Health Care on the Brain

However you feel about the Health Care Reform, I guarantee we can agree on one thing. People want to save money. Or do they? MSNBC reports that medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for a person who is obese compared to a person of normal weight.

"Overall obesity-related health spending reaches $147 billion, double what it
was nearly a decade ago, says the study published....by the journal of health
Affairs.

"Don't blame things like stomach-stapling for all those extra bills.
They instead reflect the costs of treating diabetes, heart disease and other
ailments far more common for the overweight, concluded the study by government
scientists and the nonprofit research group RTI International."

Sound convincing? Maybe. Maybe not. This was an article published in the Summer of 2009, so fairly recent, yet the study was done by government scientists and a nonprofit research group. Can we believe it? I believed it enough to keep looking, and you can too.

Imagine this: your grandparent is being treated for a relatively small handful of age-progressing ailments including adult-onset diabetes (which is now referred to as type 2 diabetes due the the increasing number of non-adults who are affected by it). Yet at the same time, your child is being treated for the same life-shortening ailments. How often does this happen? Enough to say that America has an obesity crisis and it affects EVERYONE.*

****This continues my topic of Health Care Monies, and brings up another- of children, which I will discuss more at a later date.

The NewYork Daily News in 2004 reported:

"It's dead wrong to write off weight problems as somebody else's personal
problem. We are all paying the epidemic's costs. More than 100,000
stomach-reduction operations take place annually, with insurance
companies-meaning all policyholders-under intense pressure to pick up the
tab."

And while I'm not going to walk up and blame someone for my continually increasing insurance premiums, I can take control and learn how to eat healthier, live healthier, and encourage others to do the same. We're all in this together aren't we?