The problem lies not as much within the American health-care system itself as in Americans’ dietary habits.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet.
I think this observation is brilliant. It immediately brought to mind this piece titled “Profile Before Optimizing”:
When it comes time to optimize a piece of software, always get profiling information first, so you can tell where you need to spend your time making improvements. Without profiling data, there is no way of knowing for certain whether any “improvements” have indeed improved the code.