Low-fat diets and exercise are pointless for losing weight, warns surgical expert Solve this problem by exercising your push back gene, and push back from the table sooner. More below the fold, including how to fix the health care insurance system. OK, it not genetic after all. "Low fat diets and exercise are pointless for those wanting to lose weight and obese people should simply eat less, a former shadow health minister told the House of Lords yesterday." Yep. It really is that simple. Exercise has the benefit of increasing your fitness, and your daily caloric burn which means you will need to eat less but not as much less as if you were not exercising. But the problem is calories. Also, fats, and proteins seem to make us feel fuller for longer, so they are a benefit in letting us reduce our calorie intake without feeling as hungry. It is also a canard to worry about Body Mass Index, and even "obesity." The real problem is too much fat, and too little fitness. In the Lottery of Life, we all know that fat people die sooner, except they don't . . . The medical community continues to focus on the obese as a costly negative, but the real concern is for the underweight, that is where the real health problems, and costs lie. The problem is our culture glorifies thin. So physicians are loath to discuss thin as a problem. Indeed, there are entirely too many obese who are seriously unfit, and they do create a costly medical problem. Of course if we were sane and place the primary responsibility for the payment of the medical conditions on the individual and not on employers and government, we would likely see the incentive of much higher insurance help limit this issue. Our betters in their infinite wisdom, have decided it is better for the state to pay the lions share, so even here in the US all levels of government pay for about 55% - 60% of all medical costs, and employers pick up about 30% leaving perhaps 15% private pay. We should change this to create a 100% private pay system, reliant primarily on Health Care Savings accounts, and the insurance the individual deems best. Government to the extent necessary can drop cash subsidies into the HSA's of the poor allowing them to purchase insurance and pay for services from that pool of money. None of this would be particularly difficult to do, but it would remove a huge avenue of graft, and corruption for the politicians, and bureaucrats, and this is unacceptable to them. Much of the bad science here is driven by the government being the payor for such a huge cohort of the population. We need to reduce that, and move people to a more independent mode of insurance, and medical payments. Another benefit will be the rapid lowering of medical prices, and the increasing pressure for real price transparency. There are reasons that the price of insurance paid medical care has increased dramatically, while the price of uninsured medical care has dropped, even medical care highly reliant on technology. LASIK As a Model for Health Care Reform - AEI "Market-based health care solutions are discussed in this Reason.tv video, based on what works quite well in the other five-sixths of the U.S. economy, where choice and competition lead to increases in quality and lower prices over time (electronics, automobiles, clothing, etc.). In one of the few truly market-based areas of health care that is actually consumer-driven (since it’s not covered by insurance and patients make direct cash payments) – LASIK eye surgery – there have been market-driven improvements in quality and dramatic reductions in cost, which could be a model for health care reform for other procedures.
Specific recommendations from Reason include: 1. Change the tax code. 2. Scale back state regulations and create a national market for health insurance. 3. Promote Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). MP: The chart above shows the 42% reduction in LASIK surgery between 1991 and 2009 (in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars)." Just so! If we wait we just miss more of the benefit, and shift more wealth to physicians out of our pockets. It really is up to you, wealthy or poor?
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