Over the last month, I have gone to Crossfit Portland 8 times. I have also taken on a high vegetable and lean protein diet and ditched all carbs, sugar, dairy, legumes and gluten. I have list 28lbs of fat and generally feel much more energetic and much happier than I did a month ago. Having a regular, friendly and challenging work out routine and a better diet changed me.
Tonight it occurred to me - how has this changed me? How could this affect others?
And then I thought - what if we provided a Fitness Stimulus.
We would fight our Obesity epidemic, people would be happier, and medical costs could be reduced.
There more it than that. This is an emergency for ability to defend ourselves. Two former Generals of the Joint chiefs of Staff recent put out a paper imploring a reaction to what they describe as "Too fat to fight". They are correct, 75% of 17 to 25 yearolds are too obese to be eligible for military service.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/too-fat-for-war/
And it gets worse. In 2010 Diabetes cost America $299 Billion. Fitness and better nutrition could fight this.
Tonight it occurred to me - how has this changed me? How could this affect others?
And then I thought - what if we provided a Fitness Stimulus.
We would fight our Obesity epidemic, people would be happier, and medical costs could be reduced.
There more it than that. This is an emergency for ability to defend ourselves. Two former Generals of the Joint chiefs of Staff recent put out a paper imploring a reaction to what they describe as "Too fat to fight". They are correct, 75% of 17 to 25 yearolds are too obese to be eligible for military service.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/too-fat-for-war/
And it gets worse. In 2010 Diabetes cost America $299 Billion. Fitness and better nutrition could fight this.
In many states, particularly in the deep south, obesity rates are above 30%. This creates many health problems other than diabetes and is correlated to everything from cancer to heart disease.
This clearly then is a problem that must be addressed to avert catastrophe. So how does it get done?
A $35 Billion stimulus aimed at encouraging and financing fitness and better nutrition at a rate of $1000 per American, and providing the USDA and Department of Health and Human services the ability to oversee a network gyms, leagues, nutritionists, child care, outdoor and sports stores, healthy restaurants and quality food purveyors who would be part of the program (let's call them Wellness Providers).
The WPs would compete in an ecosystem where each american could select the services which appealed to them and simply register their names upon payment to provide the WP with government dollars.
The accounts, which would be held by the government and kept in the individuals name in a payment database would be as a lump sum each year. Unspent dollars would not roll over to the next year to encourage full program utilization.
WPs would be under USDA and DHHS oversight, and would be required to provide an annual report on their activities
The program would be monitored with data available to the USDA, DHHS, FDA and CDC. The data could only be reviewed after a 1 year delay, and only then in a manner that protected all personal details of the participants. The data could be used to measure the impact of the policy and fine tune the way WPs were managed based on health outcomes.
If your thinking this is far fetched or a socialist plot, I suppose I can agree that certain parts might seem a little extreme, and there are definitely edges here that I think could be rounded down and still create an effective program, ideally run over a 10 year period. In considering this proposal, the risk of not doing anything must be considered. America is headed for a disaster on many levels if we do not solve this slow epidemic.
If we act now, the benefits are almost limitless:
-Greatly reduced health costs
-Improved national security
-Improved productivity
-Reduced non-renewable resource use
This program could create an American culture of wellness and fitness and change the outcome of the 21st century.
This is, essentially, Universal Health Care. In fact, a good UHC system would, much like private HC, provide a stipend per-year for gym memberships, regular visits to the doctor and preventative care.
ReplyDeleteThere's a bigger problem at work here, too. Americans don't think of their bodies and their health in well, a healthy way. A good diet and exercise are all it really takes to "be healthy" but we have a skewed idea of what health is. Too many people focus on "BMI" instead of other, bigger factors. I mean, in some respects the people we see as healthy are just people that work out too much and don't eat.
I like this idea, though. What I'd love to see in addition is an overhauled health education program in American schools.
Just look at the effects of "safe sex ed" (as opposed to "abstinence only sex ed" has been having (where its allowed): http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/04/10/461402/teen-pregnancy-sex-education/?mobile=nc
And now extrapolate that to other health issues.
And then of course there's the problem of the cost of food for poor families. I think many people just never had a good education and think that healthy eating is out of the question because of cost. In some places I'm sure that the cost REALLY IS a problem and they just can't eat good food for their families budget.
But again, this ties back to a healthcare system that helps people and doesn't treat them like customers. And also, again, this boils down to a liberal "Healthcare is a right not a privilege" thinking that some people just don't agree with.
Baby steps, though. I think something like this would be beneficial. People would be healthier and by extension I think it would keep healthcare costs down because fewer people would be getting sick from preventable diseases. Which would make the idea of a publicly funded health care network more palatable and, honestly, more sustainable. Now we just need someone that will champion stuff like this in congress.
Not sober enough to read this whole thing, but I agree with the first part.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.schoolyards.org/about.news.php?action=display&pressrelease_id=702
Ehhh?
I agree fitness is important but I think the majority of health care problems in this country can be fixed without any extra taxpayer dollars, in fact less. Plainly put food subsidies are all fucked up. Why do I have to spend 3 to 4 times the amount of money to eat healthily and locally? Why is the shittiest food the cheapest? Seems to me like if we figured out these questions our health care system, welfare system, obesity epidemic, general health, decline of farming, all the way to our dependence on oil would be affected in positive ways.
ReplyDeleteAnd may I add we won't affect freedom of choice by bringing up any universal healthcare talk.
DeleteI very strongly agree about needing to re-prioritize the way we subsidize crops. Corn is king, and we are paying the price for that.
DeleteI also think that we have reached a point where we need disruptive change and hopefully the ideas I'm putting forward here might spur some of those changes.
Something that I did not mentioned in the post, that I think bares worth putting forward - These stimulus dollars would have a positive affect not just in terms of health care, but in terms of job creation. These would American jobs that could not be outsourced and stimulus dollars that would be accessible to small businesses.