soapbox

This is sort of an amazing article. Some people went through the federal health care budget and looked at how much of the total cost was due to diabetes related expenses. (Medications, cutting off legs, etc.) The final amount was one dollar out of every 8 in the budget, which actually amounts to more money than the department of education’s budget.

Now, some of that can’t be easily fixed. You can’t force people to take care of themselves. However, a lot of the problem, especially with type 2 diabetes is that people don’t even realize they have it until they have their first heart attack. By then their entire circulatory system is screwed up and it’s a matter of playing catch-up to try and prevent gangrene and other nastiness. I have a feeling that if there was just more screening (and fewer obese people), they could cut the costs way down. The pills for type 2 diabetes aren’t dirt cheap, but it’s costs a lot less than surgery.

Study finds staggering cost of treating diabetics - Yahoo! News

In related news, I apparently have to have my wisdom teeth out.

(1) Nathaniel, have you noticed that the blog has been getting ‘a lot’ of rhymes-with-’yourmamasfatbutnotasfatasiam’ recently? I mean, not a whole lot, but I’ve deleted from moderation maybe a couple comments a day in the past couple weeks, up from ~1/week?

(2) I am attempting to run a piece of code that will take a couple days on dactyl, so if you can’t read this message anymore please let Nathaniel (and me, but he knows more) know so he can fix things. Hopefully it won’t break anything, but just in case.

And finally, since every post needs a picture/photo/graphic, and since this is a pretty nerdy post, here you go: