Novel Idea for Health Care Reform: “Drop the Donut”
By:
NWHF Staff
| Posted on: August 14th, 2009
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Economic Issues •
Education •
Policies & Laws •
Food & Nutrition •
Public Health
Recently, a “health writer” for MSNBC came up with a brilliant idea for health reform:
“Critics say consequences of individual choice missing from reform debate,” the MSNBC article by JoNel Aleccia began.
Aleccia starts by introducing Dr. Steven Spady, of rural Kentucky, who says there are two important words missing from the nation’s conversation about health reform: “personal responsibility.’”
As if no one has ever made that comment before.
Dr. Spady talks about the obese man who “left our hospital this morning and now has gone and got drunk and will suck up more health care dollars.”
Spady, the article says, “is part of a growing chorus of medical professionals, researchers and ordinary citizens who contend that the touchy topic of individual responsibility has been all but ignored in the debate about how to reform the nation’s health care system.”
Despite the fact that people have been speaking about this issue for decades, it quotes “experts” such as Lisa Herrington, a former health industry administrator, as saying things like “seldom does anyone suggest how — or if — the individual’s role should be reformed.”
The article cites an Internet message board where “frustrated” Americans say things like: “People need to get their lives together,” “Make fat people pay more for health care, tax them where you can,” and “Tired of paying for everyone else’s stupidity.”
Buried deep in the piece, Rob Gould, president of the Partnership for Prevention, is Washington, D.C., finally says “When kids don’t have a way to safely bike or walk to school because there are no sidewalks, that’s not personal responsibility.”
Joan Alker, co-executive director Georgetown University Health Policy Institute Center for Children and Families adds “I don’t think it’s good to impose a stick approach, particularly on children,” after analyzing such a program two years later.
Alker said that it’s “cheaper to feed a family fast food than fresh vegetables,” and points out that “everyone is subject to the pressures of a culture in which bad health behaviors are routinely glorified by advertisers.”
“We just have to remind ourselves that individual choice is taking place in a social context,” she said.
As James Zervios, of the Obesity Action Coalition in Tampa, FL says “ample treatment options for people who are already overweight.”
It’s always easier to blame the individual eating the fast food meal than it is to try and understand, and change the larger, more complex causes of our preventable health care costs – such as U.S. government subsidies for industrial corn and soybean production with no subsidies for small organic farms.
Headlines like “Solution to health care costs: Drop the donut” probably don’t help much either.
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