Ngozi Ezike, MD: Hello everyone. I'm Dr. Ngozi Ezike, and thank you so much for tuning into another episode of More Than Medicine. Today's guest is someone I've had the privilege of working with closely during our most challenging public health crisis in recent history. He's a physician, a scholar, and nationally recognized leader whose work has shaped public health policy at the very highest levels of government and academia.

Dr. Ashish Jha served as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, helping guide the country through the pandemic, while laying the groundwork for stronger, more durable public health infrastructure. He is also a former dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and one of the most cited public health scholars in the country.

Dr. Jha, thank you so much. I'm so honored that you are joining us today here on More Than Medicine. It is an honor to have you.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Well first of all, you are too kind. It is a pleasure to be on with you. I've loved working with you. You are a fantastic leader. And so, it was my pleasure and honor to be on with you. Thanks so much.

Host: Appreciate it. Appreciate it. So as I typically start on these podcasts, we really like to give our audience a chance to know a little bit about the background and the story that kind of laid the foundation for our speakers' great journeys. So, can I go back a little bit to the beginning and ask what first drew you into public health and medicine and, when did you realize that this work is more than just about treating those patients, however dedicated and committed? How did you, get to the point where you realized it's really about changing the systems?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: My story is a very typical immigrant story in America. I came as a kid. I went to med school for all the reasons you're not allowed to admit in medical school applications, which was my mom really wanted one of her sons to be a doctor, and my older brother had no interest. So, it was either me or bust.

So I applied to med school. I got into medical school. I was actually pretty excited about being in medical school, but pretty quickly realized as I was spending time in clinic and talking to patients, that so much of what shaped their health, so much of what shaped their lives was happening outside of the clinic.

So as a med student, on my own, I just started taking classes across the street at the School of Public Health, and found them fascinating, not as a alternative to what I was learning in clinic, but really as an addition to it. And so I took a whole series of classes as a medical student, obviously doing the medical school stuff, but also public health.

And then after residency training, decided I needed to just focus more specifically on public health. So I got my Master's of public health, did research training and then, about 20 years ago, joined the faculty, both at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. Both doing health policy research, but also really studying public health, teaching public health, while also practicing medicine. And so in some ways, these two have always been deeply combined for me. I've never felt like one could stand without the other. They both have a lot to bring. But for me, they were both very important.

Host: Thank you. Thank you for being so honest.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: As long as the med school doesn't go back and rescind my application, I think we're okay.

Host: Yeah, you're good, you're safe. I promise you're safe. So we worked, closely during the COVID response but today the nation is facing a different mix of challenges. There's political polarization, there's mistrust in science, there are the widening health inequities. So from where you're sitting now,

what would you say is the most urgent public health issue facing our country?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah. There are so many. There's some specific ones. We just went through a pandemic that had so many negative effects on our society. I feel like we haven't learned enough of those lessons. We have not prepared for future ones. There are obviously all the challenges of kind of resurgence of infectious disease.

We're seeing a huge measles outbreak, but fundamentally underneath all of it is the crisis of trust that what has happened over the last five, seven years, is a fragmenting of our information ecosystem. Everybody gets information from different sources. There are bad actors in my mind, people who exploit

weaknesses that we have in our system to sow division. But look, at the end of the day, we always have to begin ourselves and ask what should we be doing better in medicine and public health? And there's an entire agenda there as well. So I do think that rebuilding trust in public health is one of the most crucial things, probably the top priority for our country, because from that flows all the work that needs to be done to deal with chronic diseases, infectious disease outbreaks, pandemic preparedness, all that work is contingent on rebuilding trust in America.

Host: You hit it spot on for sure. Trust has become one of the, it's definitely one of the most essential elements of public health, but it's also right now, one of the most fragile. So, using your experience, what do you think, I mean I know that political polarization has helped to corrode that trust, so how can institutions rebuild that trust with communities, especially the communities that already felt harmed or ignored or used as a political pawn? Like what can the institutions do to rebuild that?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Good question, and it's both about institutions and individuals and what can we in the public health community be doing. When I talk to my friends, they often begin by pointing to bad actors who are exploiting those weaknesses. And look, there will always be bad actors, as I said earlier.

For me, the most important thing is what should we be doing? Trust is earned. And trust has been lost for a variety of reasons. And I think it begins first by reaching out and listening to people. There's way too much attention paid to should we improve our messaging? Do we need better marketing?

