Story by Marc Glass; photo by Michael Marsland/Yale University

Eleesa Marnagh ’07 has a guiding tenet for earning an MPH in health policy at Yale University’s School of Public Health: “Universal health care is a human rights issue,” she says. “And I believe it is a fundamental human right to be well.”

At present, the nonpartisan National Coalition on Health Care estimates that our mostly private health system costs about $8,000 per American—twice the cost of Europe’s mostly public system. And by the U.S. Census Bureau’s count, nearly 46 million Americans—about 15 percent of the population—were uninsured in 2007.

Human rights issues aside, Marnagh believes universal coverage makes good economic sense. “If we had more healthy people as a result, there would be more people able to work, which would result in a huge gain for the individual and the economy from a purely utilitarian perspective,” she says.

Macro-level policy change may be a driving goal, but Marnagh also seeks to improve individual health. For instance, after researching high vaccine refusal rates among immigrant and migrant populations in Bakersfield, Calif., she developed a communication skills training program for health care providers.

“We assume there are always specific reasons behind refusal to vaccinate, but sometimes parents refuse simply because their concerns aren’t validated,” she says. “Some providers are so busy with paper work that they can’t take time to listen.” And when time is made, she says it’s important that providers follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to appeal to the heart and head: “Statistics and scientific evidence don’t resonate with everybody, especially if there’s a language barrier.”

It all may seem like a far cry from UMF, where she majored in biology, but, Marnagh says, she uses the skills learned in classes with Professor of Biology Ron Butler “every day in my research at Yale.”

“There were times I would put my daughter to bed and then get back to work until two in the morning with research partners,” says Marnagh of her study regimen at UMF. (After what she calls a “surprise and welcome” pregnancy, she relocated to Farmington for child-care support from her mother, Margaret Collinson ’00, while her husband worked on a master’s in creative writing at USM.) Thus, by the time she got to Yale, she was “already used to the sleep-deprived lifestyle of a graduate student.”

As she finishes the first of two years at Yale, Marnagh—at this writing—plans to conduct research based in Rome with the U.N.’s Agricultural Support Systems Division. During the 10-week summer internship, she will examine sustainable agriculture policies at work in Egypt to see if they can be replicated in Cameroon and Niger. And she might eventually work for the U.N., she says, as many Yale-required internships yield job offers.

Whether or not she winds up in the employ of U.N., she hopes the United States will someday fully comply with Article 25 of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”

“All developed countries except for the United States have signed it,” she says, “because we don’t have universal health coverage.”