Healthcare As A Human Right: The Case For

Healthcare For All - part two:

Healthcare in the United States is viewed as a service, offered by private, for profit providers and, for the most part, paid for by individuals who purchase insurance, largely through their employers, from for profit insurance companies.  For the vast majority of citizens this method has worked very well and has provided excellent care.  However, the cost of care, and insurance, has skyrocketed, far outpacing the rate of inflation and leaving a growing group of citizens without the means to pay for medical care, or even without access to care.  Unpaid medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy.

Healthcare For All?

On political issues I lean libertarian, but healthcare, especially for those unable to obtain it in the market, has always been the chink in my armor.  I see healthcare as a right equal to free speech and private property, and I can’t understand how a society that protects other basic rights so jealously would let so many in need suffer with conditions easily treatable for those able to secure insurance.  If the human rights argument is not strong enough, then perhaps the cost saving to society of avoiding expensive bad results by providing inexpensive basic care could be enough to persuade more conservative critics of health care for all.

A Downside to Mindfulness

I write so much about the benefits of mindfulness that I have to fess up when I come across a study that reveals negative effects.  This hasn’t been too taxing because there are so few resources painting mindfulness as having any deleterious effects at all.  But recent research out of Georgetown University does just that.

It turns out that mindfulness can inhibit implicit learning and implicit memory.

Maybe It's The Discipline

Mindfulness works as a therapy to increase impulse control.  While the results of practice are well-researched, the neurological mechanisms are indeterminate.   Something about mindfulness practice actually changes the cortical make-up of the brain.  Why this happens is not yet known.  It could be the focused attention or the release of judgmental thoughts.  Or, it could be the discipline.

Meditating with Purpose

If mindfulness is the sharpening of one’s ability to notice, then perhaps this noticing can be applied to the subtle changes in thoughts, behavior, and emotions that precede or come concurrently with the onset of a mood change or a psychotic episode.  One changes as one enters any psychiatric episode.  Noticing these changes can enable the individual to take whatever steps are necessary, and effective, to head off a debilitating psychiatric break.

A Simple Practice

Here's a simple meditation technique that anyone can fit into their schedule.  It’s called the Twenty Breaths Practice.  It only takes a few minutes, can be performed almost anywhere, and can yield great stress relief.

How To Begin Meditating

Meditation is quite different from sitting there doing nothing, thinking nothing.  It is instead a focused attention on one’s present experience.  A chance to minimize the distractions that pull one away from the present. Pleasant events are often spoiled by comparison to other good experiences or worry that this wonder may soon end.  Difficult experiences are often tempered by a desire for escape and the fantasy of being somewhere else doing something else.  The mind will wander all over the place and our present experience, good or bad, may be missed.

So meditation becomes a practice.  A practice to remain here, in the present moment, fully aware.  It is something that must be practiced to achieve benefit, and the practice, though simple, can be extremely challenging.  But the benefits, as described in other posts and in countless others’ experience, are worth it.

So how does one begin?