“These expenditures [for chronic health condition care for seniors] totaled $362 billion and averaged $12,566 for every older adult [in 2006}… It is naïve to expect that Medicare can handle these costs, particularly considering the working population who contribute to Medicare is decreasing.” NASM Senior Fitness Specialist, p. 2
When my kids were in middle school and maybe even high school, they occasionally had to do an assignment for English called something like “Talking to the Text.” I remember it because they hated doing it, which meant it was torture for me, too. That said, I talk to texts all the time myself. In the case of the above passage from my current text, “talking” is a euphemism for “screaming in furious anger.”
I know. I’m taking a fitness course, not economics or politics or sociology. The people who wrote it are working in a context in which we are supposed to justify why personal training is beneficial to society and cost-effective. It is beyond the scope of my course to discuss why the currents of our society actively promote individual solutions to systemic problems, why the pressures of capitalism create unhealthy patterns in the first place, and how to do anything besides accept the system as it is and try to work within it. Still, I found myself yelling.
Health care doesn’t have to cost as much as it does. Ask literally any other developed country in the world. Good health should not be the purview of the privileged few, but the expected birthright of all humans. It should be easier to eat healthy food than junk food, to get exercise than to be sedentary, to relax than to stress out.
We need a paradigm shift. This one is killing us.
