The health care system & you

The world is fucked, and this time around, you are almost certainly to blame.

About six months ago, I made the decision to improve my life; I started a regular workout regimen. I spend anywhere from 8-12 hours every day working on computers, and my extremely busy, sedentary lifestyle was eroding my health. I was overweight, but worse, my doctor was starting to see an unhealthy trend in some blood work from my physicals. A few years prior to this, I had undergone a period of bad health related to stress that ultimately affected my liver, and over time, my liver has shown no improvement.

I was supposed to begin a prescription course of therapy. I asked my physician to hold off on this long enough for me to try healing myself through changes in lifestyle. I committed to an exercise program and to making better choices with my eating habits.

The changes were profound:

1. Within the first seven days, I almost completely stopped snoring (three years earlier, I had a sleep study done to determine if I had sleep apnea).
2. Within two weeks, I stopped taking antacids, and I've only taken them once since then.
3. Within three months, I was down 35 pounds.
4. Within four months, at my next physical, I had lost 45 pounds of fat, put on roughly 10 pounds of muscle and, most important of all, for the first time in more than three years, my liver enzymes were completely normal.

Since then, I've started a second workout program to complement the first, and my progress has continued as expected. I still have room to improve myself, but these decisions I've made and my commitment to myself have paid off, and I'm confident they will continue to pay off long into the future.

I'm not relating this story out of pride; this is an anonymous blog, and I don't particularly care whether people know who's writing this or not. I'm writing this because I came to realize something important as my health started to improve.

The more I do to improve myself, the better off everyone else is.

If I cared as much about my health five years ago as I do today, I could have saved myself a considerable amount of money in health care deductibles, and I would not have contributed to my fellow insurance carriers' higher premiums.

As a society, we spend so much time complaining about the state of our medical care, yet so little time doing what we're able to do on a personal level to make the situation better. Not counting those who suffer from congenital problems or health issues heavily influenced by genetics, the other 80% of us who choose to be unhealthy make the health care situation worse for everyone. The problem is no different in countries where health care is nationalized; simply substitute "taxes/contributions" for "insurance premiums."

I didn't choose to work on my weight and ultimately my health because I was unhappy with myself. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I wasn't lacking in confidence in the least! I enjoy my work a great deal, I'm surrounded by some pretty fantastic people and I'm married to the most amazing of them. I've always considered myself to be very lucky and blessed, and my decision to live healthier is my attempt to enjoy my life as long as possible. Do I feel better about how I look, and will I feel even better in the future? Of course! But this is a result of my decisions, not the motivation behind them.

My decision was purely health-driven, and as a result, your insurance premiums or national health care contributions are less likely to go up. As a result, one more hospital bed will remain available for someone who truly needs it. As a result, we will have that much more legitimate ground to insist on a more fair, balanced medical industry.

Until we as a society take responsibility for our health at an individual level, we have little room to complain about how private companies are profiting off our bad decisions or how much of our tax money is being wasted by medicine. I realize issues within the health care industry are more complicated than I'm making them out to be here, but I fully believe the biggest impact we can have on our situation is within our control.

Stop being a part of the problem. Your life will be better for your better choices, and everyone around you will benefit as well.

P.S. My wife wants to fuck more often. Can you say everyone wins?