James Towey finds it outrageous that Cuban men live longer than American men.
Towey, the president of St. Vincent College and a former counselor to President Bush, said Thursday the country needs to do better, beginning with individual Americans taking more responsibility for their own health.
The former White House director of faith-based initiatives was named yesterday to a 14-member panel that will focus part of its attention on lifestyle choices and healthy living.
The panel, headed by Alice Rivlin, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Mark McClellan, who once headed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is expected to issue a report by the end of 2009, Towey said. The report will highlight steps to cure Americans' faltering health.
Formation of the panel was announced yesterday in Washington.
"The focus will be on prevention," Towey said in a phone interview. He was in Southern California on college business.
The commission is the brainchild of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which called it a "nonpartisan" attempt to "identify and recommend practical solutions to address the many medical influences on health" as well as "improve opportunities for more Americans to make healthier choices."
Towey indicated one of its main functions will be to publicize public health issues that are impacted by individual "attitudes and behavior" that impede good health and to suggest ways to change them.
He said Americans have become complacent about health care, believing that the nation's superpower status implies a superpower health-care system.
He pointed, however, to a preliminary report issued by the foundation which cataloged the disparity between the health of Americans and the people of other developed societies.
For instance, life expectancy in the United States is on a par with South Korea, Portugal and Denmark and below that of Sweden, Spain, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and a host of other nations.
The life expectancy of the average American -- 77.5 years -- trails the life expectancy leader -- Japan -- by more than four years.
Likewise, there is a health disparity between low-, middle- and high-income Americans, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report.
The study links health and life expectancy to such factors as income and education. It reports, for example, that U.S. children in low-income families are seven times as likely to be in fair or poor health as children in high-income families, and that poor adults suffer from diseases such as asthma and diabetes to a degree not experienced by adults who are financially better off.
The point of all this is to get information into the hands of the public, Towey said.
"If people don't know there is a problem, they won't reach for a solution," he said. "Stewardship starts with the individual."
Towey did not discount the potential political dimensions of the commission's final report. At the same time, he said the findings would range over a broad array of interests and concerns, not just governmental.
Towey, who served on the White House staff until 2006, said he believes he was asked to serve on the commission because of his position at St. Vincent, which puts him in contact with young people.
In drafting their report, Towey said commission members will hold public hearings as well as meet privately with experts and average Americans.
Other panelists include former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; Allan Golston, the U.S. program president for the Gates Foundation; and Carole Simpson, formerly of ABC News and a scholar at the Emerson College in Boston.
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