The Rowdy Tao

Personal healthcare is so; well, personal when it touches you as an individual.   It really lights the lights of protest and is ripe for sound bites.   The one that gets me a little edgy is the cry that individual rights are infringed with any plan that is related to health care and people should be allowed to make all their decisions unilaterally.   I have a sympathetic ear for such concerns but in reality there is a catch and it is likely you will not hear much about it because it sounds radical or uncaring.   You hear a little piece of it when you read a boring spending statistic that Medicare spends the greatest amount of one person’s lifetime care costs in the last six months of life.   The tricky unknown in the formula is calculating exactly when your personal last six months of life begins.   Real boring stuff unless it is your life, a loved one or you are saddled with the payment policy to fund the spending. Here is the unpopu...

Well I thought I was doing the right thing and generally speaking I was right.   But even right these days comes with a risk analysis involving a risk-reward curve.   Honestly, I always knew the ham for my daily ham sandwich was packaged in something but always kicked the can down the road about thinking much about what it might be.   Yes, eating low fat ham is a better choice than a lot of choices but my time of reckoning has arrived.   Darn it!   “The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has just completed a detailed review of more than 7,000 clinical studies covering links between diet and cancer. Its conclusion is rocking the health world with startling bluntness: Processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption. Consumers should stop buying and eating all processed meat products for the rest of their lives. Processed meats include bacon, sausage, hot dogs, sandwich meat, packaged ham, pepperoni, salami and virtually all red meat used in frozen prepared...