On the redder, non-browner states in your scenario, perhaps the most philosophical quote:
they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them
philosophical emission = politician demise?
The post points out one of the key missing foundation principles in health policy.
Health is not simply the absence of disease and a state which is absolute.
But did you know that there is a health profession, which, by its own professional standards and ethics, is charged with advocating for all of the elements of health mentioned for patients and the public?
Would you be surprised to learn that it's professional nursing?
Nursing, I believe, is on the brink of being a failed profession, if it hasn't already failed. Historically, public health nurses at the beginning of the twentieth century, traveled into densely populated urban areas and identified conditions which led and contributed to poor health. These included the lack of fresh air and circulation, fire hazards, the lack of adequate sanitation in the way of fresh potable water and sewage and waste disposal and treatment, the availability of fresh and nutritious foods, and the facilities to store and prepare them for safe consumption. Nurses were the key healthcare providers in moving forward public health measure which protected workers, which turned around fire trap residential and commercial buildings, and which moved communicable disease prevention and containment forward.
At the other population and density extreme, nurses were traveling to the most remote and rural places to deliver maternal/child care to isolated families. They established and eveloped the Frontier Nursing SErvice in Kentucky, for example, and radically reduced maternal and newborn fatality and morbidity rates.
But over the past thirty years, nurses have remained invisible at the health policy table. THe NLRB has eviscerated the collective bargaining ability of nurses, and workplace conditions have become increasingly violent, unsafe and unpalatable for nurses.
Nursing faculty earn less than the most novice two year technical associate degree graduate in a first clinical position, and so, potential faculty aren't entering nursing education, and existing faculty are aging out or are leaving for economic and unreasonable workload reasons.
The corporate media never includes professional nursing as integral and critical pieces of any healthcare reportage, and nurse experts and nursing research are not cited or used as expert sources for health stories.
The public is presnted with only exaggerated and highly inaccurate stereotypes of nurses as oversexed, mondles obedient handmaidens of physicians.
None of this serves the public's interest. yet, there are almost three million registered nurses in the US who, if they could be brought together to work for common health-related goals, could radically impact the morbidity and mortality rates of the US population.
One hypothesis that is probably nigh on impossible to prove, and betrays a certain amount of cultural prejudice, is that modern conservatism and health problems have a common root in a certain rigidity of mind, an inability to take in new information and modify behavior accordingly, and that this same tendency is shown disproportionately by people who tend to stay rooted to places and ways of life which more adaptable people tend to move away from.
Commenting by HaloScan
