In an insightful reaction to President Obama’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress, noted author Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) said something very provocative on the pages of the New York Times. Unlike South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, he didn’t accuse the president of lying. But he did make pretty clear that the health care debate thus far has ignored a very significant part of the problem: an acknowledgment that our transformation into a fast food nation is playing a huge role in making health care more costly and less accessible for all Americans.
In his Op-ed titled “Big Food vs. Big Insurance“, he writes:
Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.
He’s got a very compelling point, and it becomes even more compelling if you follow the “environmental costs” thread that he mentions only in passing.
Much of federal food policy is all about subsidies for corn, both as a feed crop for fatty meats raised under inhumane conditions on “factory farms” and for use in the ubiquitous sweetener high-fructose corn syrup found in calorie-laden soda and other processed foods throughout the supermarket. Most of the corn grown in this country requires intensive application of nutrient-rich fertilizers, especially those with nitrogen. A lot of the fertilizer gets dumped into rivers either through excess application onto the fields or through the mishandling of manure from the animals who eat all that corn without fully digesting the nutrients.
The water pollution problems caused by our heavily-subsidized fertilizer- intensive agriculture only serve to exacerbate our reliance on cheap and unhealthy food. The result are seasonal “dead zones“: areas in polluted waterbodies like the Gulf of Mexico where algae blooms fed by the fertilizer runoff deplete waters of oxygen that fish need to live. So to grow corn to fuel the increasing consumption of unhealthy process foods and soda related to the explosion of costly and increasingly-common health problems like Type 2 diabetes, we’re using fertilizers that destroy the capacity of fisheries to provide alternative sources of much healthier nutrition. A vicious cycle if ever there was one.
Self-defeating food policies that poison and destroy fisheries aren’t the only link to rising health care costs. As CLF reported in our “Conservation Matters” article on mercury pollution, “there is a high correlation between children with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and other neurological disorders and mothers who have ingested high amounts of methylmercury from poisoned fish and water.” To prevent these costly, life-long health conditions Northeastern states warn pregnant women and young children not to eat freshwater fish from the over “10,000 lakes, ponds, and reservoirs, as well as more than 46,000 miles of river deemed too toxic for fish consumption.” The pollution comes from coal-fired power plants whose owners refuse to sacrifice a small part of their enormous profits to install readily-available mercury pollution controls. CLF is continuing to fight for tougher mercury standards in hopes that New England’s freshwater fisheries–a historical source of great sustenance for our region’s people–will once again provide safe, nutritious food rather than potential health hazards.
There’s no doubt that health insurance reform is desperately needed, but to succeed in controlling costs and making us healthier it must accompanied by reforms to our food and environmental policies.
Barry
The article makes a good point, but the politics of dealing with it seem so difficult.. How is it possible to stand up to the fat-food interests when key Senators represent corn belt states etc? A tax on sugared soft drinks? Anyone proposing that risks being driven out of office by the relentless anti-tax rhetoric on all the right-wing media, especially talk radio.
Similarly, health care costs are driven up by costs associated with children that parents (or a parent) had not wanted, and cannot afford to take care of. But who will politically take on the issue of reproductive freedom in face of the religous zealots determined to keep sex education out, hide the birth control, and force women to continue unwanted pregnancies. Of course there are also environmental consequences to our rapidly growing population.
Similarly, health care costs are driven up by a litigous society that results in not only expensive lawsuits, but unnecessary defensive medicine. Surely a system that remediates claims more sesnsibly is possible, but who will take on the trial lawyers, at least on the Democratic side, as they contribute so much to that party.
It seems to me our political system is broken when it comes to fixing such problems. I hope I am wrong.
Luca Penne
It simply is not true that lawsuits and defensive medicine account for a significant part of our health care costs. TOGETHER these account for far less than one percent of those costs. Trial lawyers aren’t the issue–high physician fees and overblown hospital costs are a much, much larger part of the problem. Unwanted children? I doubt that this is a real factor. We’ve got to get real and face up to the genuine costs of health care and stop politicizing non-political issues.
