As a health and wellness CE, I talk a lot about healthy eating and healthy living. But lately I'm starting to feel like there is a conspiracy against sick people in this country. Well, maybe "conspiracy" is too strong of a word. Let's say...discrimination. With so much focus on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, being unhealthy has quite a stigma attached to it. And it's even crossed over into politics, turning judgment into a pundit pass-time.

What I mean by that is...Health care and the uninsured is a hot-button policy issue these days (as it should be), and opponents of universal health care, often justify their opinion, by blaming lifestyle choices for poor health.

They point to the many studies that link chronic illness to obesity and smoking. Now, I'm not going to argue that an unhealthy diet and smoking aren't contributing significantly to problems like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. But, "contributions" are not causes. Is there anyone who believes that if we just eliminated smoking and junk food, that we would eliminate chronic illness? Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. The high cost of health care has little to do with lifestyle, and everything to do with unscrupulous insurance companies and drug companies.

I agree that part of a good health care plan, is preventative medicine. But all the prevention in the world is not going to stop chronic illness. No matter how hard we try, we can not prevent the major cause of chronic illness, and that is aging. Then there are those other pesky little things, like genetics and the environment. The truth is, any one of us could spend our entire life eating only healthy foods and never smoking - yet still die of lung cancer or heart disease. The point I am trying to make is, that there is a very fine line between encouraging a healthy lifestyle, and blaming people for their own medical hardships. A good example would be the discrimination of overweight people.

From The F-Word...

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

Another thing we have little control over, is the amount of stress in our lives. But this video shows, that stress can have the same negative effects on our heart as smoking does. That's kinda scary given the stressful times we are living in.

Not too long ago, I was asked to write a post on how stress can affect your health. It's hard to imagine that at the age of 40 we could have a heart the age of 50, and for no other reason than stress. Can you imagine the amount of stress an uninsured person must have? Just like the rich get richer...the sick get sicker. Universal health care might not be the perfect solution to this problem, but it is the only solution.

From Moms Speak Up...

What does it mean to you to hear the phrase, “uninsured children?” What does it mean to hear, “underinsured children?”According to the Children’s Defense Fund

9.4 million children in America, almost 90 percent living in working households and a majority in two-parent families, are still uninsured. Millions more are underinsured. Chronic budget shortfalls, often confusing enrollment processes, and dramatic variation in eligibility and coverage from state to state prevent millions of currently eligible children from living healthy and realizing their full potential in school and life.

But what does that mean to the families of the 9.4 children living without insurance?

So tell me what you think. With all the focus on making healthy choices...Are we judging or blaming the sick for their own health problems? Do you think we should insure everyone? Even the people making poor lifestyle choices?

Contributing Editor Catherine Morgan at Catherine Blogs, The Political Voices of Women, Care2 Election Blog