From snuffing out smoking to his ill-fated attempt to ban big sodas, Mayor Bloomberg’s public health crusades were a defining mark of his 12 years in power.
It made him a hero to public health experts, even as he was widely derided as a meddlesome nanny.
“It’s not one of the most important things he’s done - it is the singularly important thing that he’s done,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
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“There’s nothing more important than saving lives and changing lifestyles .”
Bloomberg banned smoking from restaurants and bars in 2003 — and eight years later, after the ban was copied across the world, he expanded it to include city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas.
Tom Frieden, his health commissioner for seven years and now head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recalled pitching the smoking ban to the mayor near the beginning of his administration at a time when only a handful of communities had instituted such policies.
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Hizzoner made it mandatory for chain restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus.
“We were in the midst of a serious fiscal crisis — 9/11 had just happened,” he said. “It was a really big deal, and when I pitched it to him, he said, ’I just have one question, ‘Are you certain it’s going to save lives?’ And I said, ‘Yes I am,’ and he said, ‘Then we’ll do it.’ ”
Frieden began to warn there would be a massive uproar, but the mayor cut him off, saying, “Do you know the first rule of sales? When you make the sale, leave.”
It was emblematic of the approach Bloomberg took on many of his pet public health plans — charging forward with little heed to public outcry, a style that both enraged critics and made it easier for other jurisdictions to copy the moves once he had taken the brunt of the controversy.
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“He was one of those rare brave politicians that moved ahead even though it was unpopular,” said Gostin, who in his role as the director of a World Health Organization center on public health law is now being asked to train leaders across the globe on the so-called Bloomberg model.
“Yes, he may have gotten out ahead of public opinion in New York and the country, but I think you have to do that if you’re going to be a leader,” Gostin said.
Bloomberg raised the smoking age to 21 from 18, jacked up taxes on cigarettes and toughened penalties for tax evaders.
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Bloomberg took heat for running a 'nanny state,' and even poked fun at his ban on smoking in public places.
On the nutrition front, Bloomberg banished trans fat from food served in city restaurants, a move being replicated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
He mandated that chain restaurants display calorie counts on their menus, and ran graphic ads depicting sugary drinks producing globs of fat.
Bloomberg also launched an effort to get food manufacturers to voluntarily reduce salt content in their products.
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His public health fixation touched other policy areas as well. He required restaurants to post letter grades and bragged that salmonella cases fell, though the infections later ticked up again, and he installed bike lanes and pedestrian plazas around the city in a bid to drive New Yorkers to get active.
There were also notable failures: most famously, a judge struck down his effort to ban servings of sugary sodas larger than 16 ounces, saying his Board of Health had no authority to impose such a mandate. A request to bar city food stamp recipients from using the benefits to buy sugary drinks was rebuffed by the feds.
A court also quashed a requirement for stores to post graphic pictures of cancer-scarred lungs alongside their smokes. And an effort to force retailers to keep tobacco products out of sight fizzled in the City Council.
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In 2001, there were 100 miles of bike lanes in New York City. As Bloomberg finishes his third term in 2013, there are 573 miles of bike lanes in the city.
The Bloomberg administration has produced a flurry of statistics to argue for the success of the policies, but the mayor prides himself on one above all others: life expectancy reached 80.9 years in the city, three years higher than it was in 2001, an increase that outpaced national gains.
“He has really helped to define a new approach to public health,” Frieden said. “There are a lot of people who are alive today because of that.”
Critics are unconvinced, and call his moves classic government overreach into people’s private choices.
“His heart is in the right place. He’s wrong on the role of government,” said Robert Bookman, a lawyer for small businesses that have fought many of Bloomberg’s initiatives. “It’s the local government’s job to educate people. . . . It’s not government’s job to decide these things.”
For Audrey Silk, founder of Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, the war on tobacco has come at the expense of personal liberty. She says Bloomberg suffers from a “God complex.”
“He calls it public health — it’s private health. Each individual is the master of their own destiny. It’s none of government’s business,” she said.
Still, many in the medical community laud the outgoing mayor for turning the city into a vast laboratory for untested ideas.
“This man is very data driven,” said Dr. Andrew Racine, chief medical officer at Montefiore Medical Center. “You’ve got 81/2 million people here. You can try this in Topeka and San Antonio, but it’s not the same. To try to do an experiment on 81/2 million people at a time is just an amazing thing.”
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