Unhealthy Squares

Madame,

Yes, although I believed she took a fall prior doing something she greatly enjoyed (an unfortunately—a fall, not enjoyment—common contributor to “premature” demise in the age advanced).  Many credible tales also exist of kung fu masters well into their 70s and 80s  and beyond whose physical conditioning and exploits have made those decades younger blush in shame.  And your heading above your intersecting circles was “Loma Linda.” I was reminded of Loma Linda native Hilda Crooks, who was still climbing miles high mountains into her 90s (although she did require help in her later years).

The predilection of human beings to respond to the attraction of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is magnified greatly when the pleasure can be made immediate (smoking and eating) and the pain delayed (put out of mind, or even rationalized by the “my friend’s uncle did all the wrong things and still lived to be 90” mentality where they think—their first hand evidence is vague—someone won the health lottery and they will too).

Not sure that “Health” is necessarily a poor label, but if you wanted to use “Wellbeing” that could work too!

On the big front (I mean that in many senses of the word), we are seeing endless political maneuvering between people who are not all that interested in either our health or our lives.  Health insurance companies have done little but be deceitful (raising premiums or cancelling coverages and implying that the people have to just take it, when, in fact, they can go to the exchanges) and deflect blame from themselves onto the hapless Obama administration, which has taken much criticism, some well justified, some not.  Congressional Republicans have been disingenuous, criticizing the health.gov website after not funding the needed amounts for the Health and Human Service Dept for the last 3 years.  It seems part of a disingenuous pattern of first breaking government, and then screaming government doesn’t work.  It would be, to borrow an analogy, like a mechanic breaking your car and then claiming that cars don’t work, or crashing the car into a wall and claiming cars in general don’t work.

Obama has been misquoted (but see below!), his words deliberately twisted out of context, and a press only too glad to go along—after all, controversy is what sells, and it’s a business now, the news (and the truth) be damned.  For instance, his quote about you could keep your coverage was true as far as it went originally—he was speaking primarily about group insurance—but even where it applied just to individuals, the law covers only unchanged policies for grandfathering.  Nearly all of these effectively fraudulent policies that ACA is now forcing the replacing of—and that Republicans such as Sen. Charles Grassley said just a few years ago criminal investigations should be opened up on—are delusional money stealers that provided no real coverage in the fine print, and were just cheap deceptions to entice the poor and unwary. The famous case of the woman carted out by Fox News is worse than a red herring: basic journalism uncovered within a few hours that although her insurance company was raising her rates, she could get much better coverage for a whole lot less if she would just go to the exchanges.

Most of the pricing and coverage “problems” are occurring in the 5% of Americans who were those oddities—not covered by employer or group insurance of any kind. One would never know that from the media coverage, nor would one know that a much higher percentage is getting coverage for the first time.  Nor would one know that a vast majority of Americans are unaffected by the ACA. 

Getting an upgraded policy that covers certain minimum things is part and parcel of ACA.  Is ACA parsing enough in its application, either through law or regulations?  No, and it creates irritating excesses on both individuals and the system.  Something of this size is going to have to go through changes and regulatory adjustments to make sure common sense isn’t lost.  But is it how it is painted by the blind-hate-of-Obama crowd, particularly those who try to pick a single anecdotal case and extrapolate it wildly incorrectly on the whole?  No.  I don’t particularly like Obama or many of his policies, and they have botched much of the rollout, but my dislike is parsed, not wholescale. Criticisms should be valid, not based on sheer emotional vitriol that is ready to attach itself to any good sounding lie or misleading half-truth.  Of course, reasoned discernment is perhaps too much to expect in this age where substance is irrelevant and momentary partisan advantage and image to the low-informed nearly everything.

And speaking of criticisms, the heat Obama and his administration is taking over the “you can keep your insurance” remark(s) IS more than partly justified.   He and his administration cast a wide application to an initial remark, and what’s worse, not only did nothing to correct it, but repeatedly turned it into a misleading half-truth at best and a blatant deceiving lie at worst.  The Obama administration has in this and other things come up as an incompetent mixture of the hapless, the punitive, the deceiving, and the deliberately silent and ignoring, seemingly hoping it will all go away or fix itself. It doesn’t, and they end up on the defensive (admittedly, a position their opponents work hard to inflict on them), unable (if they would even be willing) to attempt to effect the “change” he was supposedly elected—twice—to push.

On a separate note (but maybe not!): The VA governor’s race only reinforced—on steroids—Hedges’ writing about how the end of a civilization (empire) sees an absence of character and surfeit of the inane.

One perhaps positive bit of health news.  The FDA says it is about to issue stringent restrictions on trans fatty acids.  We’ll see!