The very first thing to recognize about a nation that is insistent that it is the greatest nation in the world is that, in the sure recognition that America is without a doubt the wealthiest nation in the world, to be truly great signifies that the people that make up this land ought to be the healthiest, beyond question, of any other nation, without exception, whatsoever. That is to say, those who are unhealthy, or even worse, those who have died before their time, are the same ones who are not experiencing how great and how rich this nation is; so, a fair review of this nation would be to ascertain how healthy Americans really are.
In truth, America’s physical health is abysmal when compared to other Western and developed nations, in which we find, as reported by anh-usa.org, that it had the worst chronic illness score out of 50 countries so analyzed, despite America spending more money on health care than any of these other 50 countries on a per capita basis. Look, the bottom line is that Americans, in aggregate, aren’t healthy, and the money so being devoted to health care is quite obviously structured in a way that it isn’t accomplishing what it should be accomplishing, which reflects that unless there are fundamental changes in how our health care is addressed, that America’s health isn’t going to change for the better, and may, as per its trendline, get even worse.
While it is true that good health necessitates many factors, the two most prominent ones come down to nutrition, that is, the food that we ingest, and the exercise that we do or do not accomplish. Indeed, those that eat food which has no nutritional value, and/or eat food that have additives that are known to be damaging to the body, are going to eventually suffer for the eating of those food items, which is why this nation needs to do a whole lot more to first make sure, that its most vulnerable people, which are our children, are eating a healthy diet, which can readily be augmented by this nation, through the provision of good nutritional food at school, and by providing guardrails for those that receive “food stamps” that the food choices that are available for them, are good nutritional choices.
So too, our health care institutions need to do a better job of forgoing the belief that a given pill is going to resolve issues, and concentrate more on the whole person, which means that patients need to comprehend better that they have agency in their own person, and part of achieving good health is the decisions that they make, day by day, and that while a pill may well have its place, the object of the exercise is less pharmaceuticals, and more of making the right decisions in the eating and exercising, which thus signifies that this nation needs to hold accountable all those that provide ultra processed foods that they are thereby required to expend more money and research in the development of modified processed foods which are better for the body, and not as harmful.
Where America goes from here really comes down to the urgency of the matter, which functionally means a top-down approach to these issues, and in fact, to acknowledge that the health of Americans should be a very great and critical national concern, which, if done right, will make Americans healthier and happier, and if not, won’t.