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susanstinsonI had dinner with two very dear friends last night, J&V, who made five spice chicken and squid salad and baked a pumpkin full of raisins and spices. I brought them eggs and wine in the basket of my trike. It was so restorative and good to talk with them.
J gave me a copy of the new edition of Field Guide to the U.S. Economy, which he wrote and edited along with Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, Nancy Folbre, and the Center for Popular Economics (where I worked for many years).
I love this book, because it's so full of very easily accessible information about the US economy, designed to be of use to activists. (Plus, it's got cartoons. And charts.)
There's a book party at Food For Thought in Amherst this Thursday at 7. I'm going! And, wow, they've got a bunch of amazing events coming up there this fall. (E, an events programmer there, used to work for CPE, too.)
So, I opened it to the chapter on health, and saw that in 2003, half of all poor full-time workers lacked medical coverage. In 2002-2003, about a fifth of African Americans and a third of Hispanics lacked insurance, compared to 11% of whites. It's a situation that affects people's life expectancy very directly. And, in 2003, the poorest fift of earners spent 17% of their after tax income on medical care, but the top fifth paid only 3%.
Oh, it just goes on. In 2001, nearly 1.5 million individuals filed for bankruptcy. In approximately half of those cases, medically related bankruptcy expenses helped push debtors over the line. Three quarters of those filing for medically related bankruptcy had health insurance when illness or injury struck.
And, yeah, pharmaceuticals were the most profitable industry in the US between 1995 and 2003. 25% of their revenues went to marketing, advertising and administration, 18% to profits and only 11% for research and development of new drugs.
These are the kinds of numbers I always think of when people talk about fat and health. The US spends a greater share of its gross domestic product on health care than other industrialized countries, but, without single payer health care, it is spent in inefficient ways, from supporting mutlifple layers of bureacracy and overlap of resources to simply not providing a decent level of care to enormous numbers of people.
I wonder what would happen if the budget for "obesity education and prevention" (setting aside all of the issues around how "obesity" gets used as hate language to justify discrimination and social stigma) for five years was spent on something targetted at improving these conditions, maybe providing health insurance for those who can't afford it or subsidizing medicine. If someone tracked major markers of health as the result of the two efforts, I bet that addressing the economic issues would show much better results.
If this really were about health and living good long lives, it's just screamingly obvious to me that addressing issues of poverty and inequality would be a clear place to start.
J gave me a copy of the new edition of Field Guide to the U.S. Economy, which he wrote and edited along with Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, Nancy Folbre, and the Center for Popular Economics (where I worked for many years).
I love this book, because it's so full of very easily accessible information about the US economy, designed to be of use to activists. (Plus, it's got cartoons. And charts.)
There's a book party at Food For Thought in Amherst this Thursday at 7. I'm going! And, wow, they've got a bunch of amazing events coming up there this fall. (E, an events programmer there, used to work for CPE, too.)
So, I opened it to the chapter on health, and saw that in 2003, half of all poor full-time workers lacked medical coverage. In 2002-2003, about a fifth of African Americans and a third of Hispanics lacked insurance, compared to 11% of whites. It's a situation that affects people's life expectancy very directly. And, in 2003, the poorest fift of earners spent 17% of their after tax income on medical care, but the top fifth paid only 3%.
Oh, it just goes on. In 2001, nearly 1.5 million individuals filed for bankruptcy. In approximately half of those cases, medically related bankruptcy expenses helped push debtors over the line. Three quarters of those filing for medically related bankruptcy had health insurance when illness or injury struck.
And, yeah, pharmaceuticals were the most profitable industry in the US between 1995 and 2003. 25% of their revenues went to marketing, advertising and administration, 18% to profits and only 11% for research and development of new drugs.
These are the kinds of numbers I always think of when people talk about fat and health. The US spends a greater share of its gross domestic product on health care than other industrialized countries, but, without single payer health care, it is spent in inefficient ways, from supporting mutlifple layers of bureacracy and overlap of resources to simply not providing a decent level of care to enormous numbers of people.
I wonder what would happen if the budget for "obesity education and prevention" (setting aside all of the issues around how "obesity" gets used as hate language to justify discrimination and social stigma) for five years was spent on something targetted at improving these conditions, maybe providing health insurance for those who can't afford it or subsidizing medicine. If someone tracked major markers of health as the result of the two efforts, I bet that addressing the economic issues would show much better results.
If this really were about health and living good long lives, it's just screamingly obvious to me that addressing issues of poverty and inequality would be a clear place to start.