Jun 23, 2009

Health Assurance

I graduated from college in 1973 and left home shortly after. I had been a sickly kid with several hospitalizations during childhood, including a near-fatal condition at 14. So, as I left my family care, my mother worried constantly about my lack of health insurance. Like most people in their “invincible twenties,” I paid no attention to such worries.

By the time I reached my thirties, I had settled into what has become a lifetime of self-employment. I’ve never had employee-based health insurance, and have never made enough money to justify the expense of getting my own. I’m happy to say that, except for periodic adventures in dentistry, I’ve never missed it.

I have always recognized, however, that I must take full responsibility for my own health. If the medical system would not insure necessary care in the future, I must do whatever I can to assure good health without it.

This meant entering in to a lifelong course in health promotion: learning about my body and its unique strengths and weaknesses, keeping a constant (and ever skeptical) eye on the field of alternative medicine, and practicing ways to move toward better health. It’s meant approaching diet as a long-range, personal chemistry experiment: eat some of this, pay attention to how the body reacts, and settle on future intake based on the results. And it’s meant honoring the power of human consciousness to affect the body, for better or worse.

As the continuing farce of “health reform” unfolds, it seems likely that the overfed and well-insured will not be upsetting their comfy status quo to include the rest of us. Though I know this may sound callous to those who are now ill and in desperate need of decent care, I urge everybody to stop looking to America’s healthcare system for help of any sort. The system is bankrupt in every sense of the word.

They not only refuse to insure your access to healthcare, they have shown little understanding of the basics of health assurance. They are better at waging war on various diseases than promoting good health.

American, heal thyself.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth