Misunderstanding Healthcare

May the Blue Bird of Paradise
provide you with many years of outstanding healthcare. 

Depending on whether you believe the president—and if you believe polls that’s less than half of us, or you believe the Republicans in Congress—and according to those same polls that’s one in five unless you live in the district represented by that particular member of Congress, the government website for national healthcare is working—or at least somewhat better than when they rolled it out two months ago. There are still a lot of skeptics who think that even though a person can find and purchase insurance on the website, the policy may not provide coverage for prescriptions or surgery when the patient needs them. My skepticism lies with those skeptics who think the purpose of healthcare is to provide pills and hospitals.

These birds managed to navigate the website.

Don’t get me wrong, I value pills and hospitals as much as the next person. I don’t want to take them, and I’d rather not have to go there, but when I am ill or injured that won’t stop me from using them. Like most kids, I grew up without any concerns for my health. We ran around outside, went places on our bikes, and, except for the time I caught my pants cuff going over a picket fence and ended up with a corkscrew fracture that required setting and a cast, avoided hospitals. My parents provided well-balanced meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables. The names Blue Cross and Blue Shield were familiar in our house, but they were hospital plans, not health plans.

For a time I took up running. Besides the five-mile runs on some weekends, and the marathon I ran to test my mettle, I got up and went running as a way of starting each day for about twenty years. When I started slipping on the ice I moved indoors. Eventually, I got off the track and treadmill and onto the elliptical. A little over a year ago I cut back from five days to three, and substituted yoga on alternate days. My over-weight relatives and friends consider this behavior weird, but then I’m not the one with early onset diabetes or trouble walking.

Their healthcare plan has definitely gone to the birds.

While I wouldn’t pretend to be the model of health, or assume anyone else should eat or exercise as I do to stay healthy, my point is to distinguish health from treatment. Only a small percentage of society is born with chronic disabilities, and that number is shrinking. Yet, most of the one in five dollars spent to make Americans healthy is for some kind of treatment.

So, no matter whether you believe the president, your Republican representative, or the guy down the street, no matter what the website does or doesn’t do, unless the policy includes provisions for nutritionally balanced meals and an exercise facility—gym, tennis court or golf course, it’s probably only providing treatment. But then, as a true blue American, it is your right to remain a couch potato, eat as much fatty food as you desire, and expect some over-worked emergency room physician to save your life when you enter the hospital with your first coronary. Now, that’s healthcare.