The U.S. Olympic team will be competing in Tokyo for first-place medals across many athletic events, each nation’s most physically-fit citizens going for gold.

When it comes to the U.S. ranking on the world roster of population health outcomes, American ranks low on many key metrics, especially given that the U.S. does rank #1 in one key stat: healthcare spending.

Reminding us of America’s lowly-placed health outcomes, the Eli Lilly Company is collaborating with Team USA, the US Olympic and Paralympic teams, to promote “Our Collective Health” with the message that,

“Watching the success of our athletes will once again give the impression that America is the healthiest country in the world. We aren’t….but we can be…we have the science, the medicine, we have everything we need. We just need to make health a priority.”

This campaign is part of Lilly’s larger “Health Above All” program to discuss and support health equity and care access and, of course, patients’ access to medicines.

Our health must be measured by the health “of all of us,” the ad’s voice concludes.

The campaign features several U.S. Olympic competitors from different sports who have been patients engaged with various conditions. These include Chaunté Lowe, a breast cancer survivor (that’s Chaunté in the photo shown here); Kathleen Baker, who manages migraine pain; Laurie Hernandez, whose father is dealing with Type 2 diabetes; Ryan Murphy, who like Kathleen deals with migraine; April Ross, whose mother succumbed to metastatic breast cancer; Oz Sanchez, who has a family history with diabetes; and, Allysa Seely, a top paratriathlon competitor who also battles migraine.

This campaign is well-timed with greater scrutiny on drug costs coinciding with the Olympic Games. In the news currently we can point to the Aduhelm debates which address both the FDA regulatory process and $56,000 list price for the drug. Then there is President Biden’s latest Executive Order targeting drug costs which offered a multi-pronged approach to relieving health consumers’ exposure to high out-of-pocket expenses for medicines.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: Lilly’s tagline for the company’s Health Above All campaign is that, “Our health and potential will forever be connected.”

That’s a central pillar of my editorial “voice” here on Health Populi — the intimate and direct connection between health, personal/household and national economics, mental health, and our collective possibility for doing well together.

That the Olympics is a team sport doesn’t get lost on me in Lilly’s link-up with Team USA. We are all in this health ecosystem together. I applaud Lilly’s creativity with and support of the USA teams in this effort. We must call out patients and caregivers as heroes that go beyond Olympic medals, and the fact that we are all connected in health and well-being – physical, financial, emotional, social.