Health Plan Introduction

 

  Generally speaking, most of us would say we desire to have good health. Yet how we go about trying to reach this goal, or even how we individually define good health, varies from person to person a great deal. What is it that we really want when we say we want good health, and why do we want it? Does good health mean we will live a long time or does it mean we feel healthy right now?

 

   The business sector of our economy we categorize as health care is very large, very expensive, and so emotionally supercharged it helps decide presidential elections. As technology advances so rapidly, costs escalate by big chunks and the ethics questions involved in delivering health care become ever more difficult. One of the biggest cries heard today is that we as a culture should be so much more interested in preventive medicine and healthy lifestyles. Statistics prove however that most people spend more by far on health care in the last year of their life than any other.

 

   What if we knew that sometime during the next 12 months we would certainly be afflicted with three or more of the following:

 

Breast, prostate, or colon cancer

Dementia or Alzheimer’s disease

Depression (long-term)

Diabetes

Cardiovascular disease (stroke or heart attack)

High blood pressure

Obesity

Osteoarthritis

Osteoporosis

 

   If there were simple and safe things we could do to avoid these diseases, and we knew our affliction with them was imminent, most of us would take any reasonable and safe route to protecting our health. In fact, many of us are currently taking prescription medications where we consider the known harm to our health an acceptable trade-off for the good the medication accomplishes. All of the aforementioned diseases are simply degenerative diseases of the aging process. The majority of seniors we know are afflicted with one or more of these diseases. When we treat one of these diseases with a prescription medication that is approved by an agency of the United States government, we feel comfortable we are doing a safe and acceptable thing. For example, we may take the prescription drug Plavix to try to keep us from having a heart attack due to atherosclerosis. Yet the known side affects of the drug are numerous and just plain scary. Would it not have been better to eat well, not smoke, and exercise earlier in life?

 

   Of course to look ahead and realize that our actions now, or lack thereof, will affect our quality of life in the future, and then to change how we live we generally describe as living responsibly. The directive of the Hippocratic Oath is to “do no harm”. Most in the medical establishment who in theory live by this oath would not think of publicly saying anything about the cumulative medical risk, botched surgical procedures, and millions upon millions of dollars spent in the pursuit of “physical beauty” through cosmetic surgery. Yet if actions we take to protect our health include doing something that is outside of the current mainline medical establishment, often the actions are labeled extreme, or even put into the realm of quackery.

 

   So what do we use to decide what is acceptable and what is not in the pursuit of good health? The answer lies in how we decide what ought to be. There are really only two main foundational paradigms to guide us in making this decision.

 

   The first is Darwinian evolution. That is, all that we see, all that we live, is the product of a non-personal, amoral, mechanistic process. If this is the case, then all of our ethics are entirely pragmatic and subject to constant change to suit the moment and the individual. The only reason for rule and structure is for the protection of one person’s desires as balanced against another’s, and for societal efficiency. This philosophical system can most easily be summarized as “I’m okay, you’re okay”.

 

   The second paradigm would be one of a supernatural being bringing into existence all that we know and see by design. If this paradigm is extended to the specific account of origins of the the Judeo-Christian scriptures, then we have a historical model of the way things ought to be. (Note: Pertinent to an understanding of the basis for individual liberty as codified in the US Constitution and general law is to understand from whence it came.  The religious population demographic of the United States of America at the time of England's surrender in the war of independence was approximately as follows,  98% Protestant Christian, 1% Jewish, less than 1% of all other religious groups including Roman Catholics and atheists.)  If one follows then the Judeo-Christian paradigm, the single most important event of history would have been the “fall” of mankind, and the subsequent human health changes we would observe from the original design. For example, in the biblical account of human history prior to the flood of Noah, human life expectancy was in the range of 250 to 500 years. Of the scholars who believe in this system of origins, many postulate an upper atmosphere ice canopy theory that would have blocked ultraviolet rays from directly striking the earth’s surface until its destruction at the time of the great flood. Is it possible that with such protection removed direct exposure to the sun is one of the components which caused an increasingly shortened lifespan?

 

   If one believes in the first paradigm, there is no ethical imperative for or against any particular health practice. “I’m okay, you’re okay” means I can use methamphetamines or run marathons and it is my business. The individual is ultimately unattached morally to any other individual. This is the fundamental basis libertarians live by. If one believes in the second paradigm, one’s actions would be best governed by an understanding of the restoration of the original designer’s intent. In the real world of today’s healthcare system, decisions regarding ethics and practice in health care are not made guided by either of these philosophical systems. Rather, they are made by a combination of unfocused, biased, but altruistic feelings of wanting to help people, the need to provide corporate shareholders with a return on investment, and the desire of individuals to earn a good living after investing such a huge amount of time and money in a health care related education.  The advent of the government dictating more and more how health care is delivered under the federal delivery system known as Obamacare has added an unintelligable and lugubrious multi-level bureaucracy to a system virtually broken already.  The sum of all these forces are formulated into a framework called the “Standard of Care”. This faceless authority then becomes the daily arbiter of applied health care. And as this authority over the average consumer of health care is adjusted and modified to meet the constantly changing modern medical landscape, the first test a modification is subjected to is does it protect health-care providers from out of control malpractice litigation and from government fines and disqualification. So a dispassionate analysis of what is best for the patient is short-circuited long before such consideration has any chance to be the primary priority as it should be, let alone where either reasearch or care distribution dollars are to be spent. If pressed for a philosophical base as to why a physician or other health care provider will not consider a concept outside of the “standard of care”, the most common justification one will hear from one's physician is often, “Well, you know we really shouldn't with Mother Nature”. When we realize that the individual’s philosophical system is usually based on mechanistic evolution (Darwinism), an appeal to “Mother Nature” or any other super intelligence is entirely nonsensical and should be seen for the self-serving diversion from fact and reality that it is.  Were we engaged in an abstract philosophical discussion the stakes would be far different.  But the subject is far from abstract, what we are discussing is our health and our quality of life in the years to come.

 

   The thoughts set forth herein on personal health are based on a philosophical system as set forth in C.S. Lewis’s "Mere Christianity". Simply stated, “What is” argues for intelligent design in and of itself. C.S. Lewis concluded that having accepted intelligent design as fact, an honest search for the designer inevitably leads one to the historical account found in the Christian Bible. This discussion does make passing observation of a few specifics as Mr. Lewis would have seen things. However, the discussion compares and contrasts mechanistic evolution verses intelligent design, and applies such to an understanding of ethics and applied practice in our present health care landscape. These considerations remain the main basis for the argument in favor of an independent view of best practices in maintaining experiential quality in the latter part one's life. The observations from a traditional Christian point of view contained herein, while of particular interest to those who would consider their application pertinent, are entirely not crucial to the fundamental arguments of an individual possessing the right to make one's own educated decisions without the necessity of an authoritarian, self-serving nanny state. Indeed, one might argue they are most correctly stated in a fundamental way as one's “unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.