Another excellent article. This sounds so familiar to me, since we've had a few family members with health issues recently.
While I agree that our whole health care system needs major changes for the reasons stated, there is so much more required to make it function better.
One inexpensive and achievable goal should be to somehow forcefully encourage a large segment of the public to take better care of themselves. I'm not talking about making everyone perfect physical specimens, or even close.
An example, when I was a youngster President Kennedy put forward some basic standards of fitness that could be measured and encouraged in our schools. The goal was to be able to run a mile, do a certain number of pushup's and situp's and other basic exercises to an age appropriate standard. If the public could be nudged in that direction, maybe even a 10-20% improvement, that could result in tremendous financial savings and quality of life improvements. The equivalent of billions of dollars of healthcare spending.
Most of the proposals now are simplistic, and require the "rich, or more affluent" to pay more, sometimes much more. To be forced to make that contribution.
What's wrong with asking, requiring, those that can have the most cost effective results, to help too?
"An example, when I was a youngster President Kennedy put forward some basic standards of fitness that could be measured and encouraged in our schools."
The President's Physical Fitness Test. Obama got rid of it and Trump brought it back. One guess as to whether or not the left was mad.
We also spent the past 40 years pushing low-fat diets and replacing saturated fat with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Now they're getting rid of thess chemicals and the left is mad.
"We" didn't replace saturated fat with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in the past 40 years. By the time the low-fat and fat-free orthodoxy came into full gear in the late 1970s, margarine (partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) had been discredited.
Saturated fat was replaced by carbohydrates, which metabolize to glucose. Carbs are fine, indeed necessary in a balanced diet, but if they are overemphasized, the result is diabetes and obesity. This is exactly what has happened since the 1970s, yet the academics STILL push low fat and condemn saturated fat.
It appears you are misremembering the 80s. It was in the 1980s that saturated fats were replaced (coconut oil for popcorn, tallow for French fries, crisco for lard in baking, margarine for butter) on a widespread basis. Go pick up any cheap prepackaged baked good and check the ingredient list
This goes back a good deal further than the 1980s.
It began after Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack on the golf course, in September 1955. After that, the academics began preaching about a connection between arterial sclerosis, cholesterol, and saturated fat. That became the consensus, and by the 1960s people were being told to drink skim milk, avoid eggs, butter, and cheese, and stay away from beef.
By the 1970s, the federal government was pushing low-fat, and in response the food companies reduced fat and replaced it with carbs. In 1958, 0.7% of the public had diabetes. In the early '60s, the obesity rate was 13%, and "morbid obesity" was 1%. By 2015, diabetes was 7.4%, and today obesity is 43%, and morbid obesity is 10%. The biggest increases have happened since the mid-1970s.
Carbs do two things. They reduce satiety, and they metabolize to glucose. People eat too much, and the glucose overwhelms the pancreas and interferes with the body's consumption of stored fat. The low-fat doctrine has been an unmitigated public health disaster, yet it survives today even though the science has shown that there's no link between cholesterol and arterial sclerosis, and no link between saturated fat consumption and cholesterol.
The top it off, now the same Big Medical that passed misinformation about dietary fat has come up with semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), which does the same thing that saturated fat does: produce satiety, but at much greater expense and with serious side effects for many people.
So no, it's not a 1980s phenomenon, and no, I do not have it wrong. All of this was produced by academic group-think that turned into government policy. If there's one thing we know, it's that neither academics nor "progressives" in general will ever admit that they are wrong about a single thing.
Don't know who you mean by 'the left', but it's worth noting that literally zero of the Democratic party leadership (radicals controlled by the far left in your view, if I recall) has said that Maduro was a good honest fellow and they're mad that he's gone--though they have said that they are mad about *other* things, such as the way the operation was done, the clear lack of post-op planning, etc.
Meanwhile last week the leader of the Republican party pardoned one of the biggest narcotraffickers in South America--the admin's official line is that narcotrafficking was what we took out Maduro to fight against, yes?--and the GOP leadership said absolutely nothing about it.
The "progressives" rail against that pardon, maybe with justification, but turn around and use it to justify their support for Maduro and various narcotics traffickers. Bottom line is that the Democratic Party stands with drug traffickers.
I think you missed the angry protests of angry leftists in many cities over the weekend.
I don't know what's going on with Hernández. It absolutely could corruption on Trump's part. Although Trump's corruption is small-potatoes compared to the left, he's still corrupt.
Well we agree on the corruption part--though I don't think there's any ideological bias in scale of corruption. Corruption is pretty pan-ideological IMO.
Honestly I expected there'd be lefty protesters should anything be done in Venezuela well before the capture of Maduro. There always are. But if we're counting anything 'not on the right' as 'the left' then those protesters are teeny-tiny fragment of the left, the vast majority of whom I suspect--like the majority of the right--are too busy working to go protest.
