Healthcare Deform

Time for my weekly rant.  Normally I don't write these down but instead bombard my wife, children or any coworker that is unfortunate enough to be standing close by when I go off.  But my wife is cooking, my kids are playing video games or hiding from me and so I am forced to target my blog.

Obamacare did some good.  I'll just get that out of the way.  It isn't all bad.  But to call it "healthcare reform" is over reaching to say the least.  It was in fact health insurance reform.  Our healthcare system is still in an abysmal state right now. Frankly there is absolutely no reason for healthcare to cost as much as it does. But that isn't my gripe.  I have another axe to grind.

Thanks to Obama threatening to sue me if I don't have insurance, I'm forced to get some. I make too much money for state insurance...barely too much.  Thank goodness my kids still qualified or I would be really hosed.  So now I have to pick up insurance for my wife and I.  That comes to about twelve (yes 12) percent of my income.  So now I make less than I did several years ago when I qualified for medicaid.  Great.  So I can barely pay my bills but at least I have insurance.

"You'll be glad to have it when you need it" is what I keep hearing.  And they would be right.  I will be very glad to have insurance when I get cancer or run over by a bus or shot or something.  But in the mean time I get to feel bad about having no savings (for retirement or anything else) and not being able to buy my kids new clothes or paying off my debts.  Right now one of my cars sits in the driveway because I can't pay to get it fixed. I have a really old roof that leaks because I can not afford to get it replaced.  I have a bathroom torn apart and can't afford to finish the job.  But yeah, I'm gonna be real glad when I finally need to cash in on some of that insurance.  Forgive me if I'm not quite seeing the light at the end of the tunnel right now.

I'm healthy.  No, I don't mean I'm not sick.  I mean I actually make a conscience effort to be healthy.  About five years ago I was overweight with high cholesterol.  I would get out of breath walking to my car in the morning for work.  I was on the verge of turning forty and I was going into middle age looking like every other middle aged man in America.  Fat, sick and tired.  My doctor insisted what I needed was medicine to make me better.  I decided to fix myself.  I started running.  I switched to a plant based diet (no meat, dairy or eggs) and I started taking martial arts.  I lost weight, my cholesterol went within normal levels and I got healthier.  My asthma, which I had since I was about ten, and for which I was on a couple of  very expensive medications, virtually disappeared.  My GERD  stopped giving me so much problems.  So much so that I got off my expensive and ultimately harmful stomach medications.  I even found I got sick a lot less.

Did I turn into superman or something?  No.  I still injure myself, I still get sick on occasion and eventually I will get old and die.  So I am realistic.  But frankly I have had little need for doctors.  For a year I was without insurance (the year before Obama struck) and just paid for my wife's medications and doctor visits out of pocket.   But not anymore. Here is what I get:

• 12% of my income is now gone.
• I have co-pays on visits.
• I have co-pays on meds. In fact, I pay the exact same amount of money for my wife's meds as I did without insurance!
• So far I've gotten nothing from the doctors.  Not even a lollipop!

So, this leaves me thinking, as most men do, that I'm paying all this money and not really getting anything except a good little yummy in my tummy that some day will really appreciate having this insurance.  That just won't cut it.  So I start going to the doctor just so I can feel I am getting my money's worth.  I don't need to go.  The doctor never tells me anything I don't already know.  But I feel compelled to do something so that I can feel good about all the money I'm not seeing in my paycheck each payday.

My foot hurts from running.  Plantar fasciitis.  How do I know?  I read and it is pretty common.  What did I learn?  No one really has a good idea what ultimately causes it or how to cure it.  It just comes and eventually it goes.  But hey, I have insurance.  I go and pay my $20 and the doctor says lots of words but the subtitles say "I dunno, let me send you to the foot doctor".  So off I go to the foot doctor.  

The foot doctor says lots of words but in the end the subtitles are the same, "I dunno".  But he x-rays me.  That was fun. I got irradiated.  Maybe this insurance thing isn't so bad after all.  But I didn't glow or get super powers so it was kind of a letdown.  Nothing broken (I knew that already) and that was that.  But hey, no $20 co-pay.  Woo hoo!  Oh wait, turns out they mailed the bill to me.  Darn it!

So being forced, by law, to pay for insurance I don't need, forced me to use the doctors I didn't need so that I could feel good about having insurance I didn't want.  Did it work?  No. Not really.  I was $40 poorer after that experience and none the wiser (or healthier).   What a poser. 

