Last Updated on: 8th April 2014, 10:12 am
I feel like this theme is getting stale, but this one just baffles me. The story is this. the health commissioner of New York City has decided that Diabetes is an epidemic, and should be treated like infectious diseases. If someone has an infectious disease, health officials know about it, so the threat to others is assessed and we don’t have rampant outbreaks of stuff. Now they want to apply this to Diabetes. So, if you have Diabetes, when your doctor tests your sugar levels, they are sent to a city’s database and if they get too high, someone from the city’s health department can come knocking and tell you to do better. The way it is worded is, “The patient is prodded to do better.” They say this is because there is a massive spread of diabetes in the poor and obese, and this can lead to many other health problems like blindness, amputations, kidney failure, bla bla bla, and this is where my head begins to spin.
First off, if the poor are the problem, how many of those have health insurance plans to pay for doctor’s visits to test their blood sugar? Second, I hate to sound like a selfish prick, but what is really motivating them to bother doing this? People are going to have to pay for their own health care anyway, so it’s not like this whole thing is going to prevent unnecessary burdens on a universal health care system because, um, there isn’t one. Plus, I’m sure it’s costing them something to do this, so why are they laying out this dough? Third, if the person already knows their blood sugar is high, what in christ is some random nosey bastard from the city going to do to stop it? Fourth, this is just way too creepy to me and doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I’m too synical, but it seems like what they’re telling us isn’t the whole truth and something else is at play here.