What is the state of health care today? Would it be considered healthy? Depends on how you measure it I guess.
I’m not interested in the typical debates around health care though.
I’m interested in examining something much more fundamental. Do we really do health care?
In some cases yes, but overall, I don’t think so. Rather, we are more inclined to do sick care, rather than health care. The health care system really only kicks in when someone is sick. We spend inordinate amounts of money on people when they are sick. Our medication is focused on alleviating symptoms of those that are sick, and to some extent doing some kind of cure to move people towards health.
Our nutrition certainly isn’t oriented towards health. We are asked to change our eating habits only when there is a problem. Our mental health system is poor at best.
We don’t do effective preventative care. We certainly don’t invest money in preventative care like we should. I think part of the reason is that preventative care saves money. There is more money to be made off of sick care, rather than preventative health care. Just as there is more money to be made from poverty and war and addiction.
Our tendency here in the US is to try to make matters better after they have broken down – at least we tell ourselves that. Why not do preventative care though? It’s more economical. It’s more dignified and caring. It humanizes the health care system. And it means that fewer of us will need as much sick care.
I suspect one reason we don’t alter our system is that we don’t have the imagination of what this might look like. And so we stick with what we know. That’s not a good reason though. That’s lazy. We could use more imagination when it comes to our health care. And we could use more motivation to change it also. Our health – physical, mental, emotional, and financial – should be enough motivation.
I agree. Poor diet and lack of exercise cause a large proportion of health problems. Many schools have little or any PE classes. If education on a healthy diet is being given in schools, it is not working for many of the students. The entertainment industry provides few examples of good health practices. Doctors are almost totally paid for treating illness, not preventing it. When they try to educate, it seems largely too late and ineffective. Also lack of enough effective resources to treat addiction and mental illnesses add to the problem. It is estimated that a significant percent of people with high blood pressure have inadequate control. If some of the money spent on overseas military actions in the past 20 years had been spent on correcting some of the above problems, one would hope things would have been better, but probably not because our priorities do not seem to include caring for people in many areas.
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