Americans Are Seriously Sick

jd writes "A study by US and British researchers on frequency of illnesses shows that even when you compare like groups in the US and the UK, people in the US are considerably sicker than their counterparts in the UK. This is after factors such as age, race, income, education and gender were taken into consideration. The most startling conclusion was that although the richest Americans were better off than the poorest Americans, they did no better (health-wise) than the poorest of the English. Previous studies of the entire population had shown similar results, with America placing around 25th amongst industrialized countries on chronic disease prevention, but it had been assumed that minorities and economics were skewing the results. This study suggests that maybe that isn't the case."

Comments

Re:Universal Healthcare?

[Enderandrew]

They have Universal Healthcare in Canada and if my father in law was in Canada, he'd be dead. He had a serious illness and needed serious treatment. If he were in Canada, his brain tumor never would have been diagnosed because he wouldn't have had access to the equipment necessary. Universal Healthcare is not necessarily a good thing.

Re:Nationalized Healthcare Good For Business

[EmagGeek]

See, here's the problem. Insurance shouldn't be covering your condition at all because it is chronic. The whole problem with insurance, medicare, and socialized medicine as we know it is that society has come to expect insurance to pay for ongoing medical care, and not just the unexpected events that insurance was initially designed for.

Your car insurance doesn't pay for maintenance on your car, and your home insurance doesn't pay for maintenance on your house. However, we expect health insurance to pay maintenance on our health. This is flat out wrong. You should be paying maintenance out of your pocket just like you do for your car and your home.

Insurance is supposed to cover the UNexpected, not the expected.

On another note, I wonder if this study took hypochondria into consideration, or the fact that we have been trained to run to the doctor for every little sniffle or sneeze because hey, it's only a $20 copay and insurance pays for everything. We're pumping ourselves so full of unnecessary medicine that our bodies are figuring out that health will come from an external source, and our immune systems are getting weaker.

I also wonder if obesity is comorbid with poor health in the individuals they studied. We are probably the fattest nation on the planet, so I'm actually quite surprised that we do as well as 25th. This brings up another point of insurance. Insurance should not cover negligence, and negligence includes making obviously bad lifestyle choices like smoking. If one eats one's self to 300 pounds and smoke 2 packs every day, I don't see why my insurance premiums should be paying for their chronic illness. I would think diabetes and cardiovascular disease would be expected and therefore the complications from them not be covered.

Whatever... the world is going to hell because more than 50% of the people are complete idiots and don't know that things like socialism and the cultures of irresponsibility and blame are BAD.

Vegetarism

[Steeltoe]

I totally agree such discussions suck, but here we go again ;-)

My reasons for vegetarism is so many without looking back at the past. Here's some you can use:

- Why spend 10x the water and food to raise stock, when that food could feed the rest of the world?

- Why torture animals by putting them in cage and giving them a totally unnatural/undesirable life - one which if we see movies of something like this done to humans we call it "horror movie" and "bad aliens".

- Your food is what you become - both in body and mind. It is both healthier (if you have knowledge about it), gives you more energy and spiritual development. OTOH, eating meat gives you a share of bad karma and foul smell. Any foul smells ;-) when you begin to eat vegetarian is actually cleansing of the body / adjustments to different metabolism.

- Animals are more similar to humans. We wouldn't want to eat humans, but we eat animals because we think less of them. Actually, by eating them you become more "animalistic", because their energy is going through your body. I know many here think this is a far stretch, but energy is always preserved, so it makes sense that some of the animalistic mind is still left in the meat while plant-food is more "tranquil".

- I don't want to participate in ignorance. Even though "everybody" does it, I prefer to do what I do based on knowledge and compassion.

To the argument about the canines, I dare people to eat raw meat. I believe our canines may have been developed as a result of humans starting to eat cooked meat, not the other way around.. but that's just a personal hunch, and a possibility to think about..

But just because I have canines doesn't restrict me from making my own decision where I want to go.

Re:Answer is easy.

[arcanumas]

Collusion is only a risk in oligopoly.
(And even then there are examples where no regulation meant lower prices to the consumer, even in oligopolistic environments (eg Cell phone providers in Afrika )) Oligopoly and monopoly are a failure of the free market model anyway, so it is unfair to take a problem limited to a certain type of market and apply it to the free market economy in general.