Articles tagged 'costs'

This weekend's New York Times featured an editorial pushing back against the medical industry's most recent device for obesity and diabetes treatment, called the Aspire Assist. The Aspire Assist is essentially a tube surgically implanted into your stomach so you can drain a portion of your stomach contents after each meal, in an effort to avoid absorbing all the calories you consumed.

How is it that we've come to the point of believing that human physiology requires this degree of intervention to achieve a healthy weight, and healthy metabolism?

The authors of this article add their voices to the growing chorus that thinks our health is suffering because we're eating the wrong types of foods, not just too many calories.

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Waiting for a delayed flight in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, I decided to walk the concourses. Challenging myself to do two things at once, I began to think. And that is when I ran smack dab into a quandary: why are we trying to change the world of health insurance for employers? Not even Don Quixote would be so foolish, would he?

Perhaps the three most powerful lobbying groups in the US are the insurance industry, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. Taking on one of these giants, much less all three simultaneously, would seem to fall into the "insane" category. Particularly for a small group of individuals with relatively light pockets and no groundswell of support from the very people they are trying to help. Yet someone has to try to do something to slow the cost curve growth that employers all across the country are facing, don't they?

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