I'm like, no. First, you gotta get out into the community. You gotta talk to individuals. You gotta hear what their concerns are, understand what their needs are, and begin to address those. That is, I think, how we rebuild trust. It's not a quick fix. It's not going to get done overnight. That is the long game that we need to be playing right now.

And also having humility. There were mistakes that were made inside public health and medicine during the pandemic. I think most of them were well intentioned. It was a fast moving pandemic. None of us had managed something quite like that before. Everybody made mistakes. Acknowledging those and beginning to do that long, hard work of rebuilding trust at this moment is critical, and it begins by listening.

Host: I know you often speak about the durable public health infrastructure. And how we need to build that. I don't know if everyone fully gets what that means. Maybe it can be a little bit of an abstract term for some. What does strong public health infrastructure really look like at the community level, and where are the specific areas where you think we, we may be falling very short?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: There are a couple of elements I think about. Again, one of them begins with looking at our institutions. We have had some great public health institutions, obviously the CDC, state health departments, one of the biggest ones that you led, city health departments. Those are really important institutions. In many ways, those institutions, I think, have gotten weaker over the years. Part of it is the issues around funding, but part of it is just mistakes institutions have made. One of the pieces of advice I try to give my friends is this is not the moment to be defending institutions.

This is the moment to be looking at institutions and asking how do those institutions do better? Not just asking for more money. Look, money is always helpful in public health, but asking the questions, how do we build institutions that are more durable and more responsive to the needs of the community?

In my mind, there are a couple of elements of that. I think institutions that have deep ties to the community, that get out into the community, that talk to frontline providers, to frontline healthcare workers and to patients and citizens; those institutions tend to be much stronger and better because they have their fingers on the pulse of what is going on in the community.

I've encouraged a lot of my friends who run public health departments to spend less time in the public health department and more time out on the streets, more time in community clinics, more time in places where people gather and talking and listening to people. I think that institution building is going to be much more powerful and ultimately those institutions are going to have the trust that is necessary when the next crisis hits. And the next crisis will hit again. So that durability of public health begins with rebuilding the durability of institutions.

Host: I appreciate that and I, I receive that. It's very easy to sit back and just say, we need more money. We need more money. Like, we have to take a critical eye to ourself. You know, we have to have the mirror up and say, wait a minute. How can we be doing this better? And a lot of it, like you said, starts with getting out into community and hearing what the community's voice is saying about how we can do it better.

So, super great point that you're highlighting.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: I often make the point that yes, it is true that we need more money for public health, but I also believe we need more public health for the money we have. We in public health have to deliver more. And the way you get more resources is by showing that the resources you get ease delivering really high quality services and meeting the needs of people.

You've gotta hear that from the people. We don't need to be just making the case that we're meeting the needs of the people. We need to have people making the cases that what they need is what they're getting from their public health.

Host: You know why I think that gets tricky sometimes it is because when we're doing everything perfectly and there's not like an acute existential threat, it's quiet and people don't see it. Like it's that thing that you don't realize something is up until something has hit the fan because it's very much a feel that hides out in the background.

Happily. Happily. And so people's assessment is hard because they didn't appreciate that we were keeping the water safe and letting you know when to not go in and, checking all the pools when you go to hang out at your favorite hotel for the getaway rates.

So lot of it is so in the background that it's hard for people to have appreciated and know, like, oh, we're getting our money's worth, or, or, we're not.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: One thing I will say, I, first of all, I completely agree with that. I think that's exactly right. The thing I always remind my friends and I remind myself is that it is true that when public health is doing its job, no one notices. That's what we actually strive for, right, is that we should be in the background.

It should be seamless. You should be able to turn on the tap and you're going to get good water. You should be able to walk into a building and breathe clean air. You should be able to go to a school and not get sick. All those things. There are others, by the way who face the same challenge. I often remind like, our intelligence community, CIA, et cetera.

One of the things they often tell Congress is when we're doing our job, you don't notice anything bad happening. And yet they have no problems getting funding. So what do they do differently than us? And one of the things they do is they tell the stories of what the world looks like and what the world would look like if they weren't here. I actually think we have to do a better job of explaining to people and connecting the dots to people between the work we do and the lives they want to lead and how we enable that. We have assumed, I think, for too long that people will automatically appreciate what we do because it's so obvious to us.

