Dear Editor,
I agree wholeheartedly that spending on healthcare is out of control. But when will we address the deeper reasons why this is so?
We could certainly discuss the out-of-control salaries that administrators at many levels of this system receive, including the bureaucracy-heavy insurance companies. Or the out-of-control costs of pharmaceuticals and the other tools of the medical-industrial complex.
Better yet, as a health care practitioner trained in preventive medicine, I think we desperately need to address all the conditions that have led us to be one of the unhealthiest countries in the world — our addiction to sugar, eating calorie-laden food with little nutritive value, poisons in our agricultural systems, the stress of working hard for a remuneration that doesn’t cover our basic needs, never mind allowing for time to recreate or be with family and friends, to name just a few.
Albert Einstein remarked decades ago that it is folly to expect that we can solve a complex problem from within the system that created it. What will it take to free ourselves from our reductionist linear thinking?
There is so much more to say about this.
There are many ways we can reframe our conditioned thinking and expectations on this, as well as many other complex problems people are struggling with.
Wendy Goodwin,
Middlebury
