Between 1985 and 2000, the retail price of carbonated soft drinks rose by 20%, the prices of fats and oils by 35%, and those of sugars and sweets by 46%, as compared with a 118% increase in the retail price of fresh fruits and vegetables. …
Healthy, low-calorie foods cost more money and take more effort to prepare than processed, high-calorie foods. … Drewnowski estimated that a calorie-dense diet cost $3.52 a day compared with $36.32 a day for a low-calorie diet.
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When political and economic thinking became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, governments began to promote the idea that individuals were personally responsible for their health and should practice healthy lifestyles. A large segment of the population – mainly the educated and economically secure – welcomed these ideas. Feeling personally responsible for one’s health and practicing healthy lifestyles gives one the reassuring illusion of control. In particular, it’s a good distraction from the things that are beyond individual control, like salmonella in our peanut butter and the superbug MRSA at the gym. Read more
The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years. Read more
Here’s an interesting observation on the associations between musical instruments and social class. It’s from Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (emphasis and paragraph breaks added). There seems no place where hierarchical status-orderings aren’t discoverable. Take musical instruments. In a symphony orchestra the customary ranking of sections recognizes the difficulty and… Read more
From Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land: As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders. Relative indifference to wealth for its own… Read more
In his recent book on the financial crisis, John Lanchester mentions China’s unprecedented economic growth, which has created a “hugely expanding, highly consuming new middle class.” China’s [middle class] went from 174 million to 806 million, arguably the greatest economic achievement anywhere on Earth, ever. Chinese personal income grew by 6.6 percent a year from… Read more
Source: The Pilver Marc Ambinder has written a terrific article on obesity for The Atlantic. It’s comprehensive and insightful, both objective and personal. Ambinder himself suffered from obesity until a year ago, when he went from 235 to 150 pounds following bariatric surgery. The operation immediately improved his severe diabetes, and within months it relieved… Read more
Source: VotingFemale The opponents of health care reform lost the battle, but their war is not over. They argue, among other things, that the legislation amounts to socialism. When Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican Party, was asked if the health care plan represented socialism, he replied: “Yes. Next question.” In a recent Bloomberg National… Read more
Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”–of knowledge, of language, of attitude–to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people.
David Remnick’s new book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offers a quotation from The Bridge, which will be released tomorrow. Here is Obama’s reply when asked about the racial component of opposition to his presidency, including the reaction of the Tea Party supporters. Read more
Source: Teabonics When President Obama filled out his census form last week, he had to decide how to answer the race question. Even though his selection was only half true, he settled on the “Black, African American, or Negro” option. I noticed Facebook friends struggling with the same issue: If my father’s parents were born… Read more
Source: University of Virginia There have been nasty and violent responses to the passage of health care: Spitting on members of congress; chanting the “N” word at black congressmen on their way to vote; images of Nancy Pelosi surrounded by flames; death threats to members of Congress; Republican congressmen on the House floor cheering protesters… Read more
This is a local story for me: I pass this school frequently and have a niece and nephew who are graduates. It’s also a heartening one that counters some of the more depressing stories from the right end of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, this event seems to have received only local media coverage. The following… Read more
Source: Babble At a London seminar promoting American donor eggs for infertile British women, a Virginia infertility clinic offered attendees the chance to win an American woman’s eggs. Also included was a free in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle (a $23,000 value). The reaction, on both sides of the Atlantic, was mixed. According to The Washington… Read more
Source: Torontoist Constance A. Nathanson is an American historian of public health. She recently wrote an essay for The Lancet that explains why the public option is such a hot button – one that threatens to confront us with the underlying issue of health inequality. Early in the twentieth century, industrialized nations – with the… Read more
If statistical analysis shows conclusively that morbidity and mortality are directly related to income, what should a (presumably) enlightened government do with this information? One approach, consistently popular throughout history, is to blame the victims. In the Reagan/Thatcher years we saw an enthusiastic promotion of taking personal responsibility for one’s health. Personal responsibility follows naturally… Read more
Whenever there are disparities in income, inequities in health are inevitable. Today in the US, the gap between the rich and the poor is much greater than in most other highly developed democratic countries, and so are the health inequities. The roots of this inequality lie deep in the histories of developed nations. When children… Read more
During last year’s immersion in matters of health care, the US system was frequently compared to those of Canada, the UK, Japan, Australia, and Western European countries. Whether the comparison involved infant mortality, lifespan, or comprehensive coverage, the US fell far behind these other developed countries. The lack of universal coverage is perhaps the most… Read more
Part two of this post discussed disillusion with the idea of progress and a yearning for a higher purpose. How did we end up in this unsatisfactory situation and is there hope that things will change for the better? I recently read Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism. I was impressed with the clarity with which he… Read more
Part one of this post noted Paul Krugman’s take on the health care legislative process and the political practice of soliciting money in exchange for votes. Beneath these surface issues, however, there’s a deeper sense of disillusion with 20th century progress and with a lack of purpose to modern life. We may tinker with a… Read more
Source: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan The typical diet in Afghanistan is bread with a watery soup, some onions, a potato, perhaps a bone and some yogurt or oil. One third of the population is hungry or in danger of starving – humanitarian groups call this being “food insecure.” Another third of the… Read more
Raphael, The School of Athens Source: Paula Muhlestein I loved this post from the Widener Law Health Law Institute blog. It’s both wise and entertaining. Here are a few excerpts, but I recommend reading the whole post. Read more
Source: Banning and Low Excellent op-ed piece on health care reform in the Sunday Times. It’s by Roger Cohen, who recently returned from a trip to Germany. Europeans readily acknowledge universal health coverage as a basic right in a civilized society. Americans have great difficulty with this concept. The current health care debate in the… Read more
Image: Jordan Maxwell We all know why Liberals want to make health care available for all Americans. Liberals have bleeding hearts and a proclivity for redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. They would agree with Peter Montague that “the growing gap between rich and poor has not been ordained by extraterrestrial beings. It… Read more
Source: Amazon A country’s health care system reflects its character, ethics, and cultural values. Politics, medicine, and economics may shape the particular design of a system, but when it comes to deciding who will be included, that’s a moral question. The United States is the only industrialized democracy that does not guarantee health care to… Read more
There’s an unfortunate parallel between the politics of climate change and the politics of US health care reform. They differ in scale — global vs. domestic. But consider this: Who suffers the most from the lack of universal health care in the US? The poor and unemployed. Who will suffer the most from climate change?… Read more
Source: Nick Brandt Click photo for larger view. My favorite conservative columnist, David Brooks, responded to Barack Obama’s press conference on health care this week with a piece that characterizes rising costs as a “stampede of big ugly rhinos. They are trampling your crops, stomping on your children’s play areas and spoiling your hunting grounds.”… Read more
A child’s health depends on the child’s environment. Children who live in poor households are more likely to die, more likely to suffer the irreversible effects of poor nutrition, and less likely to benefit from a health-care system if one is available. It’s estimated that 9.2 million children under the age of five die each… Read more
Source: Courier Times Online Scott Harrington is a professor at Wharton and “adjunct scholar” at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Two weeks ago he wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that gave the standard Republican argument against a public option: It will inevitably lead to a single-payer system. “Private health plans have a strong… Read more
