of health management and policy and of global public health at the U-M School of Public Health, joins the Michigan Minds podcast and discusses the ways politics and public health are colliding to affect vaccines, preparedness to fight the spread of contagious disease, humanitarian outreach and HIV/AIDS programs.
You’ve had multiple studies, commentaries, articles and podcasts on your work published and posted recently, and one of the most recent was your review of decades of research that explains how health and health care systems shape political engagement and trust in democratic institutions. What were the top takeaways of that research?
Basically, what we found is a growing trend over about the last 30 years for ill health, for a decline in your self-reported health to increasingly predict either dropping out of the political process or voting for the populist radical right, voting for Brexit, voting for the fascists in Europe. What’s going on?
What happens is when you’re diagnosed with a chronic disease or otherwise see a significant lasting decrease in your self-reported health, you get a lot of exposure to your health care system, you get a lot of exposure to your employer’s HR system, maybe you get exposure to the government benefits system, maybe you get exposure to the home health care system.
And a little bit of exposure goes a long way with all of them … because many of these systems are not designed to make you feel like an empowered patient, to feel like a respected adult human being. They’re disempowering. They aren’t necessarily trustworthy. Some of them are explicitly designed to create administrative burdens and make your life harder.
So what do you do when you’re spending a lot of your time dealing with people who are quite often legitimately not taking your interests seriously? You become less trusting, and when you become less trusting there’s a political party on offer in most countries that’s willing to accept your vote and feed all your worst instincts.