More Info: Parents & Grandparents
We are not trying to panic parents and grandparents into insisting that all their teenagers get blood tests for prediabetes—or that all teens talk to a psychotherapist.
(Though if a teen you care about has been very inactive for years, with quite unhealthy nutrition, a blood test might be a good idea…and the results could become an encouragement for improving health habits!)
(And if your teen has been feeling depressed for weeks on end…wouldn’t learning some ways to pull out of prolonged sadness be helpful for both the teen and the parent? Both physical activity and health education can help with that.)
School Can Help A Lot
What if health education helped students learn simple ways to manage their stress and helped them to avoid risky situations and substances?
What if our kids had learned to better handle their use of social media and other typical teen social challenges?
Since we have such a large percentage of young people at-risk, we need major, high quality, cost-effective, practical solutions.
(And they also need to be broadly accepted solutions, with minimal controversy. And where there is potential controversy, schools need to provide parents with other choices: whether opting-out or opting-in or offering alternative content for particular topics in health education.).
We are trying to raise awareness and get action.
We are informing you, so that you can help us change things—to benefit all of our children and grandchildren.
Who Will Pay for Their Future Health Insurance, Taxes and Medical Costs?
And by the way, not to make you panic even more—but how will our children and grandchildren pay for their health costs, if most of them have chronic conditions from their teen years or their 20s or 30s?
Think about your own health, and how it has gotten worse with age. Our bodies wear down, we need more health advice, we have more prescriptions, etc etc.
Unless we take drastic action: There will be so many kids so unhealthy from such an early age…into the foreseeable future—with ever-higher health insurance premiums, and fast-rising out-of-pocket deductibles, and a lifetime of chronic diseases.
Given how hard it has been for us to pay for our own health insurance, taxes and health care: How are future, unhealthier generations going to pay for their health-related expenses?
Medical bills are already by far the largest cause of family bankruptcies.
The government has backstopped our health care system more & more:
Health costs were 5% of the federal budget when many of us were growing up. Now they are about 50% of federal spending.
The feds heavily subsidize employer health insurance with hundreds of billions of dollars annually in tax write-offs, as well as paying for Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare and veterans health benefits etc.
State budgets used to have few health care costs—now medical expenditures are typically the 1st or 2nd biggest state expenditure.
States pick up a large portion of Medicaid spending (called AHCCCS in Arizona; Medicaid is “free” health care for lower-income families). In other words, state taxpayers pay for much of the health costs for lower-income families that the federal government doesn’t pay for.
(And by the way, this state health spending also eats a big hole into what the state can afford to invest in K-12 education and other areas…)
State governments, which unlike the federal government don’t have the option to go into debt, will have to cut what they pay.
They will pay less to Medicaid health care providers (which will increase what people with private health insurance have to pay, in order to subsidize hospitals and doctors which are not reimbursed enough by government health plans).
And the government will also save money by decreasing access to state-funded health care, i.e., to AHCCCS.
As cost pressures mount, both private and public health plans & providers will reduce the quality of care—as we have seen for decades. (Just think of the traditional 30-60 minutes with the doctor, now often down to less than 15 minutes.)
Given all of that, we must for everyone’s sake do something major about current health trends among our younger generation.
Will you help?
One quick easy step that you can take now to help us is to fill out our Contact form