GOP Senator blames Americans for most of their health problems
GOP Senator blames Americans for most of their health problems
Republican Sen. Roger Marshall said "70 percent of your health outcomes are determined by you" as his party prepares to gut health care protections.
Summary
Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) claimed that "70 percent" of health outcomes depend on individual choices, blaming Americans for poor health while Republicans plan to cut healthcare protections.
Marshall, a former OBGYN and leader of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Caucus, emphasizes nutrition and preventative care but ignores systemic issues like poverty and racism.
Proposals from the Trump administration and GOP Congress may weaken Affordable Care Act (ACA) protections, reduce access to care, and increase uninsured rates.
Marshall has also supported physician-owned hospitals, benefiting financially from the industry.
The Millionaire Senator Roger Marshall, that pleaded no contest to reckless driving when he attempted to run over his neighbor? The same Roger Marshall that tried to stop the impeachment of Trump for extorting a foreign country's leader to interfere in the US election or he would withhold aid approved by Congress? The same shit heel who was caught violating insider trading reporting, opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest, contested the 2020 election without evidence, and promoted conspiracy theories during the peak of the COVID pandemic?
The world would be a safer place without Roger Marshall, and he's welcome to surrender his Medicare for life granted to all congresspersons because any health issues he or his dependents have are clearly self-inflicted as he says about others.
I agree with him to an extent. But people can’t make right choices if they don’t know what are the right choices. As with most American ills, it’s an education problem, which is systemic and not individual. So I’d lower his number to 50% now that we all have access to the internet and can research what a good diet looks like.
There is still a lot of disagreement about what a good diet looks like. The government propaganda on behalf of the agri-industrial complex that was the food pyramid is still around out there, for one.
It also takes time many people don't seem to have to eat well. Ready-to-eat food is near universally bad for you, tho it is at least labeled as such if you read nutrition labels or visit the nutritional information page of your favorite chain.
I'm all for better information resources with the best information we do have about diet and any other health maintenance, to reduce "self-inflicted" health conditions. But, I'm against reducing funding for treatment of people's current health conditions, whatever the cause.
There’s actually not that much disagreement. There’s disagreement about whether certain foods cause or increase the likelihood of diseases, like red meat and cancer. But it is almost universally accepted that a varied diet made up of Whole Foods like vegetables, grains, meat and fish and as little ultra processed foods as possible, is the best diet. Only social media influencers trying to get engagement are the ones saying that vegan,vegetarian or carnivore diet (or other more farfetched diets) are the “optimal diet”. That being said there’s some nuance to the ultraprocessed food label, because some of them could be good or at least better than most others of their kind, but as a rule of thumb if it doesn’t look like something that can grow out of the earth or came from an animal you can bet that it is ultra processed and is best avoided and eaten only on occasion.
It doesn’t take that much time either imo, just last Sunday I meal prepped for the entire week and it took me 3 hours. I know maybe not everyone can have the time for it but I’m confident in stating that most people can find 3 hours to meal prep, but they choose not to because they don’t know how to and the alternative is easier than trying to figure it out.
Education is the solution, school should be teaching people nutrition and food preparation because parents that don’t have these skills can’t teach them. It’s unbelievable that we will teach people calculus at school which they are unlikely to ever need in their lives unless they go into a technical field, but we won’t teach them the basic skills that keep us alive and healthy as a society.
Blame education levels when medical advertising is no longer allowed and when companies need to be able to substantiate any health claims. A huge part of the problem is our exploitational and dishonest system: we don’t need an education as much as a skeptical eye and being able to spot the scans, fakes, and lies
I still cannot abolish personal responsibility. But I agree with you, that that is also a big part of the issue but for me a skeptical eye comes from being well educated on at least basic stuff. When you don’t know much about anything it’s really hard to decide what is fact or fiction and because trying to untangle the lies from the truth is hard work most people just default to taking everything at face value and accepting it without much skepticism.
Rugged individualism is brainrot.
100% of recently shot CEO's were the result of their choices.
And could have been prevented by their own actions like choosing to not declinepeople's insurance claims.
Marshall, a former OBGYN and leader of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Caucus, emphasizes nutrition and preventative care but ignores systemic issues like poverty and racism.
A conservative who ignores the impact of unaddressed and systemic poverty and racism in his policies? I'm shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you.
They're not problems FOR HIM so obviously they're not problems! Poor people should just not be poor - duh
since theyre so concerned im sure theyll ramp up the preventative care as that itself saves a metric buttload of money... right? right?
Saves a bunch of money for you. That money should be in their pockets, you see? So, to discourage you from saving it, they will add another cost to your medical care.
Long live the shareholders.
You will also need to fix PTO and work practices that deny paid time off since most clinics only operate during bankers/work hours.
Speaking of PTO, most employers don’t offer sick banks any more. You either use your time from your 2-3 week vacation bank as a sick bank or you don’t get paid time off. You can either get sick or have a vacation, not both. Even hospitals engage this system with their employees, not offering a time bank for anything medical. Worse, they’ll force you off on days with too many staff and auto pull from that bank, depleting it.
So it’s not as simple as just ramping up preventative care. You will still have people trying to use the Emergency Room on the weekends and thus not really getting help for basic problems instead of seeing their doctors.
Also, I'm sure this asshat supports more regulations around healthy food... surely
One of the biggest things that "radicalized" me was my son's heart disease. Right out of the gate he's got a chronic illness that neither he nor my wife and I could've avoided (no genetic issues or family history of heart disease) and under the old system he would've struggled his entire life to get medical coverage because every insurer would try to say his heart was to blame or he's used up his lifetime maximum (what a dumb fucking policy that was). Plenty of people like him do absolutely nothing wrong and suddenly they're facing a lifelong health issue, but that doesn't mean he and others like him are a drag on society.
