Politics & Power Quote by Lois Capps

The line reads like a plain-vanilla public health statistic, but its real work is political: it turns an invisible, slow-moving disease into a loud, budget-worthy emergency. By stacking “10 million Americans” against “1.5 million fractures annually,” Capps converts osteoporosis from a niche diagnosis into a national throughput problem. The numbers don’t just inform; they accuse. If this many fractures are happening every year, then the system is failing somewhere upstream: screening, prevention, education, access to treatment, even the way aging bodies are culturally dismissed until they break.

The phrasing “As we may know” is a small tell. It’s not there to teach; it’s there to establish consensus and lower resistance. In legislative speech, assumed agreement is a tool: if we already “know” this, then debate shifts from whether the problem exists to why we haven’t acted. The demographic detail “most of whom are over 55” is equally strategic. It pinpoints a voting bloc and reframes osteoporosis as an issue of dignity and security in later life, not personal failure or bad luck. It also quietly nods to gender without saying “women,” allowing the speaker to invoke a feminized health burden while keeping the message broadly palatable.

In context, this is the rhetoric of appropriations and awareness campaigns: build a factual floor, create moral pressure, and make prevention sound like common sense governance. The subtext is simple and sharp: ignoring osteoporosis isn’t neutrality; it’s choosing avoidable suffering at scale.