I continue to believe that the over weight, unhealthy people living in the US (that includes people of all race, gender, and income bracket) are the main source of the difficulties.
I'm pretty sure that is false.
Where are the problems?
Firstly, our current system of fee for service with insurance sets a lot of bad incentives. I'm not talking of patient incentives. I am talking of physician incentives. The system encourages them to provide unnecessary care, and bill the insurance companies for it.
Secondly, we already have a system of socialized medicine - about the worst kind of socialized medicine imaginable. Anybody who gets sick can go to an emergency room and be treated with the most expensive kind of treatment, and the bill is paid by the taxpayer or by other patients, if the sick individual cannot afford to pay.
I'm not a big fan of Obama care. I would have preferred a single payer system. But it should be a step toward rationalizing this mess, toward coming up with better incentives and encouraging people to keep healthy instead of relying on the emergency room.
Getting back to your overweight - I still see that as a bad diagnosis. Our problem is that we are pretty healthy, so that most people live long enough to die of degenerative diseases of old age which are expensive to treat. If everyone instead quickly dropped dead of a heart attack in their 50s, the costs would go down.
Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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