Well, it may be obvious to us, it is not obvious to everyday Americans who are just trying to put food on the table and get their kids off to school. So for everyday Americans being able to explain what public health does, why it does it in a way that's useful for them is absolutely critical, and not just assuming that they'll figure it out on their own.

Host: That's such a good point. You know, this is like the good work that we don't want it to be a secret. Like we've got to shout it from the rooftops and get better at being good messengers of our own work. That's a really great point. We're so busy doing the work that we're not really talking as much about it.

So, using the tools that are out there right now, you know, social media, et cetera, to be able to help us lift up our message. So another, another key important point. I appreciate it. When I think about Sinai Chicago, and we're serving our community. Our community has long experienced, you know, disinvestment in all kinds of structural inequities, health inequities.

Let's talk a little bit about pandemic preparedness and biological threats. You already suggested that maybe not all the lessons have we, you know, learned or implemented, you know, strategies to deal with. How do we ensure that the efforts that should be undertaken actually protect the communities that we already know are going to be the most at-risk?

The ones that will be hardest hit, we already know where they are. We already know who they are. They're already experiencing all kinds of difficulties. What do we do to help protect them since we know they're the ones who are going to get hit the hardest?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah, that's a great question. I, often used to say during the height of the pandemic, we may all be in this together, but we're not all in this together equally. It is true. The pandemic affected everyone. From the wealthiest to the poorest, but it did not affect everyone equally because the resources and the capacity to respond to that pandemic, to respond to that threat, varied dramatically from community to community.

It was one thing if you lived in the nice leafy suburbs and had four bedrooms for each of your family members, you could do Zoom by yourself. Not to suggest that doing Zoom was a great way to live, but at least it was safe. If you lived in a multi-generational household, with three generations all under one roof in a single bedroom apartment,

that was a very different challenge. I think just understanding that is very, very important. Now, the question that you asked, which is much harder, is what do we do about that? That vulnerability is going to exist, and so what that means is right now in my mind, we should be very focused on building up national protections against future health threats like pandemics, biological engineered threats, because the better we get at preventing those things, the more it will disproportionately benefit people who are most vulnerable. Second is we have to be investing in health infrastructure in those communities. The truth is that it's not just the multi-generational households, but then often the hospitals, the clinics in those neighborhoods and communities are under much more financial stress.

Their ability, not that I need to tell you that running the hospital that you run. They don't get the same set of reimbursements, they don't get the same set of opportunities. From a health policy point of view, we have to do a much better job of that as well. So I think this is a multi-pronged issue.

Obviously there's no simple or quick fix, but a broad strategy on better job on prevention, and then some targeted efforts on building up capability and capacity in communities that are going to be most vulnerable. That combination is what we need to be doing right now.

Host: Amen. I, I, I think obviously we're singing from the same hymnal and the reason I'm here is because I think there's such an opportunity. Health equity is a critical issue for everyone. And I, I think, what we don't get out enough is, I'm here leading, you know, the largest private safety net health system in the state of Illinois.

So you know, you think, oh yeah, good job, good job for the communities that you're serving. But the communities that immediately get their care by the safety net systems, they're not the only ones that are affected by what we do in the safety net. And I feel like we're not seeing the interconnectedness of this whole health ecosystem.

You know, I like to say that my great partners Rush Medical System, Northwestern, they can't do what they're doing if I'm not doing what I'm doing over here. And so how does, talk to me about how a robust and durable public health infrastructure, including, supporting our safety nets helps impact access, affordability, and outcomes for everyone.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah. Our healthcare system. And of course there are two sets of issues in my mind. There is the connection between healthcare systems and public health. The history behind this is interesting because historically medicine and public health were part of the same community. And then over the last century we sort of saw fracturing of the two where the public health community went off on one end, healthcare went off in another end. I actually think in the last five, 10 years we've seen a coming back together again. When public health in some ways failed. We had underinvested, we weren't able to effectively curtail the virus. Guess who had to deal with the consequences? It was the healthcare system.

So I think increasingly you're getting recognition from the healthcare system, which is of course a much more financially renumerated and wealthier and powerful, that a weak public health system puts everybody at-risk. I think that is sort of one important point. Inside the healthcare system, to get to your question more directly, there are safety net providers, and then let's be honest, there are a whole bunch of providers whose financials just look a whole lot better. Their patients are wealthier, they're generally privately insured. They get better reimbursements and it is easy to see this as like two different islands.

