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Monday, July 2, 2007
America’s poor diet: That’s sicko
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While the bylaws of the Band of Right-Wing Conspirators does not permit me to fork over hard currency that increases the wealth of propagandist filmmaker Michael Moore — so I will not see “Sicko” — the left and the disgruntled herald its arrival as a cure for cancer. With a limited opening, it drew $4.5 million in ticket sales over the weekend, finishing ninth.
Noting that the American health care system is dysfunctional, as some critics and professionals do, is the equivalent of noting that metro Atlanta is mired in gridlock. Where we diverge is in solutions.
It is admittedly a superficial observation, but a stroll through the streets of Havana and other parts of Cuba — one of the health care systems Michael Moore finds enchanting — reveals few people who look like Michael Moore. You’re more likely to see him at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Marietta or at a dollar store in rural Georgia.
We could make Georgians look like those in Havana — that is, reasonably fit with presumably fewer self-induced lifestyle diseases. But neither the Michael Moore’s of this world, nor the rest of us who start out less drawn to the British, Canadian or Cuban health care systems would consent to endure the Cuban model.
Southerners who grew up in the Stroke Belt — one of the 10 Southeastern states that are among the 11 in the country where stroke deaths exceed the national average by more than 10 percent — know that we were killing ourselves on fatback and cigarettes. Tops among the risk factors are poor eating habits and physical inactivity. The solution is not to be found just in medical care, as now structured or in the financing, as suggested by the Moore perspective, but in managing lifestyles.
Deaths from strokes are far higher in Cuba than in the United States. Other risk factors, such as diabetes, affect mortality rates.
Among men ages 35-74, it was 42 per 100,000 in the United States, and 96 in Cuba. Georgia in 2004, according to the Department of Human Resources, had a stroke death rate 21 percent higher than the national average, and among blacks it was higher still, 1.4 times higher.
Comparing the lifestyles and health care systems of the two countries, Michael Moore notwithstanding, and even with our lifestyle excesses, the place to be sick is here.
Combining the free market’s medical care innovation and invention with a totalitarian state’s ability to manage lifestyle would, no doubt, produce a remarkably healthier population. But that has to come from free-market solutions that, for example, give individuals financial incentive to take better care of themselves. And it comes from giving private health care providers a financial incentive to manage wellness, in addition to providing appropriate treatment when people get sick.
If it’s possible to bring that element of authority that keeps women from abusing their bodies with drugs and potato-chip diets while pregnant, the health of newborns could be improved immeasurably. Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate (5.6 per 1000 live births) than the United States’ (7.0), based on 2002 data. Combined with providing children the basic vaccinations and medical attention, as both Cuba and the United States do, the result would be a far healthier population.
Cuba rations basic foodstuff and induces people of all ages to walk by allowing them few alternatives. It does, too, put high priority on training doctors and other medical personnel. Cuba has increased the number of doctors from one for 1,393 people in 1970 to one for 159 people in 2005, reports Julie M. Feinsilver of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.
Walk through Five Points in downtown Atlanta or an all-you-can-eat buffet, and you realize that America’s plenty is part of its health care problem.
The solution is not socialized medicine. It’s to build incentives into this one so that we’re not killing ourselves, while insisting that somebody else pay whatever it costs to keep us from dying.
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Feel safer with surveillance cameras?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Discoveries over the weeked of two car bombs in London, followed by a firey attack on a Scottish airport, prompted U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to make the rounds of Sunday’s talk shows to reassure the country that the necessary precautions are being taken here.
“I think given what we know now, we’re comfortable that we’re at the right posture” said Chertoff. More air marshals will be added to overseas flights and security will be beefed up over the July 4th holiday “at various rail locations and other mass transit locations in cooperation with local authorities,’ he said. That’s not because of any specific threat, but because more people are travelling.
My favorite former Democrat, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Sunday advocated greater use surveillance cameras here. “The Brits have got something smart going on in England,” Lieberman said on ABC, “and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend.” That “something smart” is cameras all over London and in other major cities, he said.
“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely. And of course we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”
I’m curious here on two points. One is whether the weekend’s events in England and Scotland will affect anybody’s travel plans there or elsewhere — or raise concerns about attending events here that attract large crowds? For me, no.
The other is Lieberman’s “common sense” proposal on surveillance cameras. Frankly, monitoring cameras are by now so integrated into everyday life that I’d welcome them in most any public place where they’re used for security, as opposed to revenue-raising, which is done with traffic cameras.
Terrorists, especially those who turn autos into crude car bombs have so many opportunities, that it’s impossible to protect everything and everybody everywere. Cameras that are monitored may not prevent harm, but they do increase the chances of finding the bad guys, as was the case in England.
An anti-terrorism program that concentrates on border security and on matching arrival and departures for visa-holders — who can then be tracked down and deported — is a higher priority than screening fans at a baseball game or every container passing through the Port of Savannah.
