alt Hacker NewsWould you say that people also need to be more responsible to be healthy themselves? Reducing pressure on the system and freeing capacity. E.g. healthy lifestyle to reduce diabetes.
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Well let’s start with insurance actually acknowledging preventative care as a worthwhile investment. We have a system that incentivizes waiting until emergency care is necessary and that comes with massive cons.
I can’t even get basic foot stuff covered, they won’t care until my feet and knees land me under “disability,” so people like me - but unlike me they can’t afford to spend hundreds more a year on special inserts and shoes - just keep doing what they’re doing until they’re hurt.
People go to the grocery store and marketing teams are trying to sell them “vitamin water” which is neither of those things, so they have to do tons of research and pay constant attention to literally every food they buy. Then when they get hurt they can’t afford to go to a doctor and the insurance that is sucking up huge amount amounts of their annual pay doesn’t pay for it either.
Meanwhile we have a US administration that is telling everybody, a population that is incredibly predisposed to heart disease already, to go eat more red meat. Also, they have spent a decade telling people that vaccines are shady and maybe they shouldn’t get them. How much damage have we done to preventative care with that one?
I could go on and on, I’m barely covering the breadth and depth of this problem. We can’t just call it “personal responsibility” or whatever
Of course people need to take some responsibility, but reality is most people live in a society and do as the society does. You can minimally change people with some financial intensives but the effect of that is pretty limited and its hard to implement.
You have to create a healthy system, that takes social engineering and government cooperating on a general plan. And in the US such a thing is basically not possible, even if they wanted to do it.
Ideally your transportation, agricultural, educational policies should all work together to produce healthy population. But this simply isn't the case.
But it will not 'reduce pressure' in a practical way, because such changes purely private or public take decades to work themselves threw the population.