Glad it all worked out ok. Kids, they give us a new respect for just how arbitrary and capricious life is, and the older they get the more subject they are to the inherent dangers of the world.
Recommends doctors use "equity-focused" language, such as "historically marginalized" instead of "minority" and "systematically divested" for "poor neighborhoods"
Focuses on addressing systemic racism and historical discrimination in medicine, including apologizing for past discriminatory practices against Black physicians and removing a bust of its founder over his racist past.
Supports gender-affirming care, which includes treatments like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors.
"if we hadn’t firmly requested chest imaging at the get-go, and if we hadn’t rushed back to the ER based on new and worsening symptoms," - but it took your firm prompting to have the chest imaging done which shows that patients need support from non-medical people to get Dr's past medical protocol which we experienced during the covid scare. And definitely insurance needs an overhauling as we see multilayers of paperwork by those in the system who find ways to milk money for their own benefit thus raising costs for the insured.
Your story is repeated daily and is no less terrifying to each family. My first daughter never came home, having a genetic defect incompatible with life. My second was in the hospital when he was a toddler to investigate the cause of a seizure. My third was admitted at age 3, not being able to breathe. That was when oxygen levels in the bloodstream were checked daily with a prick of her finger. She selected which of her fingers they would stick each day. Children teach us to love someone else more than ourselves and to be grateful for modern medicine.
The doctors and staff are my hero’s. But I have seen many, many good people leave medicine because it has changed so much. Too many non-medical people making important medical decisions.
(By the way you have an amazing vocabulary. Thank you.)
Thank you for the great post, and glad your son is better! Gotta recommend Matt Stoller's excellent Substack post "Obamacare is Cooked." There he introduces us to _Washington Post_ writer Phil Longman's idea of Medicare Pricing for All. If all we ever had to pay was the same Medicare rate for every service, drug, or device, this would hopefully get rid of the entire insurance industry, since their profits would crash. We need to take all the billions spent on making this group obscenely rich and build well-managed/invested healthcare funds for each state instead. Thank you again!
Kudos. Brave to admit one's naivety. More of us liberals/progressive should have shared experiences with the large majority of the others. Maybe an article on the Dollar Store experience is in order?!
Another excellent article. This sounds so familiar to me, since we've had a few family members with health issues recently.
While I agree that our whole health care system needs major changes for the reasons stated, there is so much more required to make it function better.
One inexpensive and achievable goal should be to somehow forcefully encourage a large segment of the public to take better care of themselves. I'm not talking about making everyone perfect physical specimens, or even close.
An example, when I was a youngster President Kennedy put forward some basic standards of fitness that could be measured and encouraged in our schools. The goal was to be able to run a mile, do a certain number of pushup's and situp's and other basic exercises to an age appropriate standard. If the public could be nudged in that direction, maybe even a 10-20% improvement, that could result in tremendous financial savings and quality of life improvements. The equivalent of billions of dollars of healthcare spending.
Most of the proposals now are simplistic, and require the "rich, or more affluent" to pay more, sometimes much more. To be forced to make that contribution.
What's wrong with asking, requiring, those that can have the most cost effective results, to help too?
"An example, when I was a youngster President Kennedy put forward some basic standards of fitness that could be measured and encouraged in our schools."
The President's Physical Fitness Test. Obama got rid of it and Trump brought it back. One guess as to whether or not the left was mad.
We also spent the past 40 years pushing low-fat diets and replacing saturated fat with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Now they're getting rid of thess chemicals and the left is mad.
This is just from the past week or two!
- Got rid of a dictator and the left is mad
- Stopped Nigerian genocide and the left is mad
- Stopped welfare fraud and the left is mad
"We" didn't replace saturated fat with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in the past 40 years. By the time the low-fat and fat-free orthodoxy came into full gear in the late 1970s, margarine (partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) had been discredited.
Saturated fat was replaced by carbohydrates, which metabolize to glucose. Carbs are fine, indeed necessary in a balanced diet, but if they are overemphasized, the result is diabetes and obesity. This is exactly what has happened since the 1970s, yet the academics STILL push low fat and condemn saturated fat.
It appears you are misremembering the 80s. It was in the 1980s that saturated fats were replaced (coconut oil for popcorn, tallow for French fries, crisco for lard in baking, margarine for butter) on a widespread basis. Go pick up any cheap prepackaged baked good and check the ingredient list
This goes back a good deal further than the 1980s.
It began after Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack on the golf course, in September 1955. After that, the academics began preaching about a connection between arterial sclerosis, cholesterol, and saturated fat. That became the consensus, and by the 1960s people were being told to drink skim milk, avoid eggs, butter, and cheese, and stay away from beef.
