Op-Ed Contributor - Big Food vs. Big Insurance - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.
-
I'm learning more about diseases like diabetes and heart disease now, and in particular what I'm wondering about is: Is is diet or genetics that determines if you get these diseases or not. I searched in the New York Times for "fast food and cancer" and I found this op-ed piece to be interesting because of how it connects personal issues out to big societal ones. "According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat "preventable chronic diseases." Not all of these diseases are linked to diet - there's smoking, for instance - but many, if not most, of them are." Seventy-five percent of health care spending goes to things like heart disease and diabetes, which are preventable if we just had better diets!