What’s Really The Problem?

Like many of you I’ve been hearing a lot about the health care debate and it got me thinking. Now I know there are many sides to the problem but I think the one question we have to ask ourselves is “What’s really the problem?” When I think about it I realize that 32% of people in the U.S. are obese and obesity leads to cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and type 2 diabetes. So I ask you is the problem with the health care system or is it in our food supply and our health & nutrition education?

That is an oversimplification of the problem but if you think of any problem/issue as a building with pillars/supports. If you want to demolish the house you could just blow up the foundation and that would take care of the your problem. The same is true for fixing the root cause for a problem. Fix the root cause and all your other related problems will disappear. You can also remove several of the supports and accomplish the same goal but it may not be as clean of a demolition and you may still have standing parts of the structure. This usually happens when we fix issues not realizing (not not willing to realize) they are part of the same problem.

Fixing the root cause is always the best solution but there are a couple of issues:
1) You have to understand the problem enough to find the true root cause
2) It can be impractical/impossible at times to change the root cause
3) It takes a long time to change the root cause and you need a temporary solution in the mean time.

Back to our health care question:
1) Do we understand the problem enough? I would say not really. The food supply/nutrition education is just one aspect of the root cause. We would have to ask deeper questions like why is our food supply the way it is and why we don’t have better nutrition education.
2)Is it impractical or impossible to fix the root cause? My personal feeling is that there is no problem that is impossible but some that might be impractical so that’s when we get to the 3rd point
3) Changing the food supply and education system would take a long time so as a temporary fix we could give everyone health care which is the solution being prosed.

Unfortunately what usually happens when we put in a temporary fix is that we don’t “see” the problem so it’s out of sight out of mind. Moral of the story, always try to fix the main problem the first time.