HEALTHY PEOPLE COST LESS
Wellness and America's debt.
America’s $36 trillion national debt is ballooning still. The newest budget legislation - dubbed ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and passed recently by the House - could add $1.7 trillion or even $3.2 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Others disagree claiming that the bill will reduce the deficit once new policies kick in and benefit the economy.
In any case, America is an expensive country to run, develop, defend and maintain. And while most efforts to bring the debt under control have focused on boosting the economy and cutting government spending, neither has succeeded in taming a runaway deficit. We are simply continuing to spend more than we have.
While economics, finance, and bond markets are beyond our expertise, there is one idea Living Well Locally wants to offer: ‘healthy people cost less.’
The public costs of an unhealthy population are massive, and today America is paying dearly in higher healthcare costs, addiction, crime, mental illness, lost productivity, disability, stressed families, children who cannot learn, exploding end-of-life care . . . the list goes on.
This truth is captured again in the ten top functional categories of our national budget: Social Security ($1,354 billion), Health ($889 billion), Medicare ($848 billion), National Defense ($820 billion), Income Security ($775 billion), Net Interest ($658 billion), Veterans Benefits and Services ($302 billion), Transportation ($126 billion), Commerce and Housing Credit ($101 billion), Community and Regional Development ($87 billion). It has been estimated that as much as 51% of the population receives more from government than they pay or have paid in to government coffers.
While many hard-working Americans want to call some around them ‘lazy’ for not holding jobs, a closer truth may be that growing numbers of Americans are sick and/or disabled, unqualified and/or under-skilled, or among the many who must care for a parent or spouse or child with chronic illness.
Poor health has a way of seeping into everything our country knows and values. And then becoming something we need government and/or medicine to fix.
Fixing poor health is not easy when mainstream medicine is allopathic, something we have written about often. And when primary care cannot fix the root causes of simple ailments, those ailments become chronic, deeper, and more expensive. Healthcare costs are now the second and third major categories in the federal budget.
It is with this in mind that Living Well Locally offers the idea that wellness will make a difference, that wellness will offer the hope that our country needs for renewal, for unity, and for solving a very serious debt crisis.
Yes, it will take time for Americans to become well. But we begin by continuing to identify the problems (e.g. the MAHA movement), understanding how wellness benefits issues beyond health itself, and increasing public awareness and hope for what is now possible with medicine that heals.
If we are patient and able to focus on building the regenerative infrastructure that is needed for healing, we will, at the same time, rebuild America’s local communities and neighborhoods, put healthy, real food on American tables, and clean the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Along the way, we will have to deal with the powerful interests invested in the current paradigm of allopathic medicine and chemical agriculture, and we must be willing to undergo the economic shifts that will eventually bring place-based wellness into existence. We will come to think of wellness in a new way, not as a product or prescription or even a therapy but as the things we do in everyday life. Wellness will become the things we take responsibility for with little conscious effort . . . eventually.
Because it’s hard to do wellness alone, especially in a culture rampant with poor food and distractions, the early phases of place-based wellness may be the hardest. But as more lifestyle practitioners help more people understand why they are sick, and more regenerative farmers grow real food for local consumers, supporting each other in healing may provide the best medicine of all - purpose. We will then find ourselves evolving the local ‘cultures of health’ that make it much easier for everyone to find wellness.
Wellness is not a quick fix for America’s spiraling debt. But it is a reliable and sustainable one. And its side benefits are the perfect antidote to our current state of living allopathically.