Blog #5: Correction to Healthcare Costs Discussion (Post #3)

Howdy Folks,

Buster here again.  Slim pickins this week for any concerned citizens who are (or hopefully someday may be) reading my little blog.  Was busy all week, but it was mainly making sure old pappy got back into St. Luke’s for a little back-stabbing in an effort to relieve his sciatica pain.  That old fool is beginning to do his part to charge up the astronomical health care costs that were discussed here a couple weeks ago.  At least his plan is to exit stage left before he does much more damage.  Trouble is I gotta keep him going for a few more years because with these danged big paws of mine, it is impossible to type on these itty-bitty computer keyboards.

Well, enough of my problems.  Next week, hopefully we can get back to the long-awaited and fervently anticipated – Economy: Part II.  This sucker is so big and messed up, it could take a full year to just adequately describe the problem.  And folks, with the kind of rascals we have running our govamints, we aint got that kind of time!

Before going, I need to correct an oversight made a couple of weeks ago in discussing our Healthcare System.  I had listed obesity as one of several factors contributing to the rapid escalation of our healthcare costs.  Actually, I should have indicated the entire category of addictive behaviors, which of course includes obesity, as a major cost multiplier.

For quite some time, our large corporations with their handsomely compensated executives and their crafty marketing gurus, have conned all of us into unhealthy activities.  The tobacco companies have long manipulated the level of addictive nicotine in their products to keep us hooked.  Mimicking big tobacco, the food giants have been adding addictive (and fattening) components to their products.  People nowadays, with their busy and hectic life styles, are even more susceptible to falling prey to these insidious ploys.

These addictive products are promoted incessantly by (surprise) massive advertising!  Alcohol and drugs, both the illegal and the way over prescribed legal ones, seem to be quite addictive without much enhancement.  So, we poor old human beans, harried and harassed, are surrounded by these cons.  My old pappy avoided alcoholism only by the grace of god, or who ever it is that decides such things, and he had been addicted to cigarettes for a number of years until he was able to quit due to an imagined lung cancer scare.  As one of his old bosses used to say, “They are not taking any prisoners out there!”

Actually a case could be made that the smokers, and possibly even this entire group, are gettin’ a bum wrap on the cost angle.  It could very well be proven that their shortened lives allow them to avoid the later periods of multiple parts replacements and massive interventions to the late life diseases.  It may be that their generally shortened life-spans let them out before the really big, costly stuff hits in the 80’s and 90’s.  We’ll probably never know for sure because its unlikely anyone is going to run those numbers.  By the time our legislators get around to addressing any of these issues logically, they will be telling us that it is our patriotic duty to just go ahead and die and reduce the healthcare costs.  Remember what one of our presidents told us about shopping?

So, again education appears to be the only logical solution.  Only by providing information on the nature of addiction to our kids, very early on and repetitiously  through high school, can we hope to mitigate the ravages of these “natural” disasters.  It certainly wouldn’t hurt either for the govamint to provide funds for messaging to the general public to offset the incessant advertising by big old corporate America.