While poor people generally favour inexpensive pre-prepared food which is typically unhealthy, many of the most healthy foods are remarkably inexpensive and just require effort to produce healthy and tasty meals. For the most part, if you just look for "Staple Foods" you will find a lot of healthy foods which are inexpensive throughout the year and can account for the majority of your diet.

My wife was actually telling me the other day that Obama was touting safeway:

Obama Cites Safeway Among Workplace Health Innovators

Of course, praising them and using them as a model are 2 different things, but at least they're aware of this company.

     From what I found from a little research, eating only staple foods can also be an unhealthy activity:

Although nutritious, staple foods generally do not by themselves provide a full range of nutrients, so other foods need to be added to the diet to prevent malnutrition.[1] For example, the deficiency disease pellagra is associated with a diet consisting primarily of maize, and beriberi with a diet of white (i.e., refined) rice.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_food

And even at stores like Save-A-Lot, bread and cereal often cost over $2.00 (which can be quite expensive to people in certain income brackets especially if they can't get food stamps where they live).  Getting by on a food budget of $20.00 a week can be quite difficult, and if you only have a food budget that large, chances are you couldn't afford Safe Ways insurance plan.

Actually a myth.  Healthy foods are actually quite cheap.

Beat me to it - Eating healthy does not mean you buy the "Healthy Choice" brand meals.  There are is a ton of food that can be put into a healthy diet at an extremely affordable price - and even in a good variety.

Note btw that I do not actually qualify as someone who eats healthy - I am more likely to ask for the extra side of country gravy than I am to eat a salad =P  So its not like I support this to save myself some money - I just don"t expect other people to pay for my indulgences.

An individual can not live entirely on staple foods, but the majority of a person's diet can be made up of staple foods and their daily cost for food can be less than the cost of a single (inexpensive) instant meal. A couple of times in my life I have been forced to live off of less than $3 per day for food, and its not hard but you don't get the same (excessive) ammounts of meat, dairy and processed products that make up a lot of people's diet and eat most of their food budget.

The government is not in the way of better insurance, the free market is in the way.

Essentially, health insurance is risk sharing.  You are sharing the risk of illness with numerous other people.  There is a average per person cost associated with this risk sharing, and those who are healthy end up paying for those who illness costs more than their premiums. The problem with the insurance industry is that there is a much higher cost attached to provide incomes for insurance employees and million dollar CEOs.  Insruance companies are an unnecessary middle man, standing in the way of efficiency.

This lack of efficiency is obvious when we look at healthcare costs per country.  For example, the United States pays three times more for healthcare than the United Kingdom even though 50 million Americans are uninsured.

Another problem with the free market is that humans are rational animals with emotions, and because of this many sick and dying people with no insurance are treated by doctors and hospitals, and they dont pay a dime for it.  The result of this is that doctors and hospitals charge paying customers more to make up for what they lost for the non-paying, uninsured patients.  Also, recent polls show that even though Americans are split on the healthcare issue, that the yougner generation is for government involvement and the older generation is against it.  Meaning that government involvement and increased efficiency will eventually come.

To summarize:

You are already paying for other people's healthcare, and with private health insurance you end up paying more because uninsured patients dont pay anything for their treatment and you have you pay income for insurance CEOs and employees. 

The people that are standing in the way now are those who profit from unefficient private health insurance and those who foolishly associate the private market with freedom, thinking that putting the power in the hands of a wealthy, self-serving elite is better that putting power in the hands of a democratic government.

When you look at outcomes though, the United States has one of the top (if not the top) survival rate in (pretty much) for every major illness ... On top of this, the United States has a much higher obesity rate which translates into much higher costs for their system on the whole.

Basically, while the United States pays more for healthcare they also get a lot more healthcare than anywhere else in the world.

Thats an unfounded conclusion.

The United States has far less smokers than other developed countries.  Also, the United States cancer survival rate is good, but so is the rest of the developed world.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dai_smo-health-daily-smokers

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_dea_fro_can-health-death-from-cancer

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival-rates-vary-by-country

There are a couple of problems with this that I can see.

1) How do you check if people are living a healthy lifestyle? It seems a little big brotherish if you're checking in a way that won't let them lie and a little foolish if you aren't checking and so they can lie.

2) The rich have the most time and money to live a healthy lifestyle. A lot of the lower poor don't have the time or money to go to the gym, live in poor quality housing and do not have the ability to buy the variety of food that the rich can. So the poor could be worse off under this system than the rich, which is a little backwards to me.

3) It completely and utterly screws over the people who live unhealthy lifestyles. These are the people (largely through their own doing) who need healthcare most. This entire system is basically 'get healthy or the system will leave you behind'. I'm a wee bit of a socialist so I don't actually believe in the system leaving anybody behind - even if its their own stupid fault that they're in that position.

I do agree with incentivising healthy lifestyles, I just don't believe that essentially abandoning the people who don't live one is the way to go about it.


If you can figure out a way to fix those problems though, it seems like an interesting idea.