Health Care and Diabetes

This just in The Number of Type Two Diabetes Cases is Soaring.

The primary cause of type two diabetes is Americans are failing to draw the connection between their diet and long term health cause.

A primary reason for our failure to draw this connection is that our health care system shields people from the consequences of their actions.

Type Two Diabetes is the one disease that the Medical Savings and Loan could really can really help reduce. This system asks that its policy holders self-fund their health care.

The system confronts policy holders on a regular basis with the consequences of lifestyle choices.

I have not been playing up the central character in the Medical Savings and Loan. The program creates a new position called the Health Care Advocate. The primary charge of the advocate is to educate participants on expected health care expenses.

It is a financial position, not a medical position, the advocate will use the language of money to explain basic things like if you get this preventive care, your health expenses will be like x. If you don't get preventive care, your expenses will look like y ... and you can't afford y.

I repeat, the HCA is a financial position, not a medical position.

The goal of the program is to engage participants in a multi-dimensional discussion of their health.

Insurance and these crazy health care exchanges treat people as if they live one dimensional lives (with speculators trading individual risks on the exchange).

The Medical Savings and Loan sees advantage of people owning their own risk as it forces people to take a multi-dimensional view of their health.

Here is an example of the type of financial questions I find beneficial. Share-A-Sale has a new advertiser called 360 Cooking. This company makes expensive stainless steel pots designed for a waterless cooking technique. These expensive pots have a multi-layered construction to evenly distribute heat. Their claim is that their design lets people cook with no oil and less water.

This increases the nutritional content of food and improves taste. They claim waterless cooking reduces energy consumption.

The company's claims may prove bogus. The pots are way outside my price range, and I am sure I could do "waterless" cooking with other pots.

However, I found that the expensives pots started an interesting line of inquiry. Could waterless cooking reduce my consumption of fat? Would it increase my consumption of veggies? What impact would such a decision have on my long term health?

Consulting a doctor about buying a pot would be ludicrous.

However, if we developed a system where people owned their own health care risk, then we would see people engaging in this type of decision making on a regular basis. It is through the repetition of this type of conversation that leads to quality life style choices.

By creating a system where people own their own risks and are directly confronted by these risks in a conversation with a health care advocate would create a paradigm where people engage in this type of discussion.

A system where traders speculate on people's health risk in a centralized exchange will result in conversations, but not conversations that help people.