For My Breakfast Omelet
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www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html?_r=2&em
Huge Food vs. Huge Insurance
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: September 9, 2009
TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the shape care debate, you would reckon that the largest problem with shape care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed. No one disputes that the .3 trillion we devote to the shape care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on shape care can be substantially clarified, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient shape care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing shape care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a following, even more powerful industry: the food industry. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of shape care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
. . . The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over shape care. . . . But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about shape care reform. And so the government is balanced to go on encouraging America’s quick-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To place it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
Why the disconnect? Probably because reforming the food system is politically even more hard than reforming the shape care system. At least in the shape care battle, the administration can count some powerful corporate interests on its side — like the large segment of the Fortune 500 that has concluded the current system is unsustainable. That is hardly the case when it comes to challenging agribusiness. Cheap food is going to be well loved as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling quick food and then treating the diseases that quick food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American shape care industry.. . . As things stand, the shape care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.
. . . AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the shape insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes?
. . . Passing a shape care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our shape care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our shape — which means going to work on the American way of eating.
