The great health care debate

This week the Obama administration announced the first steps they are taking in the health care reform debate. I can't say that I am at all impressed with the steps taken so far, asking health care providers, insurers and Big Pharma to reduce their costs by $2 trillion in 10 years, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Still, I can't say that I trust those making those promises to carry through with them. They are, after all, in the business of making a profit, and they'll do whatever it takes to satisfy their shareholders. So I'm disappointed at these steps because I don't feel as if it's enough of a step in creating real and lasting health care reform. I'm in favor of a single payer system myself, but the drawback to that is the fact that we don't have enough health care providers and hospitals to accomodate every single person in this country, and my fear is that it would take even longer to see my doctors than it already does. Typically, I can get an appointment with my primary care doctor within a few days of calling, but a specialist typically takes a few weeks to see as it stands right now. So if we had every single person in this country able to see a doctor, it would take that much longer even to see my primary care physician and that bothers me. Sometimes, I don't even like having to wait a few days as it is. I recently had a painful ear situation over a weekend that meant waiting a few days to see my doctor and it drove me nuts wondering what was wrong until I could get to my doctor's office. I could have gone to an urgent care, but we no longer have one in Kent and the nearest one is in Streetsboro. Urgent care co-pays with my insurance are $50 so I wanted to save $30 by going to see my primary care doctor instead. If we had single payer insurance, it might have taken me weeks just to see a doctor, so that is a problem with that system in that we currently don't have enough doctors, in particular, primary care physicians since everyone wants to go into specialties where you can make that much more money. So I don't know what to think, but all I know is that my deductible is too high and my co-pays can really add up after a while and get very costly. So I don't know what the answer is, but trusting insurance and pharmaceutical companies and health care providers to lower their costs over ten years is just too slow a way to enact real and comprehensive health care reform. I can't afford to wait ten years for affordable health care. And neither can the rest of us aging boomers.

WORKOUT NOTES

My fitness trainer is in the process of completing his Master's Degree this week so he wasn't available last night at the gym. His brother worked with us instead and it was a pretty brutal workout overall. I'm dismayed at how weak my upper body remains and how much more work I need in strengthening in particular my chest, shoulders and upper back. I also find myself feeling increasingly risk averse doing anything with my knees because the glucosamine and chondroitin I've been taking for almost two months has made my knees feel so good for the first time in forever that I am almost afraid to try doing anything that I fear might injure one of them, so I still tend to go easy on things like squats and lunges, which we did a lot of last night. I tend not to bend down as far as I probably could because I don't want to reinjure a knee and send myself back to yet another round of rehab. So I still don't know what all I can do and what I cannot do and what I should be trying to do. It's a tad frustrating not to know what I am capable of doing when I live in such fear of yet another knee injury and yet I also know that I need to strengthen my leg muscles if I am to prevent any more injuries. So knowing just how far I can go becomes an exercise in frustration at times. But I am going to try to get in some running on my own time to both build up my cardio strength and to build up my leg muscles. A few days ago I tried running around the block and became winded by the time I got to the end of my street. The same thing happened at the end of each street I ran, and that was truly maddening, so I obviously need to work on that. If I do a little each day, I'll build up to where it's not such a big deal, but again, there's that little voice of fear inside me wondering about the wisdom of even trying to do simple things like running around the block. I just changed my insoles in my shoes and it makes a huge difference in shock absorption, so that should help a lot. My goal this year is to stay out of rehab and to strengthen my joints enough to where I don't have to live in fear of doing things that in the past have caused me to get hurt. If I can do that, then I will feel very good about myself and what all this working out has accomplished.