Health Issues
Health issues affect our current and future enjoyment of life and the survival of ourselves, and our decedents. Recently, this has been shown to be especially true with the whole world having struggled with the Covid-19 pandemic. Although we have struggled for a long time with the many problems resulting from the way we do and do not deal with our health, this pandemic has helped to highlight some of them. I will mention a few of these problems here and discuss more of them in the following sections.
With Human overpopulation and overcrowding, and with all our global travel we have created the perfect environment for the creation, mutation and spread of diseases. With over 8 billion of us in the world and with many of us packed too close together, we provide plenty of hosts for diseases to infect and for them to spread to. In addition, with all our global travel, a new disease or variant can be spread around the world before any of us knows that it even exists.
There are also a lot of us who are in poor health, which makes us more susceptible to becoming sick. Part of the problem stems from too many of us living in poverty, which makes it harder for us to get enough to eat or to get enough healthy food, and harder to get proper medical care. Too many of us also live with too much pollution, which can also weaken and sicken us. Even those of us who are well off enough to eat well, get good medical care, and live in less polluted areas may live an overly sedentary lifestyle with not enough exercise which can lead us to things like obesity and diabetes.
There is also a lot of health care disinformation and misinformation spreading around, which can lead us to avoid lifesaving vaccines and drugs. Although some of us can have a bad reaction to some vaccines and drugs, the CDC and FDA help to ensure that our vaccines and drugs are safe. Vaccines are especially important to help us prevent severe illness, to slow the spread of diseases and to reduce the creation of new variants. However, this only works if enough of us get the vaccines instead of falling for the disinformation and misinformation being spread by anti-vaccine advocates and charlatans.
One big issue is the skyrocketing costs for health care and health insurance. These costs can leave a lot of us unable to afford to pay for either health care or health insurance, so we do not get the health care that we need. Several factors have led to these rising costs. On the one hand, many of us are in poor health and an increasing percentage of us are older with more age-related illnesses. There are also more diseases due to things like pollution and overcrowding which require a lot of new treatments.
Rising health care costs have also led us to incur a lot more medical debt. Our debt then leads many of us to skimp on our medical treatment and other necessities which makes it harder for us to get healthy. It also means that doctors, hospitals and other medical professionals may not get paid. When too many patients are unable to pay their bills, these doctors, hospitals and other medical professionals will either need to raise their prices for other patients or risk bankruptcy themselves. This creates a feedback loop where rising prices means more patients cannot afford to pay and to even higher medical prices.
In addition, too many doctors, hospitals and other medical professionals are responsible for some excess medical costs. Part of this comes from them prescribing a lot of unnecessary treatments and surgeries. In some cases, patients insist on them, and in other cases, the medical professionals push them so they can make more money. We also have some medical professionals submitting fraudulent claims to bilk the insurance companies and the government.
In the following sections, I will discuss some more of our health-related issues and what I believe we need to do to ensure our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our descendants.
Disease -
Preventing Disease to improve our lives.
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