Parenting & Family Quote by C. Everett Koop

Koop’s line carries the blunt moral pressure of a public official who’s seen how institutions quietly fail the people least able to complain. The phrase “can play a great role” is classic bureaucratic understatement: an invitation that doubles as an indictment. He’s speaking to an industry that prefers to see itself as benevolent, then pivots to the uncomfortable fact that benevolence is often calibrated to visibility.

“These children” is deliberately unsentimental. No individual story, no halo of innocence - just a category the system has misfiled. The real sting lands in “hard to find them,” a confession about how modern care works: it treats presence as eligibility. If a child isn’t enrolled, transported, documented, insured, or attached to a predictable adult, they become statistically ghosted. Koop isn’t describing a mystery so much as a design flaw - and a moral alibi. “Hard to find” can mean transient housing, rural isolation, undocumented status, disability, abuse, foster care, or simply families exhausted enough to stop showing up.

Context matters: Koop’s career as Surgeon General unfolded during a period when public health was being asked to stretch beyond hospitals and into social reality - AIDS, smoking, prevention, child welfare. The subtext is that the health care industry isn’t just a neutral service provider; it’s a gatekeeper of attention. He’s urging proactive detection and outreach while warning that neglect isn’t always cruelty. Sometimes it’s just a spreadsheet that only counts whoever makes it to the waiting room.