Health Care Reform

By Michael Applebaum. MD, JD, FCLM

Enough is enough.

I just finished watching the third Presidential Candidates’ Debate and still wonder what they are talking about re: health care.

Actually, I think I know what they are talking about.  They are talking about (around) the issue, not to it.

Both candidates have plans to “fix” health care.  Each has similar components: lower drug costs, more access, more health benefits, more coverage, i.e., more money.

Both candidates are wrong.

Quite possibly it is not the health care system that needs to be fixed.  Quite possibly it is the participants in the health care system that need to be fixed.

Citizens are bankrupting the system through a stubborn resistance to physical training and controlled eating.  We have seen the enemy and it is us.

Overfat, underactive people are draining the system of vital resources that can be applied to real health problems or other vital areas.  Self-created poor protoplasm is stretch-marking the system beyond its fiscal limits, stealing care from others.

I can hear the “Gimme, gimme, gimme” demands for drugs: statins, blood pressure and diabetes meds, in the same zombie-like voices as the “Gimme, gimme, gimme” demands for food at the dinner table.

People are becoming human kobe beefs.  Just as kobe beef's ratio of marbled fat to meat is higher by far (as much as 10 times higher) than any other beef, so have we developed the highest human fat to meat ratio on the planet.  Proud of yourself?  Probably.

You’re probably also proud of the highest human fat to meat ratio highest human fat to meat ratio kobe calves you are raising at home.  You know, the rotund statistics waiting to happen: tomorrows diabetic-stroked-out-heart attacked-blind-renal shutdowned-socially-ostracized-hypertensive-amputees.  They are easy to recognize.  They are the fat kids that call you “Mommy” or “Daddy.”

Don’t let anybody tell you different.  You are good parents giving your child every opportunity to develop the bad diseases that lesser parents don’t allow their children to develop.

Instead of watching Kobe’s problems on TV, get your kobe butt off the couch and do something having nothing to do with consumption.  While you're at it, take the kids, too.

I am old enough to remember John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country.”

What you can do is get fit.  You’ll do something for yourself, your kids, your country and the rest of us.