But the truth is we all live in one community. When safety net hospitals close, it puts pressure on everybody else. It obviously harms the people who in those communities the most directly. And the consequences for the broader healthcare system are felt by everybody. What I have seen, I think in more enlightened health policy leaders is a recognition that a strong and thriving safety net system is good for everyone in the community.

Both good for every individual, but also good for health systems that are more privileged, that are better financed because they really need the whole system to work together. And when safety net hospitals, for instance, collapse or have real financial problems, the spillover doesn't get contained just to that, in that safety net.

Ngozi Ezike, MD: Thank you. Thank you. I want to, the only one saying I don't think I've sent it to you. I have, a TEDx talk, which talked about what happens when invisible systems like our safety net hospitals, what happens when they go away, and the impact that it has on everyone.

I'm going to have to share it with you, but it, it really, speaks to this. I'm so grateful because your work does this cross connectivity and intersection bridging, both policy but actually research, but also real-world impact, which is where the rubber hits the road.

And so when we think about the policy choices today, that have the biggest potential to either do for good or do for bad, narrow, or widen health inequities over the next decade, what do you think those important policy decisions are, and what are the choices that need to be made?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: I think, and you may be surprised by this answer, I think the number one issue that we need to deal with is the extraordinary cost of healthcare in America. And let me lay out why. We are slated to spend 70 to $80 trillion on healthcare over the next decade. The problem with that amount of money is so expensive that it is already putting pressure to curtail

health insurance and access. So you have middle class Americans who are struggling to pay for healthcare. You also have poor people losing health insurance. I mean, the One Big Beautiful Bill as it's called, the one that president Trump signed last July is the first piece of congressional legislation that I can think of where fewer people will be insured as a result of it. So we are finally, we are not, finally, we are starting to see a rolling back of the progress we've made towards universal coverage. And I worry that as long as healthcare spending remains extraordinarily high, we'll see further erosion of coverage. And of course, we know that that will disproportionately impact some people in some communities more than other's.

So if your number one goal is equity and making sure that every American has a fighting chance at a long, healthy life, irrespective of which zip code they were born into; then I think dealing with the extraordinary cost of healthcare has gotta be at the top of that list. Also, one more quick thing. When we see this extraordinary cost of healthcare, the budget pressures it puts on states, what do states do?

They turn around and cut education. They cut social services. That is not helpful to the long-term health and wellbeing of people in general and particularly vulnerable populations. So, it feels a little bit like a funny answer, but I actually think if we don't get our healthcare spending problem under control, we're going to have a very hard time addressing almost any other issue because healthcare is going to eat up more and more of our budget.

Host: That's very insightful and I thank you for lifting that up because we all know that the costs are just growing exponentially, but the impact of that. We are already seeing some of it now, but it's only going to get worse. And then our typical responses, our knee-jerk reactions to cut more, like that's going to just worsen the whole situation.

So thanks for that highlight. For our listeners who might be in public service, healthcare, community advocacy might be feeling a little overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges, but, we need to give them some concrete actions that can actually move us closer to health justice.

What would be of those concrete actions, advice that we can give to people, boots on the ground now to help us move in the right direction closer to the ideal of health justice?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Well, it's a very hard time right now. I mean, obviously, public health in many ways has been under attack, over the last year. We've seen not just financial cutbacks, but we've also seen what I think are often deeply unfair attacks on the public health community, on the motivations. so it is a bit daunting.

You know, I, just stepped down as dean of a public health school and this past fall when our students arrived, I told them, I said, this is a hard time to be in public health. And yet I'm proud of them for choosing public health at this moment. Public health I think is going to undergo a major transformation in the years to come.

And it's going to be led by, obviously by students, but it's also going to be led by people who are on that frontline. What is my advice for them? I mean, first and foremost, the work that needs to be done has never been more important. The work has not gone away. Public health has never been about institutions.

It has always been about the problems that we are working to solve. I think we are going to get better at solving those problems if we engage the people who are feeling those problems and get them involved in solving it. When I think about places where public health is not as effective as it should be, it's often because we think we understand the answers, and our job is to somehow give people the answers.

