Families' health care worries top all other concerns...& without prevention it's going to get much worse

Americans' are increasingly concerned about health care costs, now way at the top of their worry list. As we keep failing to prevent the unhealthy behavior, which drives the vast majority of these costs, these costs & worries will mount. K-12 is the essential setting for us to start transforming our physical activity and nutrition habits. https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthPoll_US_020717/

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Is it a “Miracle Drug”?...if it Costs a Fortune and Creates Lifelong Dependency...&...Saggy Faces!?

[It’s been a while since our last blog post. A lot has happened since– including some “miracles” ! So we’re going to do two posts in a row…] Normally we should all be happy about miracle drugs... shouldn't we ? Yes, there is lots of upside from taking semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), tirzepatide (Montjaro)--and upcoming new, even-more-miraculous drugs TBD: losing huge amounts of weight quickly, a much lower risk of diabetes–and probably less heart disease and other chronic conditions as well. But what if the “miracle” requires: $200-300/week, with a lifetime cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars… a drug that you can never quit…because if you stop taking it, you gain back all the weight it helped you lose–not to mention the chronic diseases which the drugs kept at bay… and it leaves your face (and the rest of your skin?) sagging … (plus, it’s so new at such high dosages– who knows what happens after years of use…? ) No doubt, in spit...

It’s Come To This for Many of Our Teens: Radical Surgery and/or a Lifetime of Pharmaceuticals

The American Academy of Pediatrics just came out in favor of powerful prescription drugs (which must be taken lifelong to avoid weight regain & chronic disease) for adolescents--and potentially for pre-teens (ages 8-11)--with moderate to severe obesity. Bari atric surgery (permanently reengineering kids’ gastrointestinal systems) should also be considered for adolescents with severe obesity . (The Academy also recommends "nutrition support, physical activity, and behavioral therapy"--but as with so many other areas of US chronic disease management, we can see where default treatments are headed: drugs & surgical procedures.) Such radical treatment recommendations created the usual (and temporary and ineffectual) tsunami of news & social media shock and indignation. The decades-long performative reaction to the increasingly bad news on dangerous levels of early obesity–and now 1 in 3 teens with prediabetes, across ethnicities & income levels–is itself sicken...

Haven-Not: Silver-Bullet Health "Solution" Misfires

Can you have a better A-Team than this? Amazon, Chase & Berkshire Hathaway joint venturing via a new nonprofit, Haven, to finally solve our health care problems! While I was hopeful when this joint venture was announced several years ago, I was also deeply skeptical. Rather than addressing the root causes of health costs, such as inactivity and unhealthy nutrition, Haven tried to "develop new ways to improve access to primary care, simplify insurance coverage and make prescription drugs more affordable"--including by throwing a lot of "big data" tech innovations at these issues. While this approach was pitched as a breakthrough, it was more of a Disease Management 2.0--focusing on more cost-efficient "care," rather than less chronic conditions to begin with. The latter is the ultimate solution, but requires far more than blue-chip brands plus high-tech to resolve--and a lot more time. 2-3 years of effort just scratches the ...

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