Monday, August 01, 2005

An Interesting, but Almost Certainly Bad Idea

I was watching TV this morning as I vainly attempted to do some crunches. Normally I do around 300+ crunches. Last night made it a lost cause. My wife asked for some help for something at 2:30 AM and here I was at 6:30 AM having failed to get up at 5:15 AM when I had planned so I can get back into exercising. My trials and tribulations of getting back into shape after my wife's pregnancy and my daughter's birth are a different entry for another time.

What I was watching though was the news. CNN was running a piece on the fact that medical insurance might not be able to cover the costs of dialysis due to the rising number of people that are overwight and becoming diabetic.

On the one hand, this enrages me. If people need medical procedures of some kind, they damned well better be able to get it. On the first pass, I'm a supporter of some sort of national health care...but I worry that the American tendency to over bureaucratize will kill it or make it much worse than the HMOs. We tend to take a good thing and sap the life out of it by adding layer upon layer of - *wiggles fingers* - oversight.

On the other hand, damnit, a lot of these people who are so fscking fat are doing it to themselves. They are taking no personal responsibility for taking care of the problem. I have friends and members of my family that are like that. These are people that I adore and love, but make no attempt to take care of themselves, then they rage that they're so fat. Damnit, if you're going to do that and make the rest of us suffer and pay for your stupidity, then you're going to have to make up more of the costs than normal. Perhaps if we had a Dr able to prescribe exercise and create some sort of a paper trail to prove that the person is not doing it, that the amount they have to pay is increased.

The problem with this, and the gripping hand here, is that I can see how fscked up this one could end up as well. It'd be sooooo damned easy to get this screwy as well as the HMO system already is. IDK. I just want people to just try to take care of themselves. It sickens me how damned fat and unhealthy people are here in the States these days.


No comments: