You should walk more.
And look: I spend a lot of time talking through the failures of our health system. But, frankly, I don't think the primary problem is care related. It's economic. We pay too much, get too little, have too much job lock, financially ruin families with bad luck, etc. But anyone expecting changes in the funding and delivery of health care to create large scale improvements in the country's health will be disappointed. In fact, the road to a fitter nation doesn't lead through emergency rooms and doesn't demand much of a co-pay. It's walking more, eating vegetables, reducing sodium intake (I suck at this, incidentally), not smoking, and all the rest. Hell, you could probably do more to improve the country's health by rejiggering transportation policy to encourage public transport and walkable cities than by instituting single-payer. Indeed, as Phil Longman has persuasively argued, if you want to reconstruct the health care system so it improves health, you should basically create a system of bribes so people act better.
