Jack

This is where I think policy flirts with politics.  You talked about corn subsidies.  People in the United States allocate 2 ½ billion dollars a year to farmers so that they will produce corn that we don’t need.  We pay extra for farmers to produce even more corn.  I was telling someone the other day that the most important health policy in America concerns the US farm bill. The U.S. farm bill probably has greater impact on health care than anything else. How do we keep rural hospitals thriving? They thrive in communities that have high subsidy payments.  The county in which I work (Yuma County Colorado) is the second leading corn producing counties in the nation. Hugh corn production. But it also gets large subsidies for wheat, cattle, and corn and soybeans. The county gets millions of dollars in subsidy payments that are essential direct payments to farmers.  Don’t say this in a red state, but this is farm welfare. Farmers gets $10,000 to either produce corn or not produce corn. They have money that they can spend. Thats what keeps the rural hospitals alive—they thrive when the county has money.  So, the farm bill is probably one of the most important health care bills –and the corn subsidy is one of those parts of the bill which has a major health impact. What do you do with all of the corn? We’ve started using at least some of it for Ethanol.  There is a positive there.  Policy becomes politics when you are talking about the farm bill.  The farm bill is a political piece. Try to cut subsidies. There is not a red or blue politician who will cut farm subsidies. We operate in a free market—except in agriculture.

Bill B

Jack, we’ve often talking about a perfect storm during these forums.  We have been talking about three Hugh entities: Agribusiness, big pharma, and healthcare. There is also a four entity. This is the food distribution (super-market) industry.  We have talked about how this storm has emerged.  How these major industries interplay with one another.  And how their alliance has become reinforced by politics and money. The critical question becomes: how do you find leverage with these Hugh powerful entities that are controlling the health of people living in America.

Jack

One of the mental models that we have in the United States concerns businesses operating in our country: Businesses should be able to do whatever they want. It is the consumer who has to be careful about over-consuming sugar, overeating, and becoming obese. Judgements are not made about a product being readily available and cheap. It’s your duty as a consumer to limit what you consume—and that is what a “free market” does. Except that’s not what works, because, as Jeremy noted, we are not rational consumers.  We go to the center aisles of the grocery store because we can buy more per pound in the center isles than we can in the outside aisles of the grocery store.  It seems that people’s mental models don’t follow what’s healthy. Their models follow what is available and inexpensive.

Mitch

Another piece of the puzzle concerns the lack of convincing evidence. Food-producing businesses are disputing the conclusion that high fructose corn syrup is bad for you.  They put out literature that reports findings from a number of studies that stir and muddy the water. These reports make us wonder what we really know since there are all of these contradictory studies. It is not clear unless you look at who sponsored the study. There really is an extreme bias in the outcomes.