All hail health care reform

First of all - I've been slacking off with posting. I was going to blame it on being left speechless by the healthcare reform bill, or maybe blame it on the cold I got despite abusing Vitamins D and C for the past few months, or blame it on my PC crashing, but the crux of it is, I was too lazy to be eloquent. I have a lot of opinions, but making something coherent out of them with the keyboard is often too much trouble.

Excuses aside, all is right with the world now that the President has signed the healthcare bill.

I suppose I should be happy for the some of the changes. After all, the insurance companies will be slipping their necks into tight little nooses that should keep them under a bit more control than they've had in the past. And now:

approval will extend coverage to 32 million Americans who lack it

Why does this sound suspiciously like 32 million Americans will just be ‘given’ health insurance, when clearly that's not the case?

The bill will ban insurers from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions

It’s about time, but what punishment will insurers think up to make up for having to comply with this rule?

For the first time, most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, and face penalties if they refused.

There you go – punishment – that’s the way to care for the people. Punish them if they don’t pay for something you want them to pay for. And ‘most’ – that means there are still people who won’t be required to buy health insurance. Will they be the super-rich, the super-poor or just people with the right connections?

health care for all Americans

This is not what the legislation is about. It’s about getting everyone to buy health insurance

[Insurance companies] would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies, from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing conditions and from canceling policies when a policyholder becomes ill.

This all sounds great – but as we’ve seen with the credit card industry, it’s just a matter of time before insurance companies come up with ways to punish their customers for every new law they have to obey

Parents would be able to keep children up to age 26 on their family insurance plans, three years longer than is now the case.

This is a step forward, and will help millions of young adults maintain health converage, but remember, it still won't be free.

$900 billion in tax increases and Medicare cuts combined

Ah – there you go! Cut healthcare costs by taking coverage away from the elderly and charging taxpayers. I just don't understand why Congress didn't think of that sooner.

So weigh in - do you think the healthcare reform will actually help the majority of Americans, or will it ultimately cause more problems than it cures?

Soon there will be a drug for that

Today I was helping my son with his health homework. His teacher wants the students to bring in articles having to do with health topics and then to write short summaries of the articles. Since I'm always reading about health topcis, I sort of enjoy the fact-finding part of the assignment, I just have to remember not to get too controversial. I don't want to end up being hauled into health class to explain my radical ideas about doctors, drugs and food.

Today's assignment was fairly easy. My son and I went searching on line and found this no-brainer [pun intended] which I thought would make an excellent topic for a junior high school health class.

Apparently researchers have finally discovered what parents have known for centuries. Teenagers are dumb. {Or more accurately, they don't have the same capacity to learn that younger children do.}

Something happens when children hit their teenage years, {let's call it 'puberty'} that seriously impacts their ability to learn.

Well. Duh.

What do we do? We shove a driver's license in their hands and try to teach them to operate 2,000-pound vehicles on overcrowded roads at a time in their lives when they'd be hard pressed to find the cheese at the end of a wooden maze. So who's really dumber, I ask you?

I digress. The real issue with the article isn't the big surprise that the distractions of puberty make learning more difficult during the teen years but the closing sentence:

...and scientists could develop drugs to manipulate how easily kids learn.

That's the ticket right there. The take home message of this study isn't something sensible, like let's redesign the type of things we teach adolscents and play to their strengths or accept that they can't learn too much between the ages of 13 and 19 and concentrate on reinforcing things they learned before that. No. The take home message is: let's make some new drugs! Then being adolescent can be classed as a disease that requires treatment. I'm sure the pharmacutical companies are already salivating over how much money they can make on 'the learning pill.'

Risk vs. benefit - what's worth it?

Yesterday's post was sidelined by computer problems.

Today I'm up an running on a laptop and surfing the web for more imponderables. Today's question - is the benefit really worth the risk?

Apparently the FDA has approved another new diabetes drug called Victoza despite some evidence that the drug may cause a rare form of thyroid cancer. {The Victoza website includes the cancer warning as the first line under Important Safety Information}.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get why someone would feel the risk of getting cancer is better than trying some other drug to control diabetes. The instance of cancer may be small [and so far seems only to have occurred in laboratory rats], but nevertheless, why should a patient accept the prospect of a debilitiating [at best] and deadly [at worst] disease in order to fight another debilitating and often deadly disease? What really is the trade off?

Sure it's fine if you're not one of the unlucky few to develop cancer as a side effect of your treatment, but what if you are? Then was the risk worth it?

I think the real issue here is, the cost of defending the pharmaceutical company against lawsuits should someone develop cancer as a result of taking the drug, is minimal compared to the profit the company will make by selling the drug and having their reps convince doctors the drug is safe and effective in most cases.

Let's call a spade a spade here. The financial benefit outweighs the financial risk and the cost of human life has nothing to do with the equation.

A better lesson in eating

The Sunday newspaper had a small sidebar article about how studies have shown that kids who brown bag lunch to school have a lower incidence of obesity than those who eat school lunch.

