Let's Reform Ourselves First

I won't insult your intelligence by pretending to have sufficient insight into the nation's health care delivery system to offer my suggestions on fixing it. Actually, even more important than reforming health care delivery is the need for Americans to do something about health care demand. The best way to deal with illness and injury is to do all you can to avoid them in the first place! This means that the real critical need is to reform Americans first, then worry about reforming our health care systems.

Reports of Americans' increasing life-span belie the fact of America's growing lack of fitness. Super-sized portions of fast-food combined with sedentary life-styles adds up to a lot of needless illness that costs everyone too much to treat. Any medical person will tell you that primary prevention is by far the "best medicine." But every day millions of Americans do, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb things that invite all manner of acute and chronic illnesses and injuries.

Here's one example that we all see pretty much every day: the driver in the vehicle in the lane next to us with a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and the steering wheel in...well it's being juggled. An accident waiting to happen, chronic, and likely terminal illness, being sown in the lungs and heart! Like I said, dumb.

Then there's the parade of young school-children coming in to my wife's school nurse office on a daily schedule with their asthma and diabetes. Hmm, the fact that as infants and toddlers these kids were a few feet, often a few inches, from a constant stream of tobacco smoke couldn't have something to do with their asthma, could it? The poor diet, obesity, and all but total lack of exercise doesn't contribute to the diabetes, does it? Multiply what my wife sees each week by all the school nurse offices across the county and, well, as I said, the problem we need to fix is health care demand more than health care delivery. It's our brokenness that should be more of a concern to the nation than the health care industry.

I don't mean to pick on my wife, and I don't need to. Working at a Scout camp this summer I saw plenty of boys, 1/5 my age, who I could run circles around. And I'm not the most active guy on the block. But when I take a simple 5-mile hike and leave a bunch of 11-12 year-olds in the dust, something's wrong, and reforming health care delivery won't fix it. And it's not just the boys in Scouting who are out of shape. Scout leaders like to say, "Scouting rounds a boy out." Well, judging by the belt-lines of no few leaders, we're a little too round! And it was, to put it plainly, revolting, to visit the leaders' arbor and choke on all the cigarette smoke there. So, much a Scout's promise to keep himself "physically strong." If they keep on smoking they'll make themselves a physical wreck, and it doesn't do me any good to be around their "exhaust."

All this is not to say that health care delivery couldn't and shouldn't be improved. But I, for one, would much prefer all the concern to be directed where it could do the most immediate good. If we all improved our health, health care would be a lot less on our minds. From the perspective of faith, well, believing what St. Paul said about our bodies being God's temple (1Corinthians 3.16-17; 6.19-20), tells me that all the abuse and neglect of Americans' bodies is an affront to God. Not that Congress would concern itself with honoring God as an incentive to encourage Americans to reform our lives, rather than waiting for our leaders to reform a system that isn't the real problem.

Enough of this, I going for a jog.