On Wealth and Health

We have the same problem with healthcare as welfare…. the solutions we have are good, and we haven’t figured out how to build a reliable bridge between short term help and long term sustainability.

Whether we’re talking about drugs or public assistance, we end up relying on the short term bridge for far too long. The treatment works for a time, but the treatments we have are not cures. Dietary and lifestyle changes are the cure for most health ailments, and we know this definitively.

I have been there myself, I was really sick and needed drug treatments to deal with my illness. The drugs helped me to stop being ill, but they didn’t make me well. I had to make dietary and lifestyle changes to get off of the medication. And that should be our approach in 95% of cases, helping people make the changes to their diet and lifestyle and get off of the medication.

The same is broadly true of welfare policies. My grandmother was on public assistance for a time, raising four children on her own, but she fought tooth and nail to work and get off of it. My grandmother is in her nineties today, and still fiercely guards her independence. We tried to do the dishes when we visited her for Thanksgiving this year, and she wouldn’t allow it. We need to realign incentives for our public assistance programs to make it easier to transition from dependence to independence.

If we want our children to lead long, happy and productive lives, this needs to be the approach. We need more solutions to help people transition away from the help we provide them before it hurts them and weakens their ability to take care of themselves and their loved ones.