Skimming the Surface of the State of the Union

I'm pretty sure that despite Obama's lofty goals with health care, there will continue to be problems that plague the way our system works, and the way the American people react to it.
For instance, this article about co-payments with health insurance.  It makes complete sense that people will reduce the number of trips that they make to the doctor if their copay is too large, causing their well-being to snowball into more serious conditions and leading to large and unmanageable hospital bills.

I do not understand why people cannot comprehend the importance of education's impact upon healthcare.  The two are inherently intertwined.  Too much of self-care has been left to families, and only the most severe medical threats are taught in schools.  Drugs, AIDS, and sexual consequences are usually stressed in health education, if a school is well-funded enough to have such a program, but there is an overwhelming negligence toward health maintenance and truly caring for oneself.  This, my friends, is a problem.  It is all related.  By depreciating the value of health to the benefit of "more important" school subjects (read: subjects that will be present in state tests), health and education about illnesses, up to and including mental illnesses, become forgotten or forsaken.  There is so much of an emphasis upon rushing, upon competition, in American society, that health falls to the wayside, and Americans then pay for it, in volumes and multitudes.

Here is an article about an educational radio show in Spanish that is currently broadcast in Rhode Island on Wednesday mornings at 9.  This is the sort of program that I think would be effective-- it reaches not only those who can read, and can read in English, but it also allows for interaction between patients and doctors on important topics that can be embarrasing to raise with one's physician in person.  I hope that this program fosters others that can become even more successful and use media that are easily accessible to a large number of uninformed, hard-working, and treasured citizens of the United States.

Take care.