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Health care fear mongering

DCblogger's picture
Submitted by DCblogger on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 11:09pm
Departments: 
Department of How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
Thread: 
Disinformation
Tags: 
japan
fearmongering
single payer
HR 676
Medicare for All
health care reform
Paul Hsieh

How do we know that we are making progress? Op-eds that demonize single payer. They would not place these articles if they didn't think that they needed them.

Paul Hsieh has a fear mongering article in the Christian Science Monitor. Do we all understand why the Christian Science Monitor is not a good source on anything connected to health care?

Sedalia, Colo. - Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further "reeducation" and their communities subject to stiff fines.

Is this some nightmarish dystopia?

No, this is contemporary Japan.

The Japanese government argues that it must regulate citizens' lifestyles because it is paying their health costs. This highlights one of the greatly underappreciated dangers of "universal healthcare." Any government that attempts to guarantee healthcare must also control its costs. The inevitable next step will be to seek to control citizens' health and their behavior. Hence, Americans should beware that if we adopt universal healthcare, we also risk creating a "nanny state on steroids" antithetical to core American principles.

I don't know what system Japan has, but I don't think they have a Canadian style Medicare for All. I also would like a second opinion on his allegations. Do we have any readers familiar with the Japanese health care system?

Moreover the nanny state he describes could easily by instituted by employers and health insurance parasites under our current system, especially if Sanjay Gupta is confirmed as Surgen General.

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Submitted by hipparchia on

they have non-profit social insurance [similar to france, it looks like]:

People are assigned a health insurer according to their employment situation. Those who are employed at a company or office are insured by the Social Insurance System (SIS). This system is funded by the employers (who pay varyingly from 50 to 80% of the cost) and by premiums paid by the employees. Everyone else (the unemployed, elderly, and self-employed, including lawyers, doctors, etc.) is insured through the National Health Insurance (NHI) system. The NHI system is funded by the government and the employed members of the system.

and heavy duty price controls:

This is how Japan keeps cost so low. The Japanese Health Ministry tightly controls the price of health care down to the smallest detail. Every two years, the health care industry and the health ministry negotiate a fixed price for every procedure and every drug.

That helps keep premiums to around $280 a month for the average Japanese family, a lot less than Americans pay. And Japan's employers pick up at least half of that. If you lose your job, you keep your health insurance.

and yeah, it looks like they're a tad zealous:

Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.

Those exceeding government limits - 33 1/2 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks - and suffering from a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.

Stephanie's picture
Submitted by Stephanie on

I remember when BHO chastised people for eating leftover chicken for breakfast -- which I truly don't understand -- what's the difference between eating leftover chicken legs and eating chicken embryos for breakfast -- and who was he to question? Everyone can't afford the Whole Foods. (and leftover pizza is great in my opinion -- protein, carbs...)

So I've been wondering about how single payer -- or some other universal health care -- might get passed under Obama. We can already presume that he will support the most watered-down coverage that bi-partisanship will support.

But what kind of strings might be attached?

Just cuz I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

Submitted by hipparchia on

obama and all the very serious people who want to bring us "reform" while keeping the insurance companies are pushing very hard on "preventive" measures to control costs.

and yes, it looks very much like their idea of preventive measures could include requiring your doctor [or even your employer] to measure your waistline. insurance companies and employers are already experimenting with paying people extra to join health clubs or quit smoking. worse, i've read that some of them are toying with the idea of fining you if you smoke or weigh too much.

but it's a completely separate issue from single payer.

pizza for breakfast has always been one of my favorites.

Submitted by hipparchia on

they can make them a requirement for any damn program they want to put into place. in fact, many many people who don't care at all about any kind of reform want to institute such 'preventive measures'.

japan has gone off the deep end a bit, but canada and the europeans aren't like this. single payer works just fine at controlling costs without such puritanical measures.

Stephanie's picture
Submitted by Stephanie on

For explaining my concern better than I did!!

zuzu's picture
Submitted by zuzu on

One of the biggest scaremongers out there re the Obesity Crisis™. He's more than eager to use sensationalism (blaming working mothers for fat kids, for example, before backing off that claim) or simply to treat fat people as if they're idiots who can't possibly know they're fat unless their doctors note "obesity" on their charts. Which is a good way to get those same patients stigmatized and dropped by their insurance companies.

