Population Health

In Their Own Words

Why More Americans Feel Stuck — and Why It’s a Public Health Crisis

Economic Opportunity is Key to Better Health, LDI Fellow Says

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A person in anguish sitting on a bed as the sun rises.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 2, 2026.

Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a ballad about a dead-end life, made the Billboard Hot 100 twice, nearly 40 years apart. As a doctor, I’m not surprised. “Fast Car” is about someone trying desperately to move up in life even as obstacles mount — bleak job, insufficient finances, family obligations, and increasing isolation. The song endures because it validates the experience of millions of Americans.

I hear versions of “Fast Car” every time I set foot in the hospital as a general internist. My patients tell me stories about how, no matter how hard they work, the path to a better future slips farther away. It inevitably comes up as the reason they feel sick. My patients even have a name for their condition: they feel stuck.

The more I listened, the more I realized this wasn’t just an individual problem. We’ve reached our 250th anniversary as a stuck country.

I’ve been documenting what our research group has come to call “stuckness” for a decade. It’s more than poverty, loneliness, or a lack of opportunity. Stuckness emerges when real barriers in our jobs, finances, relationships, health, neighborhoods, and politics coalesce to keep people from having a real shot at success and happiness. It is a feeling and a reality that reinforce each other, robbing us of hope, generating chronic stress, and making it harder to move forward.

Read the full op-ed here.

Author

Atheendar Venkataramani, MD, PhD

Associate Professor, Medical Ethics and Health Policy; Director, Opportunity for Health Lab, Perelman School of Medicine

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