Wednesday, October 28, 2009

DAY 31 ALKALINE YEAR Health Care Debate: Golden Halo, Clay Feet




October 28, 2009 Our national health-care debate, while sporting a golden halo of respectful care for each other’s insurance needs, has clay feet because of its total absence of emphasis on individual responsibility.  Such neglect can only erode our greatest resources: ourselves.

When I worked in Hawaii with elderly poor folks, it was common to find a new client using 10-20 prescription medications which they could not manage despite the plastic containers cleverly labeled with “day of week” and “time of day.”  A friend told me today that her late husband, who’d never taken any medicines, was hospitalized with a heart attack, came home with  12 different prescriptions.  She put red stickers on the bottles for AM, blue for lunch, green for evening consumption. 

At another job, I worked with a person who used every single day of sick leave every month for more than five years, also asked co-workers to contribute some of our vacation time (I did) when his ran out, and sometimes fudged a day on the time sheet when too drugged out from the latest surgery to drive to work.  Lifestyle changes relating to nutrition, exercise and methods to increase inner peace and self-acceptance could have extended his healthy life as well as those of the elderly poor.

However, such changes are not rewarded substantially in any insurance plans I’ve seen.  Kaiser comes the closest, with a strong educational program, to helping people become aware of the need for healthy habits.  Lowered premiums for people who certify that these changes are in place?  Nobody does that much; most of the large companies apparently figure that the healthy’s lack of illness will balance the unhealthy’s over-use of healthcare resources.

Nowhere is this more evident than in human nutrition. Have you noticed, lately, that  people are munching everywhere?  This empty-calories consumption is ubiquitous.  In a local classroom, a bright teen-ager used the Heimlich Maneuver to save the life of his teacher, who was choking on a. . . Tootsie Pop.  What in heck was the teacher doing eating a Tootsie Pop in class?  What sort of example was he setting?

How do we achieve healthcare plans that reward people for taking care of themselves, without neglecting the neglectful?  I don’t know if we can. Part of the problem, of course, relates to truthfulness.  I’m writing this blog on alkaline eating; for all you know, I could be scarfing down bacon and chocolate milkshakes.  (Okay, I did have some corn chips with my guacamole last night, and French bread with my yam soup when friend Sue and I ate lunch in Roses Restaurant, today.)  Perhaps healthcare companies should be required to provide low-cost plans to people whose practitioners attest their claim to healthy lifestyles: an absence of smoking; drinking wine or spirits;  alcohol being extremely acidic and right up there with coffee; age-appropriate exercise.  Certainly there couldn’t be any more moral dishonesty in such a  practitioner-documented requirement than currently exists in Medicare prescription frauds.


Such provisions would add lustre to the halo as well as encouraging healthy feet on which our health care could become newly balanced.







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