The U.S. has substantially worse health outcomes than all its peer nations. In a list of non-communicable disease mortality in 17 high-resource countries, the U.S. has the second-highest death rate at 418 deaths per 100,000 people.

Next week marks the 11th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which swept through the Gulf Coast of the United States. The storm breached levees, led to extensive flooding, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The hurricane would ultimately kill more than 1,800 people, and inflict over $100 billion in damage. Particularly hard hit was the city of New Orleans.

The issue of gun violence has reached, it seems, epidemic proportions. Since taking office President Barack Obama has addressed the nation 14 times in the wake of a mass shooting. In June, House Democrats staged a sit-in to protest the lack of national legislative movement on gun control. Despite these efforts, there has been little progress on this issue at the federal level, and the partisan divide remains as wide as ever. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supports a range of gun reforms, including an assault weapons ban, while candidate Donald Trump calls gun bans “a total failure.”

In recent years, you may have heard the phrase “the first child to live to 150 has already been born.” It is an exciting thought. Regardless of whether or not it turns out to be true, it is a fact that global average life expectancy has risendramatically over the last century. According to the World Health Organization, it increased by five years between 2000 and 2015 alone. The United States is no exception to this trend. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, between 2000 and 2014, overall life expectancy in the US increased by two years. This advance is in keeping with prior national life expectancy gains, steadily trending up. In 1900, US life expectancy was about 47 years. It is now close to 79 years. Given this increase, it seems reasonable to expect that our children will live longer lives than we will, lives characterized by significantly greater wellbeing. But is this really the case?

THE UNITED STATES spends substantially more than any other country on health. And yet, despite all this attention and money, our health, compared to the health of other comparable nations, is abysmal.

A 2013 report by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine found that among the world's 17 richest countries, we rank either 16th or 17th on nearly all core indicators of health. For example, only Denmark has a higher rate of mortality from non-communicable diseases than the U.S. Italy, Spain and Portugal all have lower mortality rates than we do, to say nothing of peer countries like the United Kingdom and Australia.

The shooter in the mass gun shooting in Orlando early Sunday morning, which killed at least 49 people and wounded dozens of others, was initially characterized as a “lone gunman.’’ But for those of us in public health, who have seen the deadly merger of access to weapons and senseless hate play out again and again, with no government action to stop it, the gunman, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, was by no means alone. He was aided and abetted by our inertia.