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How bad can America’s health actually get? And what shall we do?
All kinds of ill health are steadily increasing, from age-adjusted obesity to autism and depression. Anxiety in young adults nearly doubled in the decade pre-pandemic. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes has risen dramatically. Deaths of despair have also risen. There seems to be no actionable plan, ready for implementation, to halt the rising tide of ill health. The numbers are steadily increasing adjusted for age, with some numbers rising faster in the young than in the old.
I find the willpower discussions to be missing the point. Unless there is a plan that we can implement in schools to significantly increase or teach willpower, then it hardly matters whether the will is relevant. The diseased from poor choices and the diseased from poor environment equally hurt the security of the nation, costing trillions from decreased productivity, decreased fertility, and healthcare expenditure. It is curious how much discourse in America is spent quibbling on issues that are so much less important than the health question. Health is something that directly impacts every aspect of the country, not the least of which is the plain happiness and fertility of citizens.
What I would like to see is a harm tax put in place that adds onto every unhealthy item the cost per item of its societal harm: the projected healthcare costs, the loss from intelligent citizens working for corporations that poison us, the projected loss of productivity. Now, this will always be an estimate, but so are many taxes. I think this would largely make sodas prohibitively expensive.
It's interesting lumping in type 1 with type 2 diabetes as one of those societal harms that members of society are potentially responsible for even though the best guesses at cause are genetic predisposition with some environmental factor triggering. If anything, the parents should be the ones to be bear the costs (and they do for the most part as with many other hereditary diseases). Why should general healthcare costs be counted as a societal harm? Those costs are typically borne by the same person who made the decision in the first place. Are people not allowed to make poor decisions and then reap the consequences? If the appeal is from the perspective of publicly covered healthcare costs, then that sounds like the mirror of right-wing economic critiques of those options warning that it justifies the state intervening in your personal life decisions to control those costs. Your productivity loss and what looks like opportunity-cost based taxes are indirect forms of the state deciding what a person should be doing with their life rather the tax bill instead of the more direct truncheon. I think Douglas Powers said it best.
Type 1 isn't autoimmune ?
Autoimmune is a description of a mechanism, not the description of the cause. Saying that a person's immune system attacked their vital organs does not explain why the thing happened. Holding society at large accountable would certainly be novel.
Type 1 is majority environmental: https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/54/suppl_2/S125/12859
It isn’t lifestyle related like Type 2, and nobody’s quite sure what the environmental triggers even are (except that they don’t seem to be present in less industrialized regions- for example, Karelians on the Finnish side of the border have 6x the incidence of those on the Russian side, despite similar diet and genetics…).
Holding society at large accountable actually seems pretty appropriate in this case.
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