In the past few months, I have come to think that Obamacare and the obsession with cost containment is driving us crazy. Now, after reading Slate writer Daniel Engber’s call for a war on shortness to be fought alongside the war on obesity, I know it is. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Engber asks:
Shouldn’t making Americans taller be one of the goals of health care reform?
It seems tall people are healthier, he writes, pointing to our supposedly very healthy president who is 6 feet 2 and weighs only 175 pounds. (Perhaps then, we should all take up smoking, since our healthy president does that too.) But short people don’t tend to live as long and have more serious health concerns, and thus, the short sector tends to be more expensive for which to care– just like the obese. If we could just get people to grow taller, it would save big money on health care!
At first I thought Engber was being tongue in cheek. But no. From the article:
You’re excused for scoffing. You probably think of weight as a problem we can fix, while height seems beyond our control. We could try to make people thin by taxing junk food or by raising their insurance premiums unless they go on a diet. But what kind of policy could make someone taller?…
Early-life experiences play an important role in the development and consequences of body size. Exposure to malnutrition, infectious disease, chronic stress and poverty stunta child’s development and seem to explain many of the long-term problems associated with short stature. Environmental factors may promote obesity, too: lack of breast-feeding, bad nutrition, chronic stress and poverty have all been associated with early weight gain and a higher risk of health problems down the road.
A range of sensible interventions could address both problems at once. To win a war on shortness, we might promote the consumption of fruits, vegetables and other foods that are low in calories and high in micronutrients. Or we could invest in education as a means of alleviating poverty and environmental stress. Better access to doctors for children and their parents would improve prenatal and postnatal care and stave off the stunting effects of childhood disease.
I have an even better idea? Leave us alone!
On the other hand, what about global warming? We should want more short people. Yea, that’s the ticket: Their smaller lungs exhale less carbon dioxide. They can be comfortable in smaller, more efficient cars, and we could squeeze more of the diminutive onto planes, thereby helping to save the planet. Short people eat less food, and drink less water–more for the salmon that way. We would need to grow less cotton for clothes, less wool for coats: Think of the environmental possibilities!
Or better yet, leave us alone.
October 19th, 2009 | 1:30 am
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October 19th, 2009 | 4:35 am
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October 19th, 2009 | 10:44 am
And maybe those of us who are congenitally short should be forbidden to breed. Sheesh.
October 19th, 2009 | 10:44 am
Talking about war on health care costs, this is the proposal on tap in Florida: Barring the terminally ill from hospitals and shutting off respirators if the state is overwhelmed by flu cases. This comes under the heading of Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste.
See: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-swine-flu-crisis-propublica-sboct18,0,2336680.story
October 19th, 2009 | 11:36 am
ah oh, I’m short and fat. Guess I’m toast.
October 19th, 2009 | 2:28 pm
For a long time, I’ve wondered why pro-abortion environmentalists don’t advocate for MORE sickness, MORE disease, and MORE wars, to counteract the population bomb.
Then again, that may be the end result of all this.
October 19th, 2009 | 10:52 pm
Because, Anthony, they don’t NEED more sickness, disease and war to wipe people out-at over 1 million procedures a year, abortion is doing a better job of that than war and sickness ever could.
October 20th, 2009 | 2:12 pm
Moreover, that whole idea is racist and ethnocentric. Many people are of short stature because that is how they are genetically predisposed to be. For instance, very few Filopino people, especially women, are tall. When people idolize tallness, what they’re really idolizing is the romanticized conception of the perfect, (usually white) man.
October 20th, 2009 | 9:06 pm
Oy… Gee, do you suppose that the whole poor-nutrition-makes-people-short thing might put a thumb on the scale for making it so, by the numbers, someone who’s short is more likely to have health problems?
Kind of like the folks who decide that self-identified African-American folks are more likely to be criminal…except that, for whatever reason, self-identified African-American folks in the US, at this time, are more likely to be from broken homes. Being from broken homes is FAR more common in criminals than in the general population.
Let’s see, what is a more likely cause….
The social situation someone grew up in makes them behave in socially destructive ways, or there’s some kind of one-drop rule for genetics. (I use the qualifiers because I know a decent number of folks who would be identified as ‘black’ but do not identify as African-American– some would self-identify as Hispanic or Arabic, even, and no small number I’d have guessed were Italian or Spanish.)
In parallel: people who grow up with poor nutrition and/or who have other health problems that impact their growth are more likely to have an unusually high number of health problems, or… height effects your health.
October 20th, 2009 | 9:57 pm
This is a bunch of baloney. It’s TALL people who don’t live as long. Their hearts have to work harder. At least that’s what studies SAID. (As if studies are to believed just because they’re studies in the first place.) What study is THIS? That’s right, Wesley — Why don’t they just leave us alone? And leave the laboratory animals alone, too. Let them try to make their way in the world doing actual work, for God’s sake. There’s been enough with these bozos.
October 20th, 2009 | 10:02 pm
AND BY THE WAY, WESLEY, IF THEY LEFT THE LABORATORY ANIMALS ALONE (instead of making them into laboratory animals in the first place, let alone what they do to them), THEY’D BE MORE APT TO LEAVE US ALONE AND YOU WOULDN’T HAVE TO BE TELLING THEM TO LEAVE US ALONE. Heck, there wouldn’t even be a death culture, or a need for SHS.
October 22nd, 2009 | 4:56 pm
I have two words for these nitwits:
Jimmy Cagney!
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