As stated in Lecture 1, according to The Future of Public Health (National Institutes of Health, 1988), the mission of public health is to “fulfill society’s interest in assuring conditions in which people can be healthy.”

There are problems, however, with the actual interpretation of this public health mission. In addition to the difficulties in determining what constitute acceptable healthy conditions, we must find ways to understand society’s interest which unfortunately cannot be defined or grasped easily. The more organized concept of society’s interest is social choice, which has a great effect on its health policies or regulations and is the topic of the next slide.