This column will have 2 distinct parts, completely different topics, at least as of this sentence:
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First I need to get out a long simmering objection, or several, to a lot of the the often deceptive rhetoric about health care that keeps going around and around; then I will address an interesting op ed relating to an important partial solution and its major flaw.
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Fist, however, should you be hit and injured by some inattentive driver who jumps the curb in his SUV and then drives off, do witnesses and bystanders call BlueShieldBlueCross, or Aetna, or some such? If they do, does the insurance company send an ambulance and paramedics who initiate treatment while they take you to the nearest insurance company office for treatment by trained medical professionals, doctors, nurses, surgeons and anesthesiologists, etc? Perhaps, alternatively, they call 911 perhaps no insurance company will be involved in providing emergency services or medical services, but will, if you are very lucky, eventually cough up some fraction of the funds necessary to pay the bills for the ambulance, emts, hospital/clinic, medicos and medicines. So, can we start to call things by their real, proper names? Insurance is insurance, it is not health care. Insurers sell insurance, they do not provide medical care.
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Recently somebody on Daily Kos posted a column with the title "REMINDER: Most of the POTUS candidates support multiple paths to Universal Coverage...which is fine." The headline is true as far as it goes, though it is vague and unclear as to what kind of "coverage", but in the context of todays Democratic Party politics, the use of the word "universal" reeks of and calls forth thoughts of universal health care, a hot topic, which pretty much extremely few candidates support. I commented to the effect that they should define "universal" and state which "plans" would accomplish it in my lifetime as well as provide an estimate of the number of annual medical bankruptcies per plan. No answer expected and none received. Face it, most politicians plans wont even insure everybody lot alone make sure that everybody gets appropriate and necessary health and medical care. Most are some insurance for many, primarily those who can pay for it, and, then, health care for those who can also afford to pay for the medical care after having first paid for the insurance, which is far from all who will wind up buying said insurance. The truth is that most candidates purport to support some sort of plan whereby, at some future point in time, most citizens will have some insurance. I propose that the government contract with BBS to issue insurance policies to every citizen, policies providing for reimbursement of 5% of covered in-patient care, 7% of covered outpatient care, and 3% of covered medicines and drugs incurred in excess of the $10,000 per category deductible. Voila, truly universal coverage, with no need to duck the question of what "universal" means. We'll pay for it with an excise tax on drugs and medicines, or take it from the CIA black budget.
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PART II Recently my wife forwarded me an op ed from the NY Times entitled Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us by By Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman which was Published Aug. 26, 2019 and Updated Aug. 27, 2019, 8:12 a.m. ET. Their thesis is in the subtitle Improving American nutrition would make the biggest impact on our health care. They note that the Democratic Party health care debate has centered around questions of coverage and funding, which they hold to be pretty much incapable of any real solution. They focus on the fact that a great number of us are sick, even seriously sick and that the costs of these illnesses in treatment and lost productivity, as well as numerous deaths. They assert that the focus should be on the cause of our terrible health, and that the cause in question is our terrible diets.
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They present statistics and facts about the state or our national health (bad) and its cost (enormous) and then suggest that given the link between our terrible diets and our health problems, our politicians should be addressing programs to bring about a healthy change in our dietary habits. They suggest various things that could or should be done in that regard and argue that every presidential candidate should have a food plan, program and platform and that these food plans should be highlighted in future candidate debates. There is some sense to that, and each candidate should also have a plan for dealing with the climate crisis, ending our wars, making the economy work for everybody, and much more. Surely they can multitask, so maybe we should take that as settled.
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Of course, no matter how good your diet is, a broken arm, concussion, gunshot wound, or other non diet-linked medical problem will still require medical care, often expensive medical care that many cannot pay. No matter how you came to need dialysis, once you need it, you need it and it is expensive. More importantly, there is something seriously absent from the discussion put forth in the article. Something that, as it stands, is something of an insurmountable barrier to the whole eat your way well mirage. The current version of capitalism is the cause of the dietary inadequacies that cause all of the health problems targeted by the article. It is that system that results in Food Deserts. They are many, they are everywhere and they are deadly. For a quickie overview just check the ever centrist Wikipedia on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert.
Hola campesinos! Quelle hombre dice da kine esos?
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Title Image is First_Aid_Kit and is public domain
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Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours
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Cross posted from caucus99percent.com