Seth Kaplan
Richard Steeves, Chairman of the Connecticut Energy Conservation Management Board, likes to adapt one of Pollan’s key phrases this way: “Use less energy, mostly renewable.”
Words to live by.
Frida
These are all very good points — and urgent issues — but Pollan’s Times piece argued that we need look to big insurance to take on big food. As if insurance companies don’t already have incentives to lower costs to protect their profits, Pollan argued that health care reform should ensure that for-profit big insurance stays the main player. This is not only naive (or just sad) but insane. Or it’s an undisclosed lobbying effort: Journalist Russell Mokhiber discovered that on June 4 Pollan led a panel at the annual convention of the health insurance industry lobby America’s Health Insurance Plans. That appearance, for which was presumably paid, is not acknowledged on Pollan’s own web site.
Yeti+
The major problem with our current practice of tying health care coverage to the job takes the paitent out of the loop and transfers control of health care to those primarily motivated by profit.
The major problem with Obamacare is that it will transfer control to those primarily motivated by power.
Freemen beware. There are only two kinds of Democrats – those who would be masters and those who would be slaves.
Joe waiter
I haven’t heard many people discussing the effect of fraudulent malpractice lawsuits on the price of insurance for the doctors. This drives up the price of OUR health-care. Or how we pay $50 for a bandaid or how hospitals rape self pay patients. Change starts with us, not them.
Sheldon D. Ruda
Mr. Pollan: Beware of the sin of parochialism. (Evaluating something on the basis of how well it attacks a problem–as seen by the speaker)
True, Pres. Obama’s proposals do not address the problems that Mr. Pollan deals with in his books. (Am reading his In Defense of Food, now.) This does not necessarily mean that they are bad. Pres. Obama was attacking different issues. (Besides, his wife–undoubtedly with his assent–began to attack Mr. Pollan’s “devils” when she started the garden at the White House.)
P. Obama’s health care proposals, good or bad (and I happen to think that they are excellent), stand on their own merit independent.of how they stand on the food v. nutrient issues of Mr. Pollen (& vice versa).
Don
Ross Lewis
Here are some other important things to think of.
Everyone having healthcare is best.
Some people not having healthcare while others do is not bad, but less better.
The cost oh health insurance is contingent upon the costs of providing that healthcare.
The cost of this new bill represents the cost of the unhealthy aspects of our exsistance.
People want health care reform to cost less.
It can only cost what it needs to
If every one single individual human made a commitment to do one thing that would be less detrimental to their health then we would be healthier and in turn the cost would be less. Health care can not regenerate what has been lost it can only stop or slow the process of destruction.
Wether or not people want to pay for this health care reform to me seems unfathomable logically. The only people who control the cost is us, all of us, it can only cost less when we make it. I would pay any cost to help the people, it would be morally wrong of me not to if i helped cause this hurt, and i admit that i did. Can you admit it, and will you pay for it. you can, you don’t want to, but that doesn’t mean you cant.
If we don’t pay the high prices of today, then we will ultimately pay a higher one tomorrow.
buck
the world is coming to an end…
Jovan Ryerson
The Federal Gov’t is killin’ me. Why can’t the whole population get that the health care bill will raise taxes for everybody and even create brand new ones for us all?
Stanley Espailat
My personal opinion this whole health argement even the bill is a fraud. Because Obama healthcare bill has many unwanted articles the bill doesn’t target the major issue. Fast-food, high food prices, money hungry insurance companys contributed to this problem. The bill doesn’t regulate arguiculture and the bad practices farmers use with fertlizers and chemicals. congress and the house fail to rise up and argue about the real issues on healthcare. This whole healthcare bill will be another formed of taxtation for middle and working class.
Plastic Surgeon Liposuction
GREAT SCOTT! You must be exhausted. Thank you for this interesting post.