Why is insurance so expensive?  Well, there are a number of reasons but the one that irks me is the fact that most Americans refuse to take responsibility for their own health.  If I walked into my doctor's office and said, "I've been eating cyanide and I'm feeling really bad, could you give me something for the symptoms?"  The doctor would assume I was crazy.  He might say something like, "You are an idiot, Brian!  You need to stop eating cyanide right now.  If you don't you are going to die".   Honest and to the point.  But if I walk into my doctor and say, "Doc, I'm eating beef and chicken for pretty much every meal except for breakfast.  For breakfast I eat coffee and donuts. I feel like crap.  My blood pressure and cholesterol are both through the roof.  How can I get these symptoms to go away?"  The doctor would prescribe a couple of meds, give us the speech about needing to loose some weight and send me on my way.  Did he really help?  Nope. Well, OK, he helped the pharmaceutical company and, due to the fact I will be back...a lot, he helped himself.  So I guess if the goal was to keep people employed mission accomplished.  

What Americans need to be told is: You are a bunch of fat, sick, dying idiots!  Stop eating meat, drinking milk, eating cheese, donuts, candy bars, etc. and start eating vegetables, fruit, nuts and more. Get off your fat arses and start exercising.  You don't have to run a marathon or learn how to cage fight, just do something more than change the channel on your t.v. or waddle to the fridge for another beer and burrito.  It is really that simple.  I'm a lazy programmer.  Trust me, if I can do it ANYONE can.

Will it cost more?  Yes, a bit.  Let's face it, the government paying for meat, milk and eggs kinda makes things cheaper.  But cheap crap is still bad for you.  Ok, so I could stop being such a jerk and say something like, "You can still eat meat, dairy and eggs, just do less of it."  But since most people have no clue how to do that I recommend you just drop it all together.  Let's face it, zero of something is a heck of a lot easier to remember than less of something.   Besides, most of the animal products companies are allowed (and even encouraged) to sell is pure garbage.  A lot of it is banned for sale in other countries because it is so bad.  But hey, give an American crap and if it is cheap enough and loaded with enough salt and sugar, he'll eat just about anything.  Even crap.  

So there you go.  I ranted.  Honestly I think I feel better now.  So I guess being forced to get insurance I don't need really does do some good. Thank you Obama!  

The end.

"You're only as clean as your colon!"

Or so cried Jim Carrey's environmental guy on the hilarious SNL skit. As funny as the parody was (I forwarded a copy to friends and asked if that was how they saw me) there is some amount of truth to his words.  Study after study over the past few decades have successfully linked diet to disease lending credence to Hippocrates' statement, "Let food be thy medicine".  

But what about genetics?  Doesn't that play a role in disease and health.  Absolutely.  Science has fairly conclusively shown the positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) role genetics plays in the game of health.  But how big of a role?  The jury is still out on that one.  But typically it isn't as big of a role as we like to give it.  At least, from what I can tell, it isn't a big enough role to justify the fatalism I hear from the media or friends and family.

This was brought home to me recently when my sister texted me and my brother telling us we had better follow her example and make an appointment for an endoscopy ASAP.  She said, "It's in the genes!".  Colon cancer runs in my family and the usual recourse is to start getting tested yearly for this the disease after the age of forty.   Now I'm not arguing against the prudence of getting tested.  I am, however, going to argue with the typical fatalism I hear from people.  You have a family history therefore you have a [blank] percentage change of getting cancer.  What would you put in that blank?  30, 60, 90 percent chance?   Do you even know?  The fact is no one really does know.  One thing we do know is that countries with a non-western diet consisting of little animal product intake have a far less chance of contracting disease, including cancer, of the colon.  So what is our response going to be to this information?   Well, for most people it is simply to do nothing but get tested and have their bodies dissected and exposed to deadly chemicals or radiation should disease rear its ugly head.   And to me that is very sad.

I have looked into this over the years and over and over again diet is indicted as a culprit in the disease process.  It won't necessarily stop it, but the numbers are rather startling.  So what do I have to lose?   For me I completely dropped all animal products over five years ago because it seemed worth it.  At least it seemed better than the alternatives.  I wasn't willing to say, "Oh well, I guess that's it.  Colon cancer is in the family so I'll just get tested and deal with it when it shows up."  I decided to deal with it now, before it had a chance to show up.

The strange, but predictable, behavior of people, regardless of the reams of evidence in support of a plant based diet, who simply refuse to modify their diet to any appreciable extent always leaves me a bit speechless.  If I told you a plant based diet will potentially decrease your chances of getting cancer by even 1% wouldn't it be worth it?   But for most people it isn't.  And the percentages are even larger.  We like our food too much.  Call it gluttony, stubbornness, ignorance or what have you, we simply will not change until it is too late and even after the point of no-return we will continue to argue that there was nothing we could do about it. It really is tragic on so many levels.

[NOTE: I could include stats here but the fact is no matter what I show someone will argue with me that they are wrong or the Doctor, agency, study is wrong. Recently I was told that diet has nothing to do with my cholesterol.  Besides this being unscientific, I told them my blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides improved greatly when I changed my diet to one that was plant based.  Their response? They still didn't believe me and demanded I show them the test results.  They actually thought I was lying to them.  I have done the research to my personal satisfaction and I suggest you do the same.]