As the world unites to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) and we strive to measure, adopt, adapt, and account for progress, awareness of the most basic of health-care needs and intrinsic goals of health systems has been obliterated: the prevention and alleviation of suffering. Suffering is a state of distress that manifests in physical, psychological, social, and spiritual forms.1 The alleviation of suffering—reducing the pain of debriding a wound or easing the symptoms of a cancer patient—is a core component of medicine and public health.