What's happening to us?

I guess crazy is in the eye of the beholder. Here are some numbers (all verifiable) that I find really crazy: our current health care (sick care) bill in the US is 2 Trillion $$ or 16% of the total Gross Domestic Product. By 2015, it will be minimally 4 Trillion $$ and 20% GDP. If you receive employer health benefits, the cost to your employer is currently rising at over twice the rate of inflation or 7.7% annually. Starbucks spends more on health insurance annually than it does on coffee. Many employers no longer offer health benefits, or offer them at a significant cost to the employee, and/or offer little if any raises in order to stay in business and pay insurance premiums. Companies that are self insured have successfully been able to restrict their employee's off time behavior because it is a risk to the bottom line. If you lose your health insurance or become one of the many woefully under-insured (25% of the US population is either uninsured or underinsured - this does not include those who are poor enough to qualify for medicade) then you may join the ranks of the newly bankrupt as 50% of all bankruptcy filings in the US are due to medical bills. And another one of my favorites is that medical intervention is now the third leading cause of death in the US (this according to the Journal of the American Medical Association Dec 2002.). We got to this situation one person at a time. One person who ate too many McD's and not enough fruit and vegetable, one person at a time who smoked, one person who sat instead of moved. The only way to reverse the trend is one person at a time gettin' crazy for health! Just imagine what we could do with all that money if it wasn't paying medical bills!!

I think that we are all so health crazy now due to the amount of processed foods, junk foods, TV ads, video games, etc. that are now on the market. When we all grew up those things didn't control your life. Now a days parents think that a chicken sandwich from Mc Donalds or Jack in the Box is healthy, I mean it's chicken, so it must be good. I see this in my own family and then the parent’s wonder why their kids are over weight. If parents would raise their children as their parents raised them, we would most likely have a much healthier society.