Turns out, we don't always understand the answers. We have an understanding and people say, well, I've got the scientific evidence. Yes, science is good. Science is a very important part of it. But decisions and policies should be science informed and not completely science driven. Science is an important part of, of the decision-making, but so are values.

So our capabilities, so what I generally advise both students, and we certainly did this at Brown. And what I would say to folks on the ground is, get out there and talk to people about what they're feeling. At the end of the day, we will be judged by how effective we are, not did we follow policy?

Not did we follow protocol? Did we come up with the smartest protocol? Who cares? Did we actually deliver for the people we're meant to serve? And if we're doing that, then we're going to be fine. We're going to be great. But if too often we get caught up in, well, my job is to implement this policy, no, your job is to make people's health better.

And if the policy and the process is not delivering on that, change the policy, change the process, but deliver for people and people will once again, get reengaged with public health.

Host: We gotta say that again. It is, is so true. And I don't know if people always catch that difference between, science driven, data driven versus data informed or science informed. It can give you a framework, but it can't lead the entire discussion. There are too many other facets. There are real-world situations going on that we can't just geek out and say, this is what it looks like in the lab, or on my calculations.

We've got to take it, put it in context. And then figure out what is the best strategy. Appreciate you highlighting that. That is so key. It's really about what is actually needed that's going to get it done. And we don't need to be overly connected and tied to this is what I think it should be, and so we just gotta do it this way. So yes, being agile.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah. And can I add two more points to that? I mean, one is, and I felt this a lot when I was in government, where often we were trying to get something done, from the White House and the pushback from agencies was, well, that's not standard process. That's not how we do it.

And my response was, I actually don't care. Because no one, pays us to follow process. If you're a government employee, the public is paying you to deliver results for them. And if you're not delivering results, I don't care what your process is, it's not good enough. So that's sort of point number one to people.

The second thing, which I think is a broader point is we talk a lot about trust being lost, and I think of trust, just the way I think about energy, which is energy is neither created nor lost. It is transformed. Similarly, trust is neither created nor lost. It is transformed into somebody else's trust. So where people have lost trust in public health, there are other people they trust now more. Who are they? How do we engage with them? So in some communities, those are religious leaders, and so if your goal is to be effective, maybe you are not the best voice for a specific policy. Maybe you need to partner with people who are better voices. That is fine. Again, when I was at the White House, there were times when I realized being Joe Biden's COVID guy, is not going to get me a lot of juice in certain communities in America. And I care about those Americans every bit as much as I care about anybody else. And often it meant I should not be the voice of the advocacy. I need to find people who could be engaged with them and work with them to get the message out.

We need to do a lot more of that in public health and figure out who are the voices people are listening to, and then how do we engage them.

Host: When I was with the state, we had Frank Lunce come and talk to us. I mean, he was just brilliant. He was just talking about how you have to adjust the message, not changing the facts, but adjust the, the message based on your audience. And he would talk to us about, in certain rooms, you would never say this word.

Like this word is just, that's a trigger word almost. And similarly, you might need the right person or the messenger for a different crowd. And so being just intentional will make a lot of difference. It's not about changing the facts, it's about delivering it in the way that it can be received so that you can make some progress and be able to start working together.

So really, appreciate and salute you highlighting that important piece as well. So at this podcast, More Than Medicine, we also talk about like the root causes of harm. So, when you think about issues like housing, air quality, the economic security, access to education, do you think those need to be treated as core public health strategies or are those side conversations for someone else?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Well, I think obviously those have a profound effect on public health. The question in my mind is, what do we in public health have to bring to that conversation? Housing costs are extraordinarily high in many communities in America,because of a set of policies and strategies that governments and other's have taken.

 I can make as a public health person a clear case that housing is a huge benefit for people's health and it's almost a no-brainer. Like that is so obviously true. And people are like, great, but does that make me a housing policy expert? It does not. And this is a place where I think public health people have to be smart about this.

Like what is the expertise we bring? I don't know, like I have ideas, but there are people who are real experts who are working on how do we make housing more affordable? How do we make housing more plentiful? We should be using our voice to make the case that when you make housing more affordable and make it more accessible; first of all, it has two benefits. I mean, there's just a direct benefit of obviously being housed. Second is if you're not spending half your budget or two-thirds of your budget on housing, it leaves more money for food. It leaves more money for all the other things that you want to do. So we should be connecting the dots between good housing policy and good health.