By the 1970s, the federal government was pushing low-fat, and in response the food companies reduced fat and replaced it with carbs. In 1958, 0.7% of the public had diabetes. In the early '60s, the obesity rate was 13%, and "morbid obesity" was 1%. By 2015, diabetes was 7.4%, and today obesity is 43%, and morbid obesity is 10%. The biggest increases have happened since the mid-1970s.
Carbs do two things. They reduce satiety, and they metabolize to glucose. People eat too much, and the glucose overwhelms the pancreas and interferes with the body's consumption of stored fat. The low-fat doctrine has been an unmitigated public health disaster, yet it survives today even though the science has shown that there's no link between cholesterol and arterial sclerosis, and no link between saturated fat consumption and cholesterol.
The top it off, now the same Big Medical that passed misinformation about dietary fat has come up with semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), which does the same thing that saturated fat does: produce satiety, but at much greater expense and with serious side effects for many people.
So no, it's not a 1980s phenomenon, and no, I do not have it wrong. All of this was produced by academic group-think that turned into government policy. If there's one thing we know, it's that neither academics nor "progressives" in general will ever admit that they are wrong about a single thing.
Don't know who you mean by 'the left', but it's worth noting that literally zero of the Democratic party leadership (radicals controlled by the far left in your view, if I recall) has said that Maduro was a good honest fellow and they're mad that he's gone--though they have said that they are mad about *other* things, such as the way the operation was done, the clear lack of post-op planning, etc.
Meanwhile last week the leader of the Republican party pardoned one of the biggest narcotraffickers in South America--the admin's official line is that narcotrafficking was what we took out Maduro to fight against, yes?--and the GOP leadership said absolutely nothing about it.
The "progressives" rail against that pardon, maybe with justification, but turn around and use it to justify their support for Maduro and various narcotics traffickers. Bottom line is that the Democratic Party stands with drug traffickers.
I think you missed the angry protests of angry leftists in many cities over the weekend.
I don't know what's going on with Hernández. It absolutely could corruption on Trump's part. Although Trump's corruption is small-potatoes compared to the left, he's still corrupt.
Well we agree on the corruption part--though I don't think there's any ideological bias in scale of corruption. Corruption is pretty pan-ideological IMO.
Honestly I expected there'd be lefty protesters should anything be done in Venezuela well before the capture of Maduro. There always are. But if we're counting anything 'not on the right' as 'the left' then those protesters are teeny-tiny fragment of the left, the vast majority of whom I suspect--like the majority of the right--are too busy working to go protest.
Great article! Here is a TikTok on health care workers in action:
https://www.tiktok.com/@rugbyrush999/video/7564656344389733662
Glad it all worked out ok. Kids, they give us a new respect for just how arbitrary and capricious life is, and the older they get the more subject they are to the inherent dangers of the world.
The AMA:
Recommends doctors use "equity-focused" language, such as "historically marginalized" instead of "minority" and "systematically divested" for "poor neighborhoods"
Focuses on addressing systemic racism and historical discrimination in medicine, including apologizing for past discriminatory practices against Black physicians and removing a bust of its founder over his racist past.
Supports gender-affirming care, which includes treatments like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors.
Supports DEI.
"if we hadn’t firmly requested chest imaging at the get-go, and if we hadn’t rushed back to the ER based on new and worsening symptoms," - but it took your firm prompting to have the chest imaging done which shows that patients need support from non-medical people to get Dr's past medical protocol which we experienced during the covid scare. And definitely insurance needs an overhauling as we see multilayers of paperwork by those in the system who find ways to milk money for their own benefit thus raising costs for the insured.
Your story is repeated daily and is no less terrifying to each family. My first daughter never came home, having a genetic defect incompatible with life. My second was in the hospital when he was a toddler to investigate the cause of a seizure. My third was admitted at age 3, not being able to breathe. That was when oxygen levels in the bloodstream were checked daily with a prick of her finger. She selected which of her fingers they would stick each day. Children teach us to love someone else more than ourselves and to be grateful for modern medicine.
The doctors and staff are my hero’s. But I have seen many, many good people leave medicine because it has changed so much. Too many non-medical people making important medical decisions.
(By the way you have an amazing vocabulary. Thank you.)
Thank you for the great post, and glad your son is better! Gotta recommend Matt Stoller's excellent Substack post "Obamacare is Cooked." There he introduces us to _Washington Post_ writer Phil Longman's idea of Medicare Pricing for All. If all we ever had to pay was the same Medicare rate for every service, drug, or device, this would hopefully get rid of the entire insurance industry, since their profits would crash. We need to take all the billions spent on making this group obscenely rich and build well-managed/invested healthcare funds for each state instead. Thank you again!
Kudos. Brave to admit one's naivety. More of us liberals/progressive should have shared experiences with the large majority of the others. Maybe an article on the Dollar Store experience is in order?!