On Saturday, I dropped by the farm in Lyme, NH, where I buy my raw milk. As the owner handed me a gallon jug, she immediately felt compelled to explain the fact that the container wasn’t cold. “I just milked her this morning,” she said. No need to apologize, I said. The fresher, the better.
Then I thought the time was opportune to tell her something I had been thinking about for a while–that her milk price of $3 a gallon was too low. “There are people out there getting $5, $6, even $7 a gallon,” I said. “You should think about raising your price.”
I thought she’d welcome an opening to increase her prices, but she didn’t. “Well, you know, I want to keep it affordable for the people around here,” she said. “I’m not looking to get rich from it. This is subsistence farming.”
I got to thinking about this farmer’s attitude as I read through the comments on my previous posting. Just beneath the surface of many of the comments is frustration over the fact that even though the best techniques for staying healthy are low in cost, we as a society push the high-cost approaches.
A big part of the problem is that health care is seen by the politicians and financial leaders as another industry. So coming up with a device that measures insulin levels a tad more accurately than competitors isn’t really any different than coming up with a chip in a computer that operates a tad faster than others out there—it’s a competitive advantage that can offer investment gains.
It’s interesting to view the reader comments at BusinessWeek.com about my article, “Animal Tags for People?”—probably a third of the individuals are gushing over the investment potential of the two companies I wrote about, Digital Angel and VeriChip. Threats to privacy? Discriminatory health care? Who cares. These stocks could be winners. (As it turned out, investors continue to be wary; Digital Angel’s stock was only up a bit more than 3% Friday after my article came out.)
As Mac and Dave Milano suggest, those who hold the system together don’t really even want to know about low-cost/no-cost techniques for staying healthy. (The real role for health insurance in our current system is to provide financial protection against a high-cost hospitalization from an accident or disease.) So most doctors can’t advise their patients about diet because they know little about nutrition, and they don’t want to know much more. Slate, which is supposed to be kind of edgy, published an article last month by an M.D. with the inviting title: “Dr. Shameless: Why I Take Handouts from Drug Companies”.
This physician says he discontinued taking direct handouts from drug companies, but instead of going a step further and exploring whether there might actually be alternatives to the Big Pharma habit, states:” I just don’t think that the financial hanky-panky between drug companies and doctors constitutes the central crisis in American medicine or, for that matter, the most corrosive aspect of the entire messy doctor-drug relationship. They need us; we need them. We do the studies they can’t do because they aren’t doctors. They invent the drugs that we can’t invent because we aren’t chemists. It’s pretty straightforward, really. A symbiosis.”
People like this doctor are going to help make their patients healthy? I don’t think so.
The major media are complicit in the whole charade. The NY Times column Steve Bemis alerts us to makes its case for improved agriculture practices on the basis of producing tastier food, not necessarily healthier food. I suspect the Times would have been much less interested in the argument for agricultural diversity if the thesis was good health–after all, who can prove more nutritious food makes people healthier, the editors would likely have asked, with derision.
Health care is one of our largest industries. There are too many jobs and too much profit at stake to make it do what it is supposed to do. We are on our own…for now.
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