Health and wellness from a personal perspective, or even as say, a parent or a guardian of someone, is one thing. But health and wellness from the government angle – now that’s going to be something completely different. Because as a politician or a leader of some sort, you have to remain both sensible and popular, and creating laws or regulations regarding well-being might cause some issues there.
But there are both positives and negatives to the situation, and analysis can happen from a variety of fronts, including funding the fight for better health, drug scheduling, figuring out school lunches, working with labeling laws, and the social pressure with respect to these decisions.
Funding the Fight For Health
A big part that government plays in health and wellness, especially on a societal level, is deciding what to do about funding. What parts of the overall government budget go to things like the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act? How much money goes to helping research addiction and mental illness, and the spread of drug use? Government officials and lobbyists decide those numbers, and their choices can have huge impacts on millions of lives.
Drug Scheduling
If you look up drug scheduling, any logical or practical person can see there are glaring issues with it. This is because the scheduling has been done by the government not for practical or logical reasons, but for political and industrial ones. So, there’s a definite dissonance between your government wanting you to be healthy, and the rules that they put in place regarding people who are attempting to find their own pathways through the concepts of pain and pleasure, especially with things like prescription drugs vs. natural ones.
School Lunches
Another plot point of the story of governmental association with health and wellness is with regard to public school lunches. There needs to be a minimum amount of nutritive value in school lunches, and the government, with all of its resources, is supposed to be able to figure out the idea presentation of this riddle. By most accounts, the government has failed.
Labeling Laws
The FDA leg of the government is in charge of all sorts of things, but one aspect that’s been getting a whole lot of press lately is the idea of labeling, and specifically, GMO labeling. There are millions of people on 10 different sides of that argument, but ultimately, the FDA is going to have the final decision.
Social Pressure
And the government should react, however slowly, to changing perceptions about health and wellness as well. With the obesity epidemic smashing through the United States, one would think that there should be a plan to accept the social pressure to fix this, most likely through education and taxation laws, but so far, not too much has happened.
Originally posted on April 25, 2016 @ 8:22 pm