Fuck healthcare and health insurance profits! They're probably the top industries where cost-saving decisions mean someone is going to die.
And often wouldn't be a drag on society and would grow up and walk and talk and poop on their own and do everything else an able bodied person does if they just had stuff like early surgical interventions and their $0.03 a day medication that's existed since 1983.
People need to understand that there is nothing universal about doctors. Many are great people who genuinely want to help people. Like anywhere else in life that involves people, there is a slice of doctors who are assholes. Within that slice, you find the the doctors who don’t like what they do and find something else lucrative like CEO or Senator. Marshall is one of those guys. These doctors and former doctors won’t hesitate to use their former title to try to look better though.
Yes, what he says, can be true. Patients will often and wantonly ignore advice to diet and exercise to lose weight. Diabetics will ignore the rules of being diabetic and end up in a coma in ICU. And hold my beer injuries absolutely do happen. But again, it’s a slice, not 70%. Many people do what their doctor advises. Many people will put in the work. Some of them, failing at diet, will get a gastric sleeve or gastric bypass, that works too. And many diabetics manage their disease, including type 2 diabetics who work hard to lose weight to send their toe 2 diabetes into remission. And so on.
Marshal sounds like a real jerk.
And also, the idea of "choice" is bullshit anyway. People who don't comply with their doctor's recommendations generally have reasons for doing so, such as depression, insecurity, and horrible side-effects to medication. Good healthcare finds and addresses those reasons instead of just blaming people for being affected by them.
Depends. People are messy. What you say is true. Sometimes education or a lack thereof is at fault. Sometimes doctors are too educated to explain the issue in a way that a person who doesn’t enjoy textbooks, but has common sense, can understand.
But nothing that involves people is 100%. There is a slice who don’t want to be uncomfortable and therefore will not engage with the recommended healthcare.
You mean I have to stay in a hospital where they interrupt my sleep every 4hrs to monitor my condition which is bad enough to require a hospital stay? No.
You mean I have to wait 3 months to see the specialist my PCP recommended for my problem to be eased or fixed? No, I’m going to the Emergency Room. They have doctors, therefore they can fix it. Not quite. Emergency Room declared me stable and offered me Tylenol, assholes, no one will help me. Crumples up discharge paperwork and throws it away. Spoiler: paperwork contains referral to needed specialist to fix problem, possibly even with a sooner appointment.
We are people. As such we really do exercise impatience and refusal to engage uncomfortable things on occasion. There’s no this is 100% not happening. There’s also no this is happening 70% of the time.
The prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials famously defined "evil" as the absence of empathy. His point still stands.
One big difference I've seen between the US and other countries that illustrates this problem is in labeling.
In the US, things like "sugar free" and "low sodium" are seen as features (and half the time they're deceptive anyways). In other countries, labels go the opposite direction, and unhealthy food has to have warnings that it's high in fat/sugar/etc.
A republican? Being a worse-than-worthless cunt??
You must have made it up 😠😠
former OBGYN
Can we make rules to not let these kind of fucking worthless pricks anywhere near a woman's body, please and thank you?
Former. Happily.
To some extent, it is about choices, to a degree, but nearly everything the qons do supports people convincing everyone to make those poor choices. The qons went insane over things like - restricting the size of gigantic sodas, planting a vegetable garden at the White House, Michelle Obama encouraging exercise in children, and the qons call things like encouraging good health "social engineering".
And that's not even getting into the complete mess our SAD is - and it is largely a creation of things I'm sure most qons support - a system that creates massive amounts of beef and dairy via subsidies, food deserts in large parts of the country, and wanting zero restraint on business when it comes to regulation in making and marketing this dangerous food, means someone, somewhere, is consuming the stuff that leads to so much bad health, or living in the cancerous zones that are created as an "externality".
Meanwhile, if the qons hear a whiff of someone making plans to educate children about the health implications of SAD - most especially curtailing, in any way, the ridiculous over-consumption of meat, dairy and eggs, why, they get the vapors. They view this as "indoctrination".
SINGLE-FAMILY CAR-DEPENDENT ZONING
The biggest contributing factor to our obesity is how our built environment itself facilitates a sedentary lifestyle.
It's also a major contributing factor to:
- poor mental health (because of both commuting road rage and lack of "third places" to socialize)
- the housing crisis
- wealth inequality
- climate change
- plastic pollution (a lot of which comes from tire dust)
- crime (as a knock-on effect of inequality and poor mental health, plus the legacy of leaded gasoline)
"you're going to be tired of all the winning!"
-Trump
....yes... I'm very very very very fucking tired of Republicans "winning."
Marshall has also supported physician-owned hospitals
Weird thing to include as if this is bad. Would you prefer venture capital to own the hospitals?
Doctors who don’t want to work as doctors often aren’t much better.
This says physician owned, not physician managed. To me that sounds more like a co-op.
To be fair, there is some potential conflict of interest with self-referrals; the American Hospital Association has some criticisms, but I’m also wondering if this is a bit of their own propaganda. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons says “physician-owned hospitals (POHs) are known for providing some of the highest quality care in the country at the lowest cost”, and the American Medical Association also supports POHs.
Third option: non-profit.
Even if that is true, that means that if Elon Musk or Trump gets cancer from something, 30% of the time it is from something that the government has said is safe and no amount of money or healthcare could have avoided it.