How Agricultural Policy Drives the Cost of Health Insurance Plans Ever Upward

It would be nice if anything else were as reliable as the ever-increasing cost of health insurance plans.  From Atlanta to Seattle, the cost of health insurance in the US has spiraled out of the ability for most to afford.  This includes even the most basic of coverage that only addresses catastrophic illness.  Most would be surprised at the level in which the massive pile of agricultural regulations that are debated on Capitol Hill every five years affect their monthly health care premiums.

Consider how the food typically consumed in North America has changed in just the last fifty years.  During that time, “diseases of affluence” such as heart disease and other obesity related illnesses have skyrocketed.  In the last decade or so, this has been universally attributed to the increase in caloric intake from processed grains.  It has already been show that the cost of health insurance plans and the incidence of obesity and cardo-vascular illnesses track very evenly with the rise of corn syrup usage in the North American diet (mostly in the form of soda pop) – and that's just one ingredient.  Just think how the premiums for health insurance plans are affected by a child getting diabetes at 12 instead of 60.

It is also useful to note the similarly even track between the use of chemical food additives, pesticides, herbicides, processing and plastics that the incidence of digestive troubles, cancers, neurological disorders and just about any other disorder that isn't a traditional infectious disease.    Health insurance plans are similarly affected by long lingering deaths that are often associated with such ailments, not to mention the waste of human potential that the increases in neurological disorders represent.

Progarms that are funded by the Farm Bill are responsible for the growing practices and additives that are present in the food chain.  In fact, the farm bill is responsible for everything from soil conservation to school lunches.  It sets the rate for subsidization.  Most Americans don't even realize that all food in the country is subsidized by the US Federal Government, just like nearly every other federal government on Earth.

By supporting huge swaths of grain across the Mid-western US states, the Farm Bill has increasingly created a system where planting such massive amounts of just a few crops causes something of a disposal problem each year.  Subsequent processing turns them into less healthy and potentially dangerous options that have large, federally supported marketing departments and employ USDA and FDA employees to check up on them without the oversight of the CDC.  Indeed, great pains are made to separate the influence of agricultural policy from the cost of health insurance plans, though it only requires two logical steps.

The increasing burden created by the use of this agricultural model has led to the food supply available today, and the disorder caused by it drives up the cost of health insurance plans.

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