In its efforts to make healthcare more equitable, cost-efficient, and accessible, Congress is not alone. With over a billion people lacking healthcare worldwide, and millions dying every year from treatable disease, global health planners grapple with the same issues—only on a much larger scale, and with a commitment to unity, good faith, and sustainability. By and large, U.S. policymakers have ignored these ideals in their recent approach to health care reform, effectively stretching a $1 trillion band-aid over a gaping wound, and would do well to consider what aid experts are doing to improve the various healthcare systems of the world.

So what can Congress learn from the global health movement?

First, global health planners collaborate. A summary report of last year’s G8 Summit in Tokyo reflects the unity in global health planning that is seemingly absent in U.S. health care reform. The report states, “We believe that a better balance needs to be found between [different] approaches [to global health systems strengthening] so that efforts at fighting specific diseases and strengthening health systems can support each other more effectively.” Instead of taking partisanship to new lows by hammering out plans behind locked doors, international conferences and symposia are held with contributors from developing and developed countries to gauge progress and formulate new solutions. Often these conferences recruit attendees from aid-recipient countries so their perspectives are well represented. Although participants bring to the table various development philosophies, the conflict that defines the health care debate in the U.S. is relatively non-existent.

Second, global health planners consider what has worked and what has not in healthcare systems throughout the world. Published literature supplies the global health community with many evidence-based proposals of how health systems should be framed, including detailed descriptions. By considering the inherent capacities and limitations of each proposed healthcare framework and its components, global health planners advance policy that strengthens and reforms health systems based on tried and tested health system models. There exist various descriptive models, as well as functional, statistical, macro-economic, and actuarial models—each advocating a specific emphasis in how to deliver health to a population. Each takes a different approach to framing the health system and draws attention to specific relationships within the health system that affect its overall performance. Unfortunately, little discussion in Congress has been directed at looking to alternative national models as guides for reform.

Third, and most importantly, global health planners take a comprehensive approach to population-based healthcare. They recognize that a nation’s health is determined by much more than the availability of medical treatment. According to the World Health Organization, a health system is impacted by “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels, which are themselves influenced by policy choices.” Although the amount of attention given to each determinant should vary from country to country, improving a nation’s health is a complex endeavor that needs to be made with great care.

So before we start hailing President Obama as a political demigod for bringing more care to more people, let’s see him go to bat against some of the real burdens on the system that inflate costs and keep people from getting coverage in the first place: the inherent backwardness of procedure-based physician pay, the unmitigated litigiousness in medical malpractice, the decades-old legislation that exempts insurance companies from anti-trust laws, the monopolies created by price-hiking drug patents, the obesity pandemic, the social and legislative acceptance of habits like smoking and drinking that directly cause chronic disease and fill up hospitals—the list goes on—none of which are meaningfully addressed in the new reform bill.

In all reality, until we see a more comprehensive, preventive approach to healthcare, as opposed to just sick care, American healthcare will continue to function as an expensive, inefficient ambulance down in the valley.

America simply cannot afford to allow legislators to sheepishly tiptoe past these issues. In the upcoming debate over how the bill will be amended and implemented, Congress would be wise to adopt a more “global” approach to strengthening our health system.

Bryce is a sophomore majoring in English and minoring in international development.