When It Comes to Policymaking...

America is sick. We live lifestyles that make us sick. Had we paid attention to what would prevent such illnesses we wouldn’t see things like obesity rising to the extent that it has thus far. We need treatment and we need it quickly. The health care system, from my limited knowledge of it, seems to work on a fix-it mentality. So, if its not broke...don’t fix it. If it is broke, well then fix it really quickly before people die and there is major controversy.

Policy can dictate that money is invested in prevention but the question is: how fruitful is that investment? Prevention is up to individuals. It’s up to society. It’s fine and dandy to have charts and seminars and ad campaigns, but if the individual refuses to utilize the knowledge and continues to live lifestyles that are unhealthy and ultimately requires treatment, we better have someone on the other side preparing the dosages. There’s only so much policy can do to enforce certain lifestyles and when it does, there are often cries of injustice and infringement on consumer independence. Just like forest fires, only you can prevent illness. Unfortunately we’re choosing to dig ourselves into an early grave.

I’m honestly not sure what the answer is, but that discrepancy does seem very large. Ideally it would be great for it to be an equal split, but I don’t see that being realistic seeing how we have more diseases and illness then we know how to cure let alone understand how to prevent from occurring in the first place. There’s so much that science hasn’t answered yet and so many challenges that come with prevention. In light of how many people are sick, it’s hard to encourage that policy cut down on curing those people to invest in telling people not to do things that, trends have shown, they’ll probably just do anyway. This is a crude argument but it’s the essence of the issue. Unless we come up with more effective ways for prevention to work on a societal level, there are just too many dangerously ill people out there to shift gears right now. We obviously need a new method of prevention, not just more money.