Even though there aren't really any reliable studies showing that fat, as an independent variable (separate from lifestyle, which may or may not make you fat) is the cause of many of the ills it is blamed for. Indeed, the CDC has admitted it inflated its estimate of the number of deaths "caused" by obesity by at least 20%. At least -- possibly they quadrupled the risk, and conveniently left out the number of deaths from underweight.

Mind you, I don't think that Obama will be thinking seriously about this, given that a) he's picked Gupta; b) he's stated that gosh, if we just got obesity rates down to where they were in 1980, we'd save millions in health care costs! Now, if he adopts Michael Pollan's suggestions about food supply and takes on agribusiness and the food and beverage industry, and closes the grocery gap and makes health care available and affordable so people can get preventive care and discourages suburban sprawl and adopts school-nutrition guidelines that owe more to nutrition and less to what surplus agribusiness needs to dump somewhere and funds schools so that they can provide decent nutrition, physical activity classes, athletic teams and fields, and can stop selling junk food to raise money...

Then we still won't get to where we were in 1980. Why? Because the CDC went and lowered the BMI range for obesity in 1998, after twice revising the 1942 MetLife tables upward (including in 1983), thus raising the rates of obesity overnight:

Citing work by CDC scientists who dissented from the agency's original
obesity report, CCF pointed out that the CDC study relied on a Body
Mass Index (BMI) measure to determine whether to place persons in the
"obese" category or the "overweight" category. The BMI measure
considers only a person's height and weight and does not take into
account frame size, body fat percentage, or muscle mass.

Thus, as the Associated Press reported on March 14, 2005, about half of
all current National Basketball Association players are overweight,
according to the BMI. Half of all National Football League players are
obese, and almost all of them are overweight.

Beginning in 1942, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company developed
height and weight tables for its insureds, taking into account gender
and frame size. The tables, widely used to identify "desirable" body
weight, were revised upwards in 1959 and 1983.

The federal government adopted the BMI in the 1990s as a guideline to
help doctors determine when to address medically their patients'
overweight or obese status. Initially, the BMI tables used by the
federal government labeled men as overweight if they scored 28 or
above, and women at 27 and above. In 1998, the National Institutes of
Health lowered the overweight score to 25 for both men and women.

Under the 1999 Metropolitan Life tables, a 5'3" woman with a large
frame and a weight of 151 pounds was not considered overweight. Under
the revised BMI, however, she has a BMI score of 27, solidly in the overweight column.

Millions Suddenly Became Obese

The impact of the BMI revision was to classify an additional 30 million persons as overweight. As Rick Berman, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution
columnist, noted on February 23, 2005, "One night in 1998, 30 million
Americans went to bed a 'normal' weight and woke up the next morning as
'overweight.' It wasn't due to midnight snacking. It was the result of
a grand redefinition, which vastly expanded the potential market for prescription diet pills and landed the likes of Will Smith, Pierce
Brosnan, Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant, and President Bush in the 'overweight'
category."

As much as those insurance tables were awful, they at least recognized that people of the same height weren't always of the same build. BMI doesn't do that -- and why should it, it's meant to measure across populations, not between individuals -- and because of this CDC classification, we now have a lot of pearl-clutching about obesity.

And note the bit about diet pills -- think it's any coincidence that the market for diet drugs skyrocketed after 1998? Suddenly, perfectly normal people had a medical condition that had to be treated by hook or by crook, and the weight-loss industry was there to fund the research and offer profitable solutions. And the FDA wasn't too stringent about safety requirements for diet drugs, nor did they express the same concern about abuse of these drugs by teenagers that they did with, say, Plan B.

DCblogger's picture
Submitted by DCblogger on

for you excellent quick work
well, as I point out, the same nanny system could be imposed by our present health insurance parasites.

Submitted by hipparchia on

i was reading about japan's system earlier this week, so i had some idea of what to look for when i went googling. i hadn't heard about the waistline law though. eek.

Realist's picture
Submitted by Realist on

He opposes the decriminalization of marijuana. This means he has no problem using the force of law to compel others to live the way he thinks they should. I would not be at all surprised to see him support punitive measures for people who don't eat correctly ("correctly" defined as "how Sanjay thinks you should eat") or weigh too much.

Nobody's saying smoking weed is good for you, but the solution isn't throwing weed smokers in jail. Would you be more worried if you found out your child was smoking weed or if you found out they were in jail?

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