Goodbye to Bad Knowledge (Post-Peak-Oil Health Care)

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-05-31/goodbye-bad-knowledge

The other major system crash that's coming, besides education, is in our sickness care "system," which is shot through and through with total dependency on economic growth fueled by the now-gone cheap energy.

In one sense, the end of cheap energy will mean better overall health.  America's obesity epidemic is really just a marker of how many energy slaves we all command.  Now that the once-per-planetary-lifetime cheap energy extravaganza is drawing to a close, so too will we see the end of the bad habits it produced, which all boil down to having machines do everything for us. 

BUT, there's a very rough transition ahead between now, when we have a huge overhang of people with bodies made sick by decades of dietary mistreatment and avoidance of exercise, and our future, when we won't be able to afford a sickness care system that continually spends a huge fraction of its total budget on people in their waning days, which ignoring the basic health needs of a giant and growing underclass of people.

Ultimately we are going to have to recognize that organizing access to health care through employment is a gigantic blunder, and that allowing the entire sickness care system to be structured around the profit motive is a recipe not just for lots more sickness and lots more profits, but essentially for making America a third-world country.   Given that Salem Hospital is laying off skilled workers even as people in Salem are increasingly shut out of affordable health care, the contradictions built into the system are soon going to be too great to ignore.