There is a story about a village near a river. One day, a villager saw a baby floating down the river. He ran to save the baby, only to find another floating down the river. The villagers came to help, when another and yet another baby came. Soon, all the villagers were occupied with saving the babies that were floating down river toward their village. Nobody thought to look upstream to find out where the babies where coming from, or why.
Nobody doubts that healthcare in America needs reform. Medical practice inefficiencies, rising insurance costs, over priced drugs, and a lack of access to quality care for all, are the babies floating toward us. Politics exponentially adds to the problem. Meanwhile, Americans enslaved, if not crushed, by healthcare costs often fail to see the snake in this box of pain, which is a broken food industry.
While everyone wants the system fixed, nobody wants to pay for it. Everyone wants better healthcare; unfortunately, few care enough about how such a broken system affects their neighbors. Politicians fear loss of campaign funding, from corporations potentially affected by healthcare reform legislation, while they attempt to make their constituents believe that they are working for the people’s best interests.
A look upstream would reveal unique funding sources for healthcare reform as well as a remodeling of the broken food industry. Taxing processed foods, laced with corn syrup, salt, and unhealthy fats, could yield new revenue as it forces a change to healthier ingredients in the nation's diet. Concurrently, outdated farm subsudies could be shifted to encourage local production of organic fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products and to also support healthy school lunches.
By taxing corporate farm operations, those using genetically modified seed that rely on excessive use of pesticides and herbicides, healthcare reform would be funded and healthy farming practices encouraged. This could remedy the agricultural disaster perpetrated on America’s farmers when post WWII chemical producers, seeking new markets for the war’s chemical surpluses, fathered post war farming techniques that are destroying the land and life throughout America’s heartlands today.
By taxing feedlot operations, which use inhumane and unhealthy production methods for beef, pork and poultry, additional new revenue could be generated. Such meats, grown with excessive chemicals and drugs, create health issues, which drive the need for more healthcare services. This would be yet another win-win situation.
Such a remodeling of the food industry would cause America’s fast food giants, one of the unhealthiest sectors of the food industry, to raise prices. Thus, choosing unhealthy foods, and creating a drain on the American healthcare system, would be a more obvious and conscious decision. It would also help curb America's addiction to sugar, salt and fat that has caused American's to be the fattest people in the world.
These actions could strike at the heart of our health and healthcare issues if Washington could just stop drowning in politics and look upstream.
