Affordable Health Care on Damn Near Every Corner--Even in the Middle of the Block , or on Roadsides

I’m SO sick and tired of politicians and “helpless victims of the middle class” wailing about affordable health care. If anything, there is an incredible breadth of health care availability in this country—go check your phone book’s yellow pages if you don’t believe me. You’d think that you can’t swing your arms in your own town without hitting a doctor’s office!

Accessing it is another matter, and one clearly taken care of by market economics: those who can pay, or pay for coverage, get in. The rest do without, or turn to Medicare.

There is a third option available: prevention. If you EAT and EXERCISE to maintain a healthy weight, blood pressure, and blood glucose level, and your blood and urine tests are in a normal range for nutrient content or excretion, you don’t really need to access health care unless there’s an obvious problem, or for ongoing monitoring.

The term “affordable health care” has become too synonymous with HMO plans and other low-fee insurance. Time and time again, the insurance industry has proven that the more access one has to doctors and hospitals, the more one uses them—and for quite trivial things. Some people think that having an HMO card allows them to go to the nearest hospital for every sniffle and cough that comes along.

Having a hospital or doctor’s office treat that sniffle or cough can be quite expensive, so it had better be a good one—persistent for longer than a couple of weeks, bloody, painful, or one of the “see a physician” symptoms that’s listed on the back of an OTC medication.

People tend to overuse health care because they don’t actually see a bill. They may see a statement of what the insurer was charged (usually astronomical amounts), and what the insurer paid for the treatment, but the patient himself never pays more than the allotted co-pay, which is peanuts. For the mere $5 or $10 co-pay, doctor’s offices and hospitals may as well have a turnstile on the front entrance, making the “access” problem more of a parking problem!

Affordable health care for those without access to insurance or the ability to pay cash (always the cheapest route) is called the grocery store, and there’s one on nearly every corner. By carefully choosing what you eat and how you eat it, you can prevent a whole lot of diseases from ever forming, so you no longer have to worry about insuring against them—for example, most cancers have already had their mystery solved as to cause and prevention; most rheumatic-related diseases can be controlled by NOT eating certain things and supplementing with others; diabetes can be controlled, reversed, and even prevented by a careful eating and supplementation plan; and the same can be said for heart disease and many other cardiac conditions. The best part is it’s all on the web for public viewing, and in the library for patron check-out. Access is free as long as you can get to the web or the library—for many, both are located in the same place.

As long as there is continuing access to HMOs and other cheap insurance, there will be no effort made to self-treat or take any preventative action. As long as the health care industry continues to create the illusion that $5-$10 will fix anything, that money won’t be spent in the produce aisle or on fish oil supplements. If you have your doubts about produce alone fighting disease, Yahoo Health once had an article on how leafy greens and crucifers protect against Alzheimer’s. Here's a book review where someone refers to the "a doctor a day keeps the apples away" mentality of today's health care system.

Other than negotiating and paying cash for services, prevention will always be the best measure—believe me, the money’s better spent in the produce aisle than in the doctor’s office and drug store. Your time is better spent behind a shopping cart choosing nutritious functional foods for you and your family, rather than cooped up in a waiting room full of coughing, sneezing, germ-and-virus-spreading sick people, then again at a pharmacy counter waiting area full of yet more sick people waiting for their miracle in a pill.

More days spent well and productive mean more days on the job, in the kitchen, at the wheel, and fewer sick days for the kids. More productivity may mean more money for some people (depending on job), while fewer sick days for kids mean more time in school learning, and more time playing and being active. Feeling well in general feels good, and makes you better able to fight off other problems, like depression and fatigue. Actually BEING well most of the time allows you to tinker with your health care options and choose a less-costly plan than the frequent-flyer-type HMOs, and allows you to avoid being a burden to the rest of us taxpayers by relying on Medicare and/or Medicaid for something entirely preventable.

Now I realize that produce isn’t going to fix things like broken bones, but it may keep you healthy enough (and alert enough) to spot and avoid the dangers that may break that bone in the first place—see how this works? You not only feed the body, you feed the mind too. Broken bones and unforeseen accidents are what insurance is REALLY for, not the occasional sniffle or cough. Ongoing monitoring of chronic conditions can easily be paid for with cash or a something other than an HMO plan—believe me, cash is much cheaper for this!

Now you know how to access affordable health care without actually seeing medical staff of any sort, or dealing with insurance hassles. Start in your grocery store with leafy greens, crucifers, and other fresh vegetables—eat them at least twice daily, either cooked separate or raw mixed in a salad. For the price of a package of hot dogs and a box of macaroni-n-cheese, you could have bought some disease-fighting broccoli, a bag of apples or oranges, or a bag of spring mix salad greens—how’s THAT for affordable health care? For even MORE affordable health care, start a garden--you can get more food from a cheaper source: seeds. The best part? You can grow only what you eat, and you don't have to pay for farm crop tending, pickers, shippers, warehouses, packaging, store refrigeration, store electricity, store displays, and store employees. There's no more middleman costs.

Now compare the cost of disease-fighting food to that box of mac-and-cheese or package of hot dogs--you can get seeds for chump change, and they're good for years (except pepper seeds). For about $1.99 (usually less--much less if you buy them marked down), you can get maybe 25 seeds (or more) per packet, and can grow 25 heads of broccoli, or 25 squash plants, or 25 heads of lettuce, or 25 carrots...or just grow a few, and save the rest of the seeds for next year. Can mac-and-cheese or hot dogs do that?

Let's use broccoli as an example: around here, it goes on sale 2/$4.00. Broccoli seeds, even at $1.99 a packet, breaks down the cost of broccoli to .08 each, instead of the store-bought $2.00 each. See how much you're paying the middleman? That's just for broccoli! Too bad you can't plant macaroni or hot dogs, huh?

We don’t need more access to health insurance—we need to make better choices about where we spend food dollars, and what foods we feed our families. Information about what foods are the most nutritious, go to the web and look up “super foods”, “functional foods”, and “food as medicine.” If you don’t have web access, then go to the library and start looking in the indexes of health books for these same terms.

Quite literally, affordable health care is on nearly every corner (or even in your own yard if you choose to garden). Changing your family’s eating habits by changing the foods they eat will save you lots of money on health care insurance premiums, and give you money to put to better use—college funds, retirement, a house down payment, or just more vegetables and leafy greens. Changing diet can also mean the difference between NEEDING and WANTING health insurance.

Resources:
Eating for your disease
Supplement look-up
Super Foods

Prior articles on using food as medicine:
The Scoop on Longer and Healthier Living
The Prescription Drug Cost Armament
Produce--A Necessary Cost
A Big Waste of Organic Dollars
“Intelligent” Nutrition