Because I'm living in a fast food nation

           I wish there is a simpler way to stay healthy, I wish everything can be taken for granted, but of course it won't be happening in the near future. If you have seen TV infomercials about losing weight without even trying or without even changing your diet you might be wondering about the truth behind these schemes. Yeah, I am on McDonalds Diet and I want to lose weight, now beat that.

           With our culture heavily dependent on fastfoods, have you wonder about their nutritional facts? Fast food companies today are required to post the calories on each piece on their menu, but have you ever wonder why there has to be an excess of something, like why should a quarter pounder be 740 calories and not 700 or 800? and a smoothie has to be 330 calories? Well, if you are keen about the amount of calories, sugar and sodium that you are eating, you should take note of this, because math wise if you are in a drive thru and you order both you would always "round down" This is because, each of them has below the "50" decimal so its going to be 700 plus 300 which is a thousand. Now if you add an iced coffee because you just feel good that you ordered a 1000 calorie menu, that's another 240 calories, and you still feel good because you just had a 1200 calorie lunch which is the normal calorie count required--you better think again because you are 110 calories over and you just overshoot your dietary intake of sugar and sodium by over 200% daily value in just one meal.

          This might be the reason why we circle around events of weight loss and weight gain, then struggle for right diet and exercise. of course its not easy, and there is no easy way around it. some argue that exercise might be bad for you. Last week, yahoo.com was flooded with blogs about exercise causing depression, and chocolates as comfort foods. What is happening with us?

             In MBA school the only business model which I can remember and understand well was of McDonalds, that is quite alarming right?  Yeah, the company is an excellent example of a successful model, its not even .01 percent as complicated as the LTCM model which I could not decipher. It is true  that McDonalds have grown to a billion dollar franchise, but what's alarming is the statistics behind it. Because for McDonalds to be at its current state all the people in the world should have spent  trillions of dollars. I know what you are thinking, that money could have paid our national debt. Last year alone the revenue reported by the company was over $24 billion from its 32,000 restaurants. Just imagine how many Big Macs that is? I am not condemning McDonalds, I don't love fastfoods but I don't hate them, I think they are  an ugly necessity.

Supersize me, the movie which came out in 2004 is an excellent example of what fast food companies can do for us. Just imagine how many calories each quarter pounder has, its like I'm paying top dollars for the extra calories and extra dollars to lose the weight. I wish McDonalds would invest in Weight Watchers or Golds Gym, but no! fast foods encourages poor nutrition for its own profit. Just look at our obesity rate, a little over 28 percent of the whole population is already obese. The direct medical cost to obesity and indirect economical loss is way over $100 billion and today 1 in 4 children is obese. Whose to blame? The parents? The fast food industry? The congress?

Last year the American Journal of medicine announced that a little bit of fat could actually save a person from a stroke.  So what's next? Raising the current BMI levels? does this mean I need to gain weight?

Maybe not yet, so to quit my haggling about fast foods here is my pitch, this year I will burn 150,000 calories with negotiable diet. quite impossible right? well that's just around 75 big macs if you do the math. So every time I go to work I won't eat a big mac, instead I will exercise, or if I should eat a big mac I must compensate by burning the equivalent calories in a given exercise session.

That means no pizza, pasta, pretzels or various other starchy foods that don't necessarily begin with "p." well Mc Donalds doesn't have a "p" on their menu, right?

As of today I logged around 85,000 calories. I have a BMI of 21 which is pretty decent, so please don't raise the BMI levels or I'll be an anorexic.
By the end of the year, I will hopefully reach my goal and then another one next year.

Boo! boring!
Please don't be a hater and an overweight.
But I have allergies, back and knee problems.
Now, I'm the bully.
Well, you made it yourself.
So, go out and exercise.

What it means to be sick in a Country with the most expensive Health care delivery system

               The Article “Sick Around America”was published on the first quarter of 2009 and appeared on PBS. Frontline, the publisher, investigated what it meant to be sick in America; it described our broken healthcare system and how citizens suffered with these flaws. The article explained that the 160 million insured population are very lucky because we have the most advanced healthcare delivery system. But even if there is high sophistication and technological advancement we also have the most expensive healthcare delivery system, which I believe means that the United States is the worst place to get sick even if you are insured.

             To further describe this, let me explain the difference between large employer sponsored insurance and small employer sponsored insurance using the Care continuum model to compare the effects on two different companies using a million dollar birth as an example.

                 Here’s the scenario; an employee undergoes a very complicated pregnancy and the direct medical cost is around a million.
                 It might not affect the large employer because it pools the risk out of its 5,000-50,000 employees, but for small businesses who employs only 50-500 employees their premium could almost double.  I believe bigger companies usually have the flexibilityand price competitiveness because they have lower risk, they pay more and they have a more efficient network. In response, larger company health plans were restructured to cut the cost without harming access.

                On the other hand, smaller companies have the least flexible health plans, they consider network composition and access as second in importance after price. The worst part, some small business employers practice medical underwriting, such as, if an employer has to choose between a physically fit person and me who is diabetic and overweight, my chances of getting hired is slim to none. This is because, President Obama make it into law that all employers have to give health coverage to all of its employees, but in the employers point of view, I am a risk because I have all these diseases. Employers don’t want a higher premium and they want to meet their overhead so I would understand. But isn’t that illegal? yes it is. More to say, the employer might also go out of business if they would hire me, now there’s the dilemma. With our very volatile economic situation, health coverage has become more expensive and less comprehensive, the current market is very challenging for all types of employers.

               On 2010, it was estimated that health care cost grew twice as much as inflation, and with our health care system taking 17 percent of our GDP it means a lot. The economic collapse on 2008 led a lot of people to bankruptcy, while hospitals and companies either closed or downsized, but the worst part, health care cost kept on rising.  I believe in this troubled economy nobody is safe, Georgetown University Research Professor Karen Pollitz explains that for many people, the current system is “like having an airbag in your car that’s made of tissue paper: I’m so glad that it’s there, but if I ever get in a crash, it’s not going to protect me.”
The trend has changed, some Americans today makes life decisions based on health insurance. I’m talking about  job lock, those who are stuck on a job they do not want because of health insurance. While for others, life becomes a quest to find and keep health insurance, while some others die with supposedly treatable conditions. According to some PCP’s, nowadays some people won’t die of the disease; they die secondary to the complications of a failing health care system.

                 I believe the current health care system needs to change, but I am not in favor of President Obama’s Health care reform bill because I believe our system is still broken. I agree that it is a very admirable goal of the president, but it is not timely and we still have a lot of flaws. In my opinion, the government should push for a consumer driven health care system to stimulate managed care product innovation, drive fair physician and hospital cost, & develop a more efficient plan design. Because if we cannot cut our 22 percent administrative cost, push for equal and fair hospital and physician pricing, lower the overall cost, cut insurance income and etc. we are just nibbling around the edges of this broken system, patching hole after hole. In the end nothing changed but an increase in the cost of this $2.2 trillion broken system, and who will suffer? The taxpayers of course.