A presidential candidate is finally talking about exercise in the context of reforming the broken American “health” care system.
At the Republican debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy called on the health insurance industry to prioritize preventative medicine over high-dollar procedures that are only sought after disease has already taken hold.
“They’ll pay for anything like feeding tubes, doctors to be pill pushers,” Ramaswamy said, but not for “the procedures that can actually make these patients better.”
“Here’s the answer,” Ramaswamy added. “We need to start having diverse insurance options in a competitive marketplace that cover actual health, preventative medicine, diet, exercise, lifestyle, and otherwise.”
“We don’t have a health care system in this country. We have a sick care system,” Ramaswamy explained.
He’s right. If Americans are at all curious why health care has remained a huge issue in each recent presidential election, look no further than our existing level of baseline health. U.S. life expectancy has essentially flatlined as 6 in 10 American adults suffer from at least one chronic disease. Four in 10 suffer from two, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nearly 42 percent of American adults, meanwhile, are categorically obese and can expect their lifetime health expenditures to cost about double those of non-obese Americans.
US life expectancy in 2022 is at levels not seen since 2001 largely because of drug overdoses and chronic illness. Suicides also just hit an all time high with a
