“The logic of increasing longevity, increasingly prevalent chronic conditions, and increasingly sophisticated (and expensive) pharmaceutical and medical products and interventions points to the possibility of health care systemic overload and bankruptcy. Such considerations may make more urgent the argument in favor of balancing the medical imagination with a sociological one, recognizing the limits to medicine, and contributing to a political climate in which medical and pharmaceutical spending are reset in a more rational proportion to investment in action on social determinants of health.”

– American Journal of Public Health, November 2009