While insurance is absolutely a necessary component that needs fixing, I think we could do a far greater, aggregate good by addressing fundamental lifestyle iss

While insurance is absolutely a necessary component that needs fixing, I think we could do a far greater, aggregate good by addressing fundamental lifestyle issues. Having doctors in the family, and having been on my own personal health journey, modern medicine, while incredible in some aspects, is profoundly rudimentary in other regards. So many people in chronic illness communities finally get access to insurance with big hopes, and it turns out the doctors don’t really know what to do with health failures without any obvious blood markers or scans. So folks get shuttled from doc to doc to speciality to specialty with very little hope of improvement. While I could propose a hypothesis, what we could use is funding and research that specifically looks at studying and deploying larger scale and better blood markers of health. Specifically intracellular measurement based markers. Some useful areas that are likely profound, but not limited to, ought to be with plasma and intracellular anti-inflammatory markers, the molecular/nutritional components that drive said markers along with the ability to influence various food industries to then address these things in the food supply via various fortifications, similar to how milk has vitamin D added, and salt has iodine added to it. Now a days, we are adding omega 3s to milk as well, which is pretty crucial imo. The challenges I see are multi-fold. We need better campaigns that make various nutritional knowledge more well known, so folks can be more informed. The food industry will need incentives to take on the cost of fortifying their foods with various vitamins and minerals. Then there is an aspect of having nationwide marketing to get folks out exercising more. Weights, sports, walking, anything such that folks are getting out more. This would fundamentally start to lower the demand generated on the healthcare system for invisible issues that seem to have no solution. Pharma and food will hate it. Medicine will likely embrace it. And the populace would absolutely take it for granted, but we would see many aspects of our nation get better. I’d be willing to bet that a concerted effort would improve the populations mental health, productivity, happiness, educational scores, reduce disability, reduce welfare needs, etc and every other measurable metric could become better. It’s a bold claim, and I’m happy to get into the details as to why, but currently, only the richest folks that care can optimize their lives in these ways, but if we can accelerate the deployment of these things, there’s incredible gains to be had.