HEALTH CARE

I’ve been trying to decide if I am healthy or not. Of course, I’ve been blind since the third grade, but it hasn’t really hampered me a lot. That’s because I wear glasses. Part of the health care industry I suppose. I have high blood pressure, but with the little pills I can still run for over an hour and climb to Hanging Lake. My left thumb aches now when I play the mandolin or guitar too much. But I always considered Ibuprofen the breakfast of champions.

So, if I am coping and working and being productive, am I healthy? I certainly don’t feel sick or diseased. So with all the discussion going on about fixing our health care system, I have been trying to decide if I need it. Just exactly what is the health care system?

So I Googled the definition and found several different ones, but most of them sounded something like this: the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain. Having looked this up before, I wasn’t too surprised. The problem with this definition is that it hardly anyone I know qualifies. I mean, is near- sightedness a disease? How about guitar induced inflammation? It hurts.

So if health is defined more or less as the absence of disease, what then is disease? So I looked that up. “Disease is a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.” In other words, disease is the state of being unhealthy.

I find it odd that a country would spend such a huge amount of money on an industry that cannot be defined accept in terms of itself. No one seems to know what the health care industry is for.

Is it to keep us from dying? That isn’t possible. The earth is a finite resource and cannot support an infinite number of living things of any kind. Is the health care system about preventing disease? That too is impossible. For one thing death comes at the hand of disease and since death comes to all men we cannot prevent disease.

More significantly not all diseases are alike. Infectious diseases are probably a part of biology. From the earliest imagine life form, living things have required a surface to live on. When surface area became crowded the next most logical step was to simply live on top of some other living thing. And living things living on living things is a perfect description of infectious disease. It’s just biology. But there are other kinds of disease such as physiological diseases. These are diseases that are the result of mechanical type malfunctions in machinery, whether due to use or simply being constructed incorrectly by the blind forces of development. In these types of disease cells may go awry, systems may malfunction, parts may not fit, or accidents happen that misalign pieces.

Perhaps the reform we need is to define what the Health Care Industry really is. How can we tell if something is broke if we don’t know what it does? How can we know how to fix something if we don’t know what it does? Or maybe some people really don’t care what it is supposed to do. Maybe there are other reasons to dabble with a third of the nation’s gross national product.