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California Study To Examine the Influence of a Healthy Diet On Patients (nytimes.com)
"According to The New York Times, the state of California is funding an experiment through The Ceres Community Project to test the influence of a healthy diet on the recovery of state Medicaid patients with long-term serious illnesses," writes Slashdot reader MonteCarloMethod. From the report: Over the next three years, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford will assess whether providing 1,000 patients who have congestive heart failure or Type 2 diabetes with a healthier diet and nutrition education affects hospital readmissions and referrals to long-term care, compared with 4,000 similar Medi-Cal patients who don't get the food.
The California study will build on more modest and less rigorous earlier research. A study in Philadelphia by the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance retroactively compared health insurance claims for 65 chronically ill Medicaid patients who received six months' of medically tailored meals with a control group. The patients who got the food racked up about $12,000 less a month in medical expenses. Another small study by researchers at U.C.S.F. tracked patients with H.I.V. and Type 2 diabetes who got special meals for six months to see if it would positively affect their health. The researchers found they were less depressed, less likely to make trade-offs between food and health care, and more likely to stick with their medications.
The California study will build on more modest and less rigorous earlier research. A study in Philadelphia by the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance retroactively compared health insurance claims for 65 chronically ill Medicaid patients who received six months' of medically tailored meals with a control group. The patients who got the food racked up about $12,000 less a month in medical expenses. Another small study by researchers at U.C.S.F. tracked patients with H.I.V. and Type 2 diabetes who got special meals for six months to see if it would positively affect their health. The researchers found they were less depressed, less likely to make trade-offs between food and health care, and more likely to stick with their medications.
Food is not an easy thing to get a handle on.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The journalist Michael Pollan calls the ideology of treating food like a drug "nutritionism". It has a very poor track record stretching back over a hundred years, when protein was the evil macronutrient and carbs were the good macronutrient.
His alternative proposal: eat food, mostly plants, and not too much. By "food" he mean something your (or somebody's) great-grandmother would recognize as food, not some highly processed industrial convenience product.
Take Cheetos -- from a marketing perspective there has never been a more perfect consumable product. Each puff is designed to give you a little burst of pleasure, but to have zero satiation value. It's engineered to make you eat forever.
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I can give you a simple answer....
No.
Healthcare paid for by others to you, is not a right.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You think they spent $50 trillion on two wars?
Someone's been hitting the medical marijuana.
You pay one way or another.
You can pay for emergency treatment when people can't afford to visit a doctor for anything less than life-threatening emergencies, by which time a condition that could have been treated cheaply and with a better patient outcome is now an expensive, risk laden venture with poor prognosis. Worse, it's tying up a system that would be better serving emergencies that couldn't be anticipated or treated.
You can try to make emergency services a user pays proposition, but then you risk increasing the wealth inequality even further, increasing crime and you pay for police, a slower legal system and increased prisons, not to mention having a growing population that are in poor health creating a pool for infectious disease.
Maybe the math doesn't perfectly balance. It's hard to put a dollar value on quality of life and engagement with the social contract, but most other first world/OECD countries achieve better health outcomes for more people, for less money and lower cost to most citizens than the US. Using some flavour of nationalised health care.
There are some things that are terrible when government run, just as there are some things you don't want to let people profit from. Health care is one of the latter.
Your argument looks good on paper. Yet the US has worse outcomes for most people, at a higher cost than most first world countries - who are running some flavour of socialised healthcare.
Of course, they can distinguish between idealised 'pure' socialism of knee jerk rhetoric and practical, regulated socialised policies designed to try and prevent the abuses you cite.
Seriously. Take a look outside the US for other models and for examples of limited and regulated soclialism especially with respect to healthcare.
Healthy food can be enjoyable and taste damn good. It's not about coercion, it's about teaching people to find/prepare healthy food within a given budget. And also increasing access to healthy food in a given area -- many "corner stores" only stock heavily processed "foods."
Since we're all dead in the end, the trip along the way is much more important than the inevitable destination.
Eating healthy improves your quality of life even if it doesn't cure you of all ills. Not eating healthy leads to scurvy, gout &c. in relatively extreme examples, but there's also corpulence, constipation, and the like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
shall be the whole of the law. As long as you're willing to admit you're in favor of Dog eat Dog capitalism that's something I can work with. Very, very few people are willing to admit it because, well, it's been shown repeatably that it ends horribly for all but a lucky few (the .01%, the robber barrons, monarchs, facists, whatever you want to call them they're the same all throughout history).