I can't say this is really a surprise - considering the average school still offers grease soaked pizza squares and chicken nuggets with french fries as a typical meal choice. The salads are tiny, the fresh fruit is usually bruised and unappetizing and cookies and sugary juices can be purchased on the snack line which is often a lot shorter than the queue to get the day's hot meal. Is it any wonder the kids who eat cafeteria food are heavier than those toting balogna sandwiches from home?

It's another failure of a well-meaning system that can't get out of its own way. I recently read about how some school systems are banning home made treats from bake sales - partly to limit their own legal exposure in cases of allergic reactions, and partly [and more publicly] to make a stand for healthier snacks. Pop-tarts and bagged Doritos made the list of 'approved' items to be sold at bake sales while Mom's cupcakes and brownies are out.

It makes a sick kind of sense, not because kids are better off eating Pop-tarts and Doritos, but because an angry parent can sue Kelloggs or Frito-Lay if their child has a bad reaction to a pre-packaged snack, but if their child doesn't know any better than to scarf down Mrs. Johnson's walnut brownies when they have a severe nut allergy, the school coffers are at risk. I imagine this is why a lot more school food is also prepackaged. Mrs. Field's cookies and Domino's Pizza have built-in liabitility insurance, don't they?

I wonder how these studies fit into the national past time of blaming parents for their kids' obesity? If it becomes widely known that school lunch makes kids fat, will Boards of Education all over the country start making bottled water less expensive than whole milk and cutting off the endless cookie supply at the snack line or will they simply brow beat parents to go back to packing lunches so they can't be sued for contributing to Junior's weight problem?

Defensive medicine may be offensive

This Associated Press article caught my eye today. It discusses the over-abundance of medical testing used as a form of disease prevention and opines whether or not such testing is really beneficial or just wasteful.

In a time when health care costs are out of control, we have to examine the real reason behind the inflated costs. We don’t spend too much on health care because we’re sick, we spend too much on healthcare because healthcare is overpriced and we have embraced the idea that in order to be truly healthy we have to be tested constantly for disease. We’ve been conditioned to believe that early detection is the key to our survival, that palliative medications will give us a longer life and incessant doctor visits will improve the quality of our lives.

Suddenly, this isn’t the case. Now the speculation is we are over-testing, over-medicating and maybe even over-worrying. I tend to agree – the old adage ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ holds some weight. Good health used to be measured by how little you needed medical care, now it’s measured by how often you go for health screenings, vaccinations and renewals of your prescriptions.

On the other hand, I do find it odd that now when health care costs are completely out of control, the worm turns toward encouraging people to use less healthcare. Is it really common sense finally taking over, or is it a subtle way to lower costs?

Do you believe in routine preventive health screenings or do you think we place too much emphasis on being tested for everything all the time? Sure people have survived for thousands of years without ever having mammograms or colonoscopies, but then again – people have been dying for thousands of years too. Are we really at the next stage of our evolution where constant medical care will keep us healthy and living longer, or are we beginning to devolve into a race that can’t survive unless we are fully medicated and irradiated at every turn of the calendar?

Girl Scouts hijacked my diet

Not that I'm actually on a 'diet'. I don't use that word anymore, but I've been working hard at changing the way I eat.

Yesterday I started off with Greek yogurt, red grapes, a banana and a granola bar. Okay, lunch was a grilled cheese [lovingly prepared by my husband] and an apple followed by a walk around the block, believe it or not. Dinner was a salad, baked chicken, another apple [organic] and some fresh Italian bread. Sounds like a red letter day and it would have been except for the half a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints I ate while making dinner.

They're like chocolate covered crack. All these weeks of teaching myself how to avoid eating processed snack foods went right out the window when confronted with these deadly little disks of yummy. The worst part is, there's another sleeve in the box and I'll be home all by myself this afternoon.

I may need to duct tape my mouth shut.

So tell me, what's your food vice? What's the thing you can't resist no matter hard you try? I can walk away from an Oreo but Thin Mints are my Waterloo.

Do you juice?

I've been trying to figure out if juicing is a good idea or not. I've looked at juicing machines [and they're not cheap] and read a lot about the benefits of making your own juice from fresh fruits and vegetables.

Every source I've found agrees that commercial fruit juices are BAD with a capital BAD. They have too much sugar - many are supplemented with high fructose corn syrup and actually contain very little real juice. Making your own juice seems like the answer to getting all the nutrients from these foods in an easier way, plus you get something to drink besides water or green tea [unsweetened tea is my staple drink but even that gets boring now and then].

I've been making some of my own citrus juice - grapefruit and orange and to me it tastes just as sweet as anything I can buy, but I've also read that juicing removes some of the benefit of the fruit. You need the fiber of the fruit to counteract the sugar in the juice otherwise you're just wasting your time.

I'm beginning to think maybe juicing is something to do for fun once in a while when you want a treat, but it may not be a daily staple of a good diet.

Any juicers out there? What do you think? Has juicing helped your health or your waistline or is it just a good way to increase your produce bill?