Healthy States Rankings Put Tennessee, Georgia, & Alabama Near the Bottom

My wife is having brain surgery tomorrow, and there is no way that I can afford $150,000.00 for a surgery like that. Can you? She has done nothing to cause this by living a unhealthy lifestyle. I know a guy that said the same thing as you, and now that he has a kid and sees how much it cost to go to the doc just for a check up he loves insurance. Everyone does not live unhealthy lifestyle, and they end up sick for no reason. Thats life. Sometimes we are delt a bad hand in cards does it mean that its everyone's fault that it happens that way. I work everyday and pay for insurance also. So I know how you feel about rising cost. And I know people who get free health care, and are in better shape than me or my family. I can't help that, but they are the ones that will pay for lying (if they are) in the end.

There are always exceptions, but the major driving factor in the unsustainable costs of health care is unhealthy lifestyle choices. That's simply a fact.

What other factors do these bottom states have in common? At or near the top in smoking rates, same for overweight and obesity, same for lack of exercise, same for per capita prescription drug usage. Hopefully, we're not also at or near the top in hard-headedness and sheer stupidity, (although, we do have some of the lowest graduation rates, and highest rates of illiteracy in the nation), so that we won't look at these facts and try to bend ourselves into pretzels, (apparently the most exercise we've gotten in the past decade) trying to twist the obvious data into meaning something else.

My auto insurance goes up if I continue to display risky behavior such as speeding, hitting people from behind, etc. If someone rear ends me, my rates don't go up, and they shouldn't. That isn't my fault, the same as if someone runs a red light and t-bones me. Accidents happen.

But with health care, more and more we are discovering that even diseases such as cancer are contributed to, or caused by our lifestyle choices. (Not just lung cancer caused by smoking, all cancers). So that since the number 2 cause of death, hot on the heels of smoking induced cancer, and poised to become number one if current trends continue, are all the diseases and health problems brought about by being overweight and/or obese. (Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, cancer, hearth disease, heart attacks, strokes, etc.)

The point is that some folks won't ever change their behavior for the better, and will continue to drag down the whole system, if they aren't given financial incentives to change.

Give all the examples you like of exceptions, or try to change the parameters of the discussion into a moral issue rather than one of practicality and sustainability, but the grim reality is, until we address this issue, our state and national health will continue to decline, and will continue to drive up the cost of health care until it is unattainable to insure anyone, let alone everyone. Those of you who bother yourself to read this now, will remember it way in the back of your minds when we have to do this whole thing over again in the next few years, because we failed to address the core problem of the rising and unsustainable cost curve.

These are the same people that LISTEN to the likes of RASH LIMPBALLS, LOU(SER)DOBBS, ANN(OREXIC)COULTER, and ALL the other "GODLY" preachers on FAUX NEWS. Skeletons indeed! Moral? Oh HELL NO!!!

People in the north are having a heart attack, because they think they have the answer to the souths problems. If people want to smoke let them. Its their buisness. If it give them cancer then they will suffer for that later in life.

Yew are one funnie people. THE WAR IS OVER!!! YOU LOST, GET OVER IT ALREADY!!! No heart attacks in the SOUTH? Go git chew anuther mowntin doo. You are pathetic.