Okay, I’m not a benefits administrator, nor do I ever plan to be one. But, HR usually is responsible for picking out health plans, which relates directly to your health care, which is why I’m blogging about this essay in the New York Times:What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses
The authors argue that it doesn’t make sense that we are all suffering from additional diseases when everyone is living so much longer. They write:
Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
They also write about the “medicalization of childhood” where every sniffle is a reason for treatment. I must say I agree with them.
All of these treatments, of course, cost money. Of course, you, the consumer, don’t generally care how much they cost because you have insurance. The most I pay for a prescription is $25 for a month supply. If I order it from my prescription provider they’ll give me 3 months for $25. I don’t think about cost when my physician writes a prescription and neither does he, because he knows I have insurance.
And who pays for most of that insurance? Employers do. And health care costs are skyrocketing, yet we don’t see a correlation between what we do and what the costs are. Maybe we’d all get bigger raises if our employers weren’t paying for what used to be considered normal life.
My personal pet peeve is diagnosing ones self with Strep every time you have a sore throat. Man, you’d think there was some sort of Strep-idemic!
And ADHD? Is this a new disorder? Kids with a short attention span? In my day, you corrected this with a ruler smacked on the desk! =)
Jon,
You’ll probably appreciate this link then.