This QHC Case Collective post offers questions from a bonus episode of the QHC Podcast, recorded 27 June 2026. I recited, with a few of my own interpretive omissions or additions, the Declaration of Independence, originally presented in Congress on 4 July 1776. Listeners are invited to consider this founding document’s current relevance to health care as another human, democratic endeavor.
—Christy Rentmeester, QHC Podcast host
The Declaration of Independence invokes values key to well-functioning structures of governance that are also important to the operations of a well-functioning system of health service delivery. Ethical values such as the following are invoked in the Declaration of Independence and can be applied to how we think about roles the health sector can play in US democratic life: public interest, general respect for individual autonomy and liberty, relating independence to interdependence, equality, and rejecting greed and exploitation in favor of an collective overall interest in unity and solidarity.
Ask 4 questions.
- Which phrases and sentiments from the Declaration of Independence could be used today to inspire health care as an enterprise to better serve domestic and international patients and communities?
- In an era in which many for-profit companies in the health sector get richer as many individual patients and communities slide further down the health/wealth gradient, which concepts of ethical relevance can be drawn from the Declaration of Independence to inspire policy and practice changes that promote common rather than special interests?
- How should the Declaration‘s spirit of unity and advocacy for protection of common interests be drawn upon to improve US health care system policies and practices?
- Not everyone has been equally free in the US during the last 250 years. What might it mean for health care as an enterprise to own this history and draw on it to forge a future in which the health sector is a steadfast contributor to robust US democracy?
The feature image for this post is available from the Creative Commons Public Domain collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about this work here.
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