It bothers me when people smoke three packs of cigarettes a day for thirty years and then stick me with their health bill.
It's hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden.
This double burden of disease is rapidly putting a serious brake on the development efforts of many countries.
We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.
People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs.
Growing and aging populations are putting increased pressure on health-care systems that are already buckling under the burden of chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes.
We're not going to have you burdening the health system.
A diagnosis is burden enough without being burdened by secrecy and shame.
Health of body and mind is a great blessing, if we can bear it.
