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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Could I add them? Sure, but I was being sarcastic, and making a simple point. That point is, NO ONE BUT YOU controls: what goes in your shopping cart, what goes in your mouth, and whether you decide to go for a walk or watch more Oprah, Keeping Up with The Kardashians, etc.

Futhermore more, people (especially "liberals") keep complaining about the cost of healthcare, but have ZERO interest in discussing the cost of bad personal health i.e., diet, lifestyle, etc.) Expecting the healthcare system to make mostly preventable disease cost-free is ridiculously. Sure, that doesn't cover everything. I get that. But if we stopped wasting soooooooo much money on the preventables, we'd have plenty for the truly ill.

Instead we blame the system.

p.s. When you look down and can't see your own "thing" when you pee, isn't that a red flag? Instead, we keep eating ice cream - it's our right, right? - and blame anything but ourselves. Again, ridiculous.

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Would you please not post rants on divisive topics to HN? That's effectively trolling and leads to the sort of low-rent flamewar we hope to avoid here.

Um. Sorry?

But at some point someone somewhere doesn't someone have to speak The Truth? We keep hearing how the cost of healthcare is the fault of X, Y and/or Z. That's a lie. It's #prolefeed.

How can we solve a problem when where not even looking in the right places for answers?

Speaking the truth is important. As with anything so important, there are concerns to be aware of. One is that most of us overestimate how much of the truth we possess. A second is that speaking the truth can do harm, e.g. when using it to blast people who don't yet see it—they necessarily become defensive and then the cause of truth is set back. A third is that truth has a lot of energy and if you drop it like a bomb on the playing field, you damage the space in which we're trying to explore the truth together.

The one who knows more has greater responsibility. Two unhelpful ways to speak the truth are to yell it out because it's frustrating to see something that other people don't, or to provoke people with it. The first is venting and the second is trolling, and both are incumbent on the truth-bearer to resist. If you do them, you discredit the truth you're trying to show.

Take this into account and there will be a bonus benefit, too: in cases where you don't really know as much of The Truth as you believe you do, you'll do less harm.

That point is, NO ONE BUT YOU controls: what goes in your shopping cart

Technically yes but in practice not really. Most people aren't professional nutritionists; they look to trusted authority figures for advice. And when the government says "most of your calories should come from carbs" and so on, people, not unreasonably, believe them.

I agree, they're listening to someone else, and not their own bodies. But that's like Oprah more than it's Uncle Sam. People hear what they want. And anyone who says "Eat whatever you want because your 'body type's doesn't matter."

Futhermore, at some point don't you look at your expanding waistline, look at a non expanding friend and ask "What's your diet and lifestyle like?" Or do you just blame the system?

No doubt it's tough. No doubt being mindful of what goes into your being - mind and body - is tough (#sarcasm). Why be your own (gate) keeper when you can just let loose and let someone else pick up the tab?

In any case, I do agree with you to some extent. So let's talk about that as part of the problem. But we don't. We blame the system yet refuse to talk about health. That's clearly not working.

Damn them LIBRULS!

Never mind that actual healthcare costs are more expensive than in other countries on a pill by pill and procedure by procedure basis.

Healthcare cost in the United States isn't about liberal or conservative or progressive or whatever label. Get over your tribal blame game.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/26/21-gr...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-costs-how-the-us-...

Yeah. Thanks. And nevermind that cost is a function of demand. It's simple...they cost more because they can. People's health is so f'ed they have no choice. Try this: look at the cost of those pills and then look at the p/c occurrence of the diseases they enable in that country? Again, go back to the pull quote from the OP.

Decrease demand (i.e., stop eating and lifestyle'ing in ways that are unhealthy) and prices will fall. But we refuse to prevent the preventable, and then complain about costs?

My point is simple. You can't talk responsibility about healthcare and costs without talking about personal health and personal responsibility for health. Health and healthiness drives healthcare cost.

People do the best they can with the level of awareness that's available to them.

You embarrass yourself by responding to parent's inane political jab. It's pure signalling, without any hint of substance to contradict.

But, if you insist on making a straw man out of it, as you have, the popular term seems to be 'lib-tard', to judge from my Very talkative coworker.

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