But I think that we should make very clear to people that our expertise is on public health and the health benefits, not on how we achieve those things. So, similarly on economic policy, policies that create jobs, policies that create well-paying jobs; those are going to have big health benefits. We should remind people of that. How do you go about creating good economic jobs? I have my ideas, but I'm not an expert on that. So we should be working with people who are experts to make the case that there are all these other benefits, particularly health benefits that come from these policies.

Host: I think what I heard is like, yes, like all of these are conversations that public health can be involved in, but we still have a lane, like we can frame a conversation and say, yes, this is important, but then we gotta get back into our lane and let the experts, I guess, figure out what they're doing.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah, mean, look, the way I look at it is. I don't think it's so critical we stay in our lane, like, I'm totally fine to say this is really important. We should be doing more of this. But it turns out that there is real expertise required, for instance, in how do you grow the economy of a city? If I were a mayor and I said, I really want economic growth in my city, the public health commissioner is not the first person I would call. Now, the public health commissioner would be part of that conversation. And the public health commissioner should absolutely advocate for the benefits of economic growth, that jobs and economic security have huge benefits for health and should be an impetus.

 But I think understanding where our expertise lies, just the same as by the way, I would not want the economist advising the mayor to also be like, and here are the three public health interventions you should be doing, and here's how you treat hypertension. Like, whoa, I'll take care of the hypertension.

You get us better economic growth. So it's all about partnerships. It's about working together with people, understanding where our expertise lies, advocating for things that we think are important. But not assuming that we have expertise on everything because we don't.

Host: Thank you for that. So I always like to end with something positive. You know, I want to close out, with light, you know, light overcomes darkness. So as someone who has operated at the highest levels of government, academia, and clinical care, what gives you the most hope right now about the future of public health in this country, especially for the next generation of leaders who are listening?

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Yeah, there is a lot of things that goes, give me a lot of hope, so I'll, just list a few. First and foremost, I have found over the last five years that there are just a large number of people across the political spectrum; in the left and the center and the right who care deeply about public health. They don't always use the same words, but, that there really is a large bipartisan consensus for improving public health in America. I know it's sometimes hard to see it. Sometimes the polarization of the news makes it feel like this is a left or a right fight. It is not. Most Americans, if you think about this as a political thing, most Americans are between the 40 yard lines and then the loudest voices from the extremes dominate social media.

So if you find yourself on Twitter, X, you will think that the country is hopelessly paralyzed. There's actually a broad middle. They care about vaccines. They care about health equity. They care about everybody getting health coverage. They care about the things that those of us in public health deeply care about.

So I first of all don't lose sight of the vast majority who are there. Second thing that gives me a ton of hope is all the students, like I have to say, I have been in academia all my life, until very recently. And the number one thing I loved about it, was that every year you get a whole fresh batch of students who show up, who are ready to take on the world, and they are just not daunted.

And there is nothing like that to make you think, whatever problems I think, these guys are gonna solve this. So that continues to give me hope. And third is, even though these are difficult times for public health, I actually do think there's a path forward. And that path forward is as we've discussed with engagement, with listening, with building relationships.

If we focus on those things, I am confident that five years from now we'll look back at this period and say, those were the rebuilding years and we rebuilt something better than we had before. And that's our job and we should get to it.

Host: Awesome. Awesome. That's exactly the pitch perfect tone I wanted to hear. Understanding and remembering, remembering that there's more that connects us than divides us. That is so true and that we are rebuilding. You know, sometimes you have to get down to the studs to be able to build back up better.

I thank you so much for that Dr. Jha, I am so grateful. I can't thank you enough for joining us today and for your extraordinary leadership, your ability to bridge science and policy with compassion and really putting people at the forefront, especially during our greatest moments of crisis, you've made a profound difference in the lives of millions.

I'm grateful for your voice, your vision and your continued commitment to building a more equitable and resilient public health system. And I look forward to seeing your contributions, in the coming years. And I just want to thank you again for being with us on More Than Medicine.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: Thank you. Thanks for having me uh, thanks for having me here. Maybe you'll have me back again in the future. And, uh,

Host: For sure. I will.

Ashish K. Jha, MD: And, you know, cause I've told you many times when we've met in-person, I'm a huge fan of your leadership, both in Illinois and at the hospital. And we've all got a difficult path ahead of us, but if we work together, we will make things better.

So thank you for having me here and I look forward to more conversations.