Healthy Living

Interesting read here.

When ACA was being debated, I commonly asserted that it was health insurance reform, not health care reform.  That what was being reformed was the way that we pay for health care, rather than how we treat people.

I guess that was wrong.  In a good way.

ACA has a lot of pilot programs designed to improve the health and health care delivery in American people's lives.  But one of the interesting ideas is to promote wellness.

Too often, medicine looks at health as illness.  "Health" is the maintenance of illness through treatment - drugs, surgery and so on.  In fact, a lot of illness can be avoided through wellness.  And it's a helluva lot cheaper.

Is it cheaper to pay the treatment costs to get someone to stop smoking at age 30 or to treat their emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease when they are 60?

While fee-for-service is a big problem in our health care costs, so is the unhealthy lifestyles of many Americans.

During the AP reading, I sat at a chair for about 8 hours a day.  We started at 8am, had 15 minute breaks in the morning and afternoon and an hour lunch.  The rest of the time, we sat and read.

I still have heartburn from that.  I literally have heartburn.  If I did that every day...

I realize that this is the way many Americans work every day of their adult lives.  If you could find a way to change that, a way to add movement or exercise to people's lives, you could make America healthier.

That strikes me as good policy, though I realize Republicans see it as the living incarnation of Nazism.