Last Friday the Tennessean posted an unsigned editorial excoriating the overweight. I refuse to link to the piece, but others have, so if you’d like to read it, feel free to follow the rabbit trail. The shortened version is that people are whining about how bad health care is, but a lot of their problem is caused by themselves because they are lazy and won’t exercise or stop pigging out.
And this right here is why Universal Health Care makes me break out in chills.
Civility exists in only the thinnest of veneers to begin with. Once people who are already stressed and oppressed by their bills and the lack of money to pay those bills start looking for someone to blame for their situation, that veneer vanishes entirely. It’s happened countless times throughout history. When Rome burned, the government looked for someone to blame and a new religion followed by slaves and foreigners seemed as good a target as any. Christians ended up as snack food for lions. Those who didn’t flee from their homes or die in the arena languished in prisons where they were tortured and starved. When Mary, Queen of Scots Tudor reigned over England she blamed her father’s Protestant religion for her parents’ divorce, her mother’s death and the general ill health of England’s economy. Protestants died by the thousands–until she died and her very Protestant half sister Elizabeth took over. During Elizabeth’s day in the sun it was the Catholic folk who hid or died.
There are many other examples throughout history–some overused, some underused–which show how a certain group has been made to blame and subsequently forced to pay for everyone’s problems.
That article in the Tennessean is not unlike the comments I’ve seen all over the internet, on TV talk shows and even dressed up in special reports on news programs. The Overweight are costing society bunches of money. They are only overweight because they can’t control themselves. They eat too much, exercise too little and suffer myriad health problems. In these before times, arguing over federalising health care, the discussions range from patronising to mean-spirited. The costs to others “because of lazy fat bastards” is hard to quantify in arguments padded with anecdata.
But I cannot see how a country where open hatred of the obese is already thriving plans to have Universal Health Care without creating a permanent outgroup of scapegoated overweight folks. I cannot see how the overweight will be allowed the same status of health care when everyone is paying for it. I can hear the arguments now–”Why should I, a healthy thin person, be forced to pay for that lazy fat lardbubble’s diabetes medicine?”
It already isn’t pretty out here for us fat folk, and I can only fear how much more ugly it will be when the rest of the world blames us for their financial woes.
Great post. Excellent points.
And yet they manage to provide universal health care without excoriating the overweight all over Europe. And when anyone, tubby or otherwise, gets diabetes over there, they can expect a better outcome (longer life, fewer complications, etc.) than a similar person could here. I’m just saying.
There are many cultural reasons that I think what works in Europe won’t work here, and vice versa.
This is just one of those…
Hmmm. I hate to paint a broad swipe across the entire overweight population (I am included in that population…I will add). I don’t think all overweight people overeat, don’t exercise etc. I’ve known MANY overweight women who ate healthy, exercised, and were still over the “normal” weight range. BUT (devil’s advocate) there are a lot of people who NEVER try to lose weight, NEVER try to make themselves healthier…whine when they get diabetes or heart disease, and even then refuse to take care of their weight/medical condition. I’ve seen it, In my own family , as well as everyday life. Unfortunately, all overweight people will be broadly painted as “lazy” due to the lazy ones. Same as the Poor, the minorities, the conservatives, etc, etc. Second verse, same as the first.
Well, Kat, Europeans engage in scapegoating just as much as we do here. Yet they seem not to feel that universal health care calls for scapegoats, since it works in a number of flavors and variants. I can’t quite grasp why USians can’t be just as clever and efficient, and I know we are no more prone to look for someone to blame than other cultures.
Oh, P.S. nerd to nerd, that’s Mary I or Mary Tudor or Bloody Mary you’re thinking of above, not Mary, Queen of Scots.
Some of us got overweight AFTER getting the yucky chronic disease that currently costs a lot to manage. Losing weight won’t get rid of my autoimmune disease: diabetes (type 1). It will help manage it better, yes. And yes, my medical care would cost slightly less. But… it’s still pretty expensive, period…. regardless of my weight or shape.
“And yet they manage to provide universal health care without excoriating the overweight all over Europe. “
Really? Don’t they take overweight kids away from their parents in Britain?
Do Europeans have secret or magical drugs they don’t share with us? Cheeky sods!
I knew that MQoS didn’t sound right. But then it felt right. I should have gone with my brain and not my fingertips….
Regardless, as Chance points out, there is quite a bit of excoriation of the overweight in countries with socialised medicine. Since I don’t live there and do live here I don’t see theirs as much, but I suspect people are the same the world over.
