Healthcare & Prevention - 06/16/2009

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that people are openly free to make fools of themselves by writing about things they have no business talking about.

Today feels like a good day to be foolish.

Listening to NPR over the last couple of days there have been many notes about the health care system in the US, and what the current adminstration plans to do based on project budget overruns in the future. I believe the big statistic that they are throwing around is that the federal budget will be completely consumed by medical related spending by the year 2030 (thats a nice round year choice). This means there won't be any spending available for schools, defence, federal police agencies, etc...

As you might have guessed this information is troubling to most people. We like our government to a certain extent and we probably don't want our government to turn into one giant medical institution and nothing else. So everyone is frantically trying to come up with plans to stop this from happening. Most of these plans focus on cutbacks in pay for certain specialists, creating competition for insurance companies, and putting more of a burden of the health care costs back on consumers and companies. The problem is large enough that there isn't a silver bullet that will make the problem go away. We will more than likely need to adopt a variety of these changes to make any real impact.

I'm not going to talk about any of that here.

What I am going to talk about is prevention. Prevention is funny because in order to prevent horrible diseases from spreading you need to spend money. So the bet is that you spend less money on prevention than you will on care. This may or may not be the case, however I say we take some preventative measures to curb health risks that help pay for other forms of prevention.

If you just followed that last sentence then you should have been thinking "TAXES!"

We already do this to a certain extent. We tax the heck out of tobacco products and alcohol. We can't make people quit hurting their bodies outright. We tried that. It was called prohibition, and it sucked just about as much as anything could suck in regard to being effective. However the use of taxes seems to work out pretty well. I personally can thinking of plenty of smokers who have quit or scaled back their smoking due to rising costs. I can also say that while many college kids spend a lot of money on alcohol, it is probably way less than they would be if it weren't taxed as much as it is.

What do we tax beyond those though? How about foods high in cholesterol, or that use high amounts of high fructose corn syrup?

I am pretty sure any average American can go into a restaurant and point out what is good or bad for their health. The problem is we decide to choose the bad stuff because we can afford it, and because it tastes AWESOME. I know. I eat at least one sweet treat a day (at least). So this isn't coming from a guy on some high horse of healthy dieting.

I just realize that, like alcohol and tobacco, we consume these foods because we enjoy them. They don't make our lives better in any physical way. Maybe emotionally, but it could be argued that temporary delight from these foods doesn't stand up to sugar crashes, obsessive behavior related to weight, and overall stress from lack of physical fitness.

This excessive behavior is due in part to our wealth as a country. We have the money available to spend on developing way to many ways to eat fun foods that in the end aren't very healthy. This in turn makes us develop new unhealthy physical conditions over time, and requires us to spend millions of dollars in research to fight the rising tide of diseases related to our excessive habits.

I am afraid that our wealth and desire to spend our time making money has made us grossly unaware of how we are treating our bodies. Or if we are aware we figure we can just spend millions of dollars to fix the issue instead of curbing our behaviors.

With that said I am willing to throw down some extra cash for my donuts, cakes, ice cream, and Venti Caramel Macchiato if I know that cash goes towards mitigating the risk to our country's medical budget.

Let's use that cash to drive messaging to the citizens of our country about how they can manage their eating habits. Let's provide well stocked gyms at a low cost to the general public, and incentivize people to actually use them. And for the love of all things holy, let's get some real food into our schools and some real budgets behind our kid's physical fitness classes.

NEWS: Twitter Added and Layout Expanded! - 06/06/2009

So I took a look at the site last week and decided I would bump it up to work with a min resolution of 1024x768. This would allow me to get away from the old micro font size style and make it a little easier to read as well.

I am not positive the bump up works (for me) with the older site style so I may look at updating the header/footer and some of the spacing, but I do like having the three columns now.

In the mean time you may have noticed that I have updated the layout with my 3 most recent tweets from twitter (right side column). I received some PHP from one of the guys on the creative team up at work to read in the tweets. All I had to do was change up the styles to match my site. It was a pretty quick but useful addition.

Finaly I moved the "About Me" box over to the "Latest Work" link. This is where I am going to keep up with what I have done lately kind of as a personal journal to go back and look at when I am deep in work, and worried that I just don't get enough done. :)

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