Health care and education: Let’s get physical

Image by ChicagoGeek via Flickr

Wrapped within the ridiculous partisan rhetoric that swirled around Obama’s speech to schoolchildren on Tuesday was a sad fact: that he was unable to mention health to millions of American kids. Aside from briefly telling them not to “spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox,” the subject of a physical education basically never came up.

What’s most disgusting about the attempts to cast Obama’s speech as “indoctrination,” is that no matter one’s stance on health care reform, health is still a viable discussion topic. It’s even more important when children are the subject of that discussion. A recent report in the journal Academic Pediatrics revealed that

researchers found that as of 2004, nearly 4 percent of 2- to 19-year olds  in the U.S. were severely obese. That was up  more than three-fold from 1976, and more than 70 percent since 1994.

That’s severely obese.

In his speech, Obama argued that the circumstances of one’s life shouldn’t limit the possibilities for one’s future. He said,

what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude.

But what about how you feel? If you can’t concentrate, maybe it’s not because you’re bad at math. Maybe it’s your diet.

Had Obama dared to mention that kids ought to exercise their bodies as much as their brains, the backlash would have been immediate. Any prolonged discussion of health by the President would have been labeled political indoctrination. Knowing this, Obama ignored the connection between eating well and learning well almost entirely, to the detriment of all kids, not just those who were actually allowed to see the speech.

So, unfortunately, the politics of possible health care reform legislation has now perhaps ruined an opportunity to suggest to millions of American kids that they ought to be healthier, or to even prompt them to discuss the idea of a healthy lifestyle amongst themselves. It’s so backwards, it’s practically insane.

The fact of that matter is that if any kind of reform of the US health system is to be successful, it will rely on this generation being healthier than the last. The Boomers and Gen X’ers will apply untold pressure on any kind of health system, no matter how good it is, and having a fatter, sicker generation follow isn’t going to help anybody, no matter where they land on the political spectrum.