Health Care in Chaos: Escape to Anarchy

USA's health is getting progressive worse, and even immigrants suffer here:

In 2012, life expectancy in the US ranked 32^nd worldwide.  Strikingly, when poor immigrants come to the United States their health declines and they live shorter lives.  One immigrant succinctly said: “In Mexico, we ate healthily and didn’t even know it.  Here, we know the food we eat is bad for us.  But we eat it anyway.”

I recall when nearly no one had health insurance, but people were healthier and medicine generally more effective.  Charity covered those who could not pay.  To this day I pay cash, and refuse Rmoney/Obamacare.

Uninsured Americans actually report fewer health problems than those who are insured privately and publicly.  They use less health care services, maybe because they have had to learn how to stay healthy without doctoring. 

As a child with the gift of ADHD/ADD, I was often in the hospital getting sewn up and once did a stretch being observed for skull fracture. (My favorite question was "What happens when I push this button?")  No one ever talked money or worried about medical bills, because hospitals charged what things cost, not what insurance companies will pay.  Doctors made a lot, but so did florists and restaurateurs.

It is individual behaviors that determine the health of a population, largely a lack of exercise, obesity and tobacco use.  Most of the credit modern medicine takes for improved health numbers emanates from a steep decline in smoking rates, not an increase in the availability of new medicines or other treatments.

No kidding.

It didn’t help that government, which fashioned the Affordable Care Act, also produced the Food Pyramid that misled Americans to consume refined carbohydrates that convert to sugar in the body at the expense of fats that quell appetite.  Nina Teicholz tells the whole story in her best-selling book THE BIG FAT SURPRISE ... We have a massive diabesity epidemic going on in America spawned by the food industry that spikes foods with high fructose corn sugar (even ketchup, bacon, peanut butter) that induces sugar-craving yeast overgrowth, and other chemicals that cause consumers to lose control of their appetite.  The medical profession then treats diabesity as if it is a lack of exercise and lack of self-control when leanness in other nations like Japan and France is not attributed to frequent attendance at gymnasiums or the reading of diet books.  [American Family Physician 2001]
There is a disconnect between the food industry that is fashioning prepared foods that are spiked with corn syrup and other pleasure-center stimulants that encourage overeating against the backdrop of modern medicine that pretends to treat this behavior as a drug deficiency.  [American Diabetes Association]
Executives from the largest American food companies walked out on a 1999 conclave that explored why half of the nation is diabetic or pre-diabetic and is addicted to food.  They protected their financial bottom line.  [New York TimesFeb 20, 2013]  The diabesity epidemic is good for business.

That's capitalism, happy to kill its customers, indeed, intent on doing so under malthusian eugenics imperatives.  There is a way to end all of this, simply end the subsidies.

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