Cultural Unhealthiness

The lack of universal healthcare can't take all the blame. It's really looking at where all our priorities lie. Certainly not in prevention.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/beyond-isickoi_b_113955.html

"What could possibly determine whether America is among the industrial world's healthiest nations, if not the thing we're all clamoring for: universal heath insurance? The answer -- and this isn't a political opinion, it's an epidemiological finding -- lies in the social determinants of our physical condition. Determinants like income, class, education, racism, the availability of public transportation, land-use policy, environmental policy, participation in the political process and a host of other factors that don't depend on our genetic makeup or our propensity to take personal responsibility for diet and exercise. Determinants that flow not from luck or individual choices, but from laws, regulations and priorities set at all levels of government and in the private sector as well."

"What's astonishing is that even if we covered all the uninsured's health care, we would still likely rank at the bottom of industrial countries for healthiness. The major causes of our country's healthiness or unhealthiness are all upstream of the things that send us to doctors and hospitals and pharmacies. The causes are poverty, and stress, and the amount of control and autonomy we have at our jobs, and whether there are showers there, and what they put in the vending machines. The causes are access to early childhood education, and to day care, and whether schools are built near asthma-breeding freeways. They are whether your neighborhood offers public libraries and public transportation and walking trails, or public dumps and liquor stores and fast food franchises."

"To me, the underlying reason America has fallen so far behind in the healthiest nation race is the exhausted dogmas that have dominated public discourse for something like 30 years -- Horatio Algerism, social Darwinism, the magic of the marketplace, deregulation is good, government is bad, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and devil take the hindmost.
We now know what America looks like when those kinds of ideas rule, and not only in the health sector."