Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim gave a revolutionary Martin Luther King Jr. keynote speech last Wednesday, challenging the politicization of the nation’s health care system and proposing imminent plans to create a national health care delivery institute at Dartmouth as a solution to current problems of healthcare. Kim spoke to students, College employees and community members at Dartmouth Medical School.

“When health care came to be only about deficits, when health care came to be about partisan divides in the U.S. Congress, when it came to be about whether a particular president or party would be successful or unsuccessful, we lost the battle,” Kim said. “We lost control of the moral discourse of what we’re trying to do in health care.”

Tapping into King’s philosophy, Kim emphasized the importance of strategy. In particular, he proposed using the power of words and ideas to work around political divides and bring everyone together to the common purpose of reforming health care. Kim pointed out that after all, Republicans also feel intensely that healthcare needs to be changed and the key to winning their support is to use the right language that speaks to them.

From his own persistence in pushing for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis treatment (the disease is essentially a death sentence without treatment) in poverty-stricken Peru to other strong willed nonviolent activists who pushed for HIV research in the 15 years since the HIV virus was first identified, Kim proved the power of persistence and the importance of strategy.

Moving forwards to discuss what Dartmouth could do, Kim spoke with enthusiasm about the responsibility to healthcare that an academic institution has in helping to increase quality and decrease costs. Kim emphasized many times the uniqueness of Dartmouth’s rich resources of the College, DMS, DHMC, Thayer School of Engineering, and Tuck School of Business.

“If there is one place in the world this [health care delivery institute] will happen, it would be Dartmouth,” said Kim. He plans to launch the institute within a year. The institute would be a center where the new field of health care delivery will be studied, so that inefficient means of providing medical care can finally be bid farewell. Kim pointed out that our 21st century technology with its 19th century health care delivery system is unsurprisingly inefficient.

Kim believed that changing the way you pay may not necessarily lead to change in the system. Referring to research conducted by Greg Judd, director of the Center for Health Value Innovation, Kim spoke of health care value, measured in patient health outcome per dollar spent, as the central issue of health care reform.

“If you’re going to start a new field, it’s a big deal. This is a moment in history where lots of forces come together. The study of the science of health care delivery, as an entirely new area of focus, may yield better social institutions. New models for medical care may also help in chaotic regions such as disaster-stricken Haiti,” said Kim.

Kim ended his speech with a quote from King:

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline that soon become stereotypes and clichés. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence…

We must all be maladjusted to the current inefficient health care delivery system with its high costs and low quality. We must all be maladjusted to the poverty and lack of health care of nations like Haiti and Peru.

The message from our Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim: “We must be maladjusted to the status quo. We must never forget the ‘fierce urgency of now’.”