Skip to main content

America the Beautiful...The Sequel

The rarely sung second verse of America The Beautiful contains these words:


       America!  America!

       God mend thine every flaw,

       Confirm thy soul in self-control,

       Thy liberty in law!


At a time when criticisms of US history are condemned as un-American, it’s worth listening to this.  


As we noted in a previous blog post, the Founding Fathers expected a number of flaws in our country--and created a constitutional process to address them. 


Often, this process requires prolonged citizen pressure to get political leaders to address a major neglected issue, such as gender inequality, voting issues or racism...or a multidecade child health epidemic and a crushingly expensive health system--both fueled by government mismanagement.  


Unfortunately, our advocacy experience so far reinforces this. 


Why are political leaders so resistant to change?  Sure, they've got a lot on their plate. But how about prioritizing the big issues that matter deeply to the public?


Powerful special interests gain from the status quo, as reflected in their lobbying and campaign donations.  After first ignoring the mounting pressure, they start to give lip service to change--while avoiding actually doing anything significant about it.  Then when it looks like you are making progress, they start to fight back--ideally for them, behind the scenes out of public view; or with deceptive public messaging; because what they are doing is not in the public interest.


As Healthy Future US makes progress, we will need to keep raising our game--because those benefiting from the current sorry state of affairs in health have a lot to lose, and will keep fighting harder.  


Thankfully, in America we have the freedom to work to help “mend our flaws”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
4 comments
Read more

Urban food myth #1: it costs more to eat healthy than to eat fast food

I get so tired of hearing this: "It costs less to buy a burger from McDonald's that to eat healthy food from the supermarket." "Low-income families just buy processed food, they don't cook their own food anymore." That always sounded questionable.  Here is a study showing in great detail that fast food is much more expensive than healthy food bought at the supermarket . Also, it turns out that the vast majority of meals eaten by low-income families are prepared at home: Blisard N, Stewart H. How low-income households allocate their food budget relative to the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan. Economic research report, United States. Washington, DC: Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2006;20. What is true is that buying healthy vs. unhealthy foods can cost $1.50/person/day more, at retail prices.  However, when health cost consequences are factored in, unhealthy foods cost twice as much .
2 comments
Read more

Health "benefits"?: Oh well...

We meet them all the time:  people trapped in their job, in order to keep their health benefits.   We need a study on the negative impact on entrepreneurship and the economy from people health-handcuffed to their current jobs.  From my limited anecdoctal evidence, the costs are astronomical.   Two-income families have made the labor market much more geographically immobile, and now health insurance is exacerbating the job-jail. Modern Healthcare just summarized results of a new Peterson-Kaiser study  on employer health insurance and the actual cost to employee families, of the combination of employee share of premiums plus employee out-of-pocket health costs. Employers keep shifting more and more health costs to employees. The only good news is that employers are still paying a (fast-shrinking) % of premiums--so health costs are still cheaper than being self-employed.  [Also, if we end up back in the uncovered pre-existing conditions bad-...
1 comment
Read more