I actually prefer guys like you. Because 95% of us know your ideas are just plain wrong. Which is exactly why so few right wingers will admit to them. Especially in person. After all, it's easy to say "Let 'em die" on the internet. Not so much when you're face to face with somebody actually dying.
And if you want to know why you're wrong (and you're open to figuring things out) start by googling "Wallet Biopsy".
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Another thing is that the value proposition, in time and money, isn't as good cooking for one person as it is cooking for a family. If I get a hankering for a sandwich, I need to buy a LOAF of bread, a HEAD of lettuce, a package of cheese, etc. The bottle of mayo will go bad before I use 1/4 of it. Then take the time cutting the vegetables and such. All for one sandwich. Subway starts to look like a reasonable option.
If a family of four wants sandwiches, it's still a loaf of bread, a head of lettuce, etc to feed all four people. That's a better value proposition.
I probably could plan out different meals a week ahead to use up that whole red onion, which I got to put 1/16th of it on my sandwich. It's a bit of a hassle, though.
I'm glad to see that restaurants, even fast food places, are slowly starting to offer healthier options.
In the short term one often loses weight on a diet simply because changing the pattern your body is used to puts it into minor shock. But in the longer run it adjusts and things go back to "normal" (overweight). Longer-term studies almost always confirm this. For one, if your food intake decreases, your metabolism also slows down to match, making it an uphill battle.
Exercise is a better route, but is time-consuming. Countries that rely heavily on walking too and from public transportation instead of cars often have notably healthier populations. One would have to exercise roughly an hour a day to match that, and split it into roughly 2 sessions. That's a lot of time to sacrifice. You may live 5 years longer, but lose that total difference exercising.
Table-ized A.I.
Right now, the US pays more per capita than any other OECD country.
Your outcomes are worse.
Low cost preventive care is sort of a myth
The evidence suggests otherwise.
There's a bunch of other articles with lower standards of rigor that all say much the same thing if you google 'cost of preventative care vs emergency care', for example. I'd be fascinated to see evidence to the contrary.
Extremely indulgent free medical services
Straw man. I'm arguing that socialised medical care as used by other OECD countries costs less and has better outcomes. You're arguing some fantastic exaggeration you're calling 'extremely indulgent free medical services'.
You're not even consistent. You argue first that people don't just avoid medical care because of cost, but then argue that were it free, people would use it too much.
The people advocating for universally free non-critical care (i.e 'free checkups') are generally the vendors of said services
Ad hominem.
Just be honest. The hot dog seller in the street is honest about his advocacy, and you can be too.
When you can back up your statement with something resembling facts, and avoid some fairly basic logical fallacies, your adoption of a patronising tone will probably ring less false.
Caveat. I'm from Australia, and while there are problems with our health care, I consider myself damn lucky to be able to live in country and period in history with access to the levels of civilisation that I enjoy. I'm more than happy to pay taxes to fund these services, both for myself and my fellow citizens and recognise that probably makes me a 'socialist' in the eyes of some. I consider the plight of those in the US who cannot afford medical care to be a tragedy. I've nothing to sell, and your assumption that this can be the only motivation for someone to advocate equitable access to the wealth of society says more about your motivations than anything else.
it's about teaching people to find/prepare healthy food within a given budget.
This implies that finding / preparing healthy food isn't the cheapest option. Many people would find if they learnt to cook, spent just a few minutes a day in the kitchen and ate healthy, they'll likely have fatter wallets as a result.
California study finds cancer links during healthy diet, places warning labels on all healthy foods.
Yeah I do pretty much the same thing. Whip up a big batch of chili, portion out into individual servings in Tupperware, freeze it, and I've got lunch or dinner for a couple weeks. Make a batch of egg salad and that's breakfast for 4 days. Tuna salad, same thing but for lunch. It's not hard, it just limits your options a little bit. The biggest pain is trying to get enough fresh fruit and vegetables.
Now, there is freedom of association in the USA. So if you prefer a collectivist approach to healthcare, you are more than welcome form your own coop, insurance company, charity hospital, or whatever, and get busy with convincing others to join you.
Nope.
There are a patchwork of laws and regulations that actually make it illegal to form my own co-op, insurance company or charity hospital. You have to meet a lot of requirements first, which cost an enormous amount of money. Then you can start being an insurance company....in one state.
But, keep in mind that a national healthcare system with compulsory participation flies in the face of the principles upon which the Republic was founded
Fire departments. Are they Constitutional? It's compulsory participation, and not enumerated in the Federal constitution or any State constitution.
At a minimum for such a thing to be implemented, I think it would require a constitutional amendment
Because Medicare does not already exist.