And in Europe they are more accustomed to socialised programs, having lived under one type or another of top-down governance for the majority of their histories.
In the United States with our culture of self-governance, which is as old as our (limited) national history we’ll have a much more difficult time adapting to socialised programs. The failures of Social Security are a good example thereof. It’s been misused and bankrupted for years.
Andrea,
Unfortunately you, like other overweight people, are going to find yourself increasingly defending your private life in public as people point fingers and claim that your weight is a result of your failings as a person. You can either stay silent and allow the misperception and misinformation to continue or you can violate your own right to privacy and confidential medical records (as you’ve done here) to defend yourself.
Imagine blaming people with multiple sex partners for the rise in health care costs correspondent to STDs, birth control and back strain. It could happen just as easily, but since the overweight present a much more readily-indentifiable target, they’re (we’re) gonna be the first to go down.
Interesting. I didn’t know I was violating my own privacy rights by stating that I’m a type 1 diabetic. It’s such a part of who I am. And it’s not like I signed up for this disease or did ANYTHING to get it… other than being genetically predisposed… and acquiring some kind of triggering infection that flipped the DNA switch. (The general public is so woefully ignorant about type 1 diabetes. Type 2 gets more press.)
I still go back to that post you wrote about how the problem isn’t the rise in health insurance costs or the fact that some have it and some don’t — but the cost of supplies, procedures, tests, services, and whatnot. Why are some so outrageously expensive and others not?
And… I guess that since I can afford the more expensive method of management, b/c I have insurance, I am privileged to have that method. If I couldn’t afford it, my doctor and I would have to make do. But what if I couldn’t even afford the minimum that it takes to manage this disease? Yikes! I’ve never pondered that before.
Anyway… I am grateful that I’m not in that situation. I need to count these blessings more often. And thank Him who grants them.
I didn’t know I was violating my own privacy rights by stating that I’m a type 1 diabetic.
Technically any time you share any information about your health concerns, whether it be a diagnosis, a medical treatment or a conversation with your doctor you are waiving your right to confidentiality with respect to that one facet of your health care.
Believe me, not a day goes by that I’m not grateful for having very good insurance right now. And not a day goes by that I don’t think about ways to improve the health coverage picture for everyone. Because it was not that long ago that I was very sick and very uninsured. I know how bad it is to hurt without relief. I have the souveneir of a slightly deformed left hand to always remind me of the cost of going without medical coverage and treatment.
I’m just very scared when I see the proposed remedies right now and then try to envision those ‘remedies’ enacted in this current culture.
Myrna: no, they just make sure that everyone gets good health education and has free, unhassled access to health care. Western Europe beats the US on pretty much any measure of health one cares to use. Higher life expectancy, better outcomes for heart disease and diabetes, lower infant mortality, whatever.
Kat: what failure of Social Security? You mean the fact that for decades Social Security revenues were taken to fund other things? The fact that when Al Gore suggested treating SS funds as a lock box he was laughed at? That’s not a failed program, that’s a murdered program. Big difference.
“what failure of Social Security? You mean the fact that for decades Social Security revenues were taken to fund other things? “
Well, it does show that we can’t trust gov’t with our money.
I understand your point, but you are saying that Social Security doesn’t count as a failure because of…the manner in which it failed? I’m not sure I understand; we gave our retirement money to politicians, they mishandled it… so, that doesn’t count as an example of politicians handling our health care? Nope, still not making any sense.
“Hate Bill” Favoritism
If “hate bill”-obsessed Congress can’t protect Christians from “gays” as much as it wants to protect “gays” from Christians, will Congress be surprised if it can’t protect itself from most everyone? If “hate bills” are forced on captive Americans, they’ll still find ways to sneakily continue to “plant” Biblical messages everywhere. By doing so they’ll hasten God’s judgment on their oppressors as revealed in Proverbs 19:1. (See related web items including “David Letterman’s Hate, Etc.,” “Separation of Raunch and State,” “Michael the Narc-Angel,” and “Bible Verses Obama Avoids.”) Since Congress can’t seem to legislate “morality,” it’s making up for it by legislating “immorality”!
Chance, I mean that legislators from the so-called “greatest generation” screwed their kids, the boomers, placing a dreadful burden on future generations. But they did it because it was nothing to them or their own generation of constituents. A universal health care system (which, sadly, we’re not going to have; none of the plans being discussed is for that) would benefit all generations and constituents alike, so there would be tremendous incentive for not looting those funds.