Jimmy Kimmel reveals the heartlessness of healthcare in America | Arwa Mahdawi

I don’t know why everyone in America is so obsessed with health care reform and why it causes endless debate. It seems obvious that there is a very simple and very fair solution to this endless reform rigmarole: let poor people die.

This may sound sort of harsh but bear with me. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion without a rigorous analysis of the facts and a long hard look at cold hard reality. And it’s this sort of objective thinking that’s really needed when it comes to health care reform. The one thing we must be careful not to do is get emotional about things like life and death to push a political agenda.

Take Jimmy Kimmel for example. On Monday the talkshow host delivered an emotional monologue about his new son, who was born with severe heart defects requiring emergency surgery. At the end of this he urged Americans to support the Affordable Care Act.

Kimmel noted that before the ACA was introduced, “if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition. If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”

While Kimmel’s story is obviously tragic he’s not exactly qualified to decide important policy issues for America. I mean, the guy is a celebrity, not a politician. Further, it is selfish to suggest that Americans should feel some sort of responsibility for their fellow citizens. It doesn’t matter how sick someone might be or how many pre-existing conditions they might have, if they’re hardworking and motivated they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find a way to pay for themselves.

As Joe Walsh, a former Congressman, tweeted on Tuesday afternoon: “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.” Walsh, by the way, doesn’t even want to pay for his own kids’ healthcare – at one point he owed $ 117,000 in child support. Now there’s a guy who truly understands the American values of individual freedom and choice.

Oh, you know what? I give up. There’s no point attempting to satirize the sick state of America’s attitude towards health care – it’s already beyond parody. I mean, on Monday, Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama implied that people with pre-existing health conditions just aren’t living their lives “the right way.” Kimmel’s son may have been fresh out of the womb but he must have done something wrong to be landed with heart problems, right?

And remember when Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz compared heath care to iPhones? “Americans have choices,” Chaffetz explained. “Maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care.” An iPhone costs around $ 800. A simple appendectomy can cost up to $ 180,000. But making your own choices? That’s priceless.

And then there’s the imitable Paul Ryan who reminded us that “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need. Obamacare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your needs.” He forgot to add the bit about freedom being the option to die when you can’t afford to buy what you want to fit what you need.

Health insurance simply doesn’t work on the free market. It’s not a bloody iPhone. In a free market, it makes no sense for insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. In a free market, it makes sense for CEOs of insurance companies to earn millions of dollars while poor people die.

Health insurance also isn’t efficient on a truly free market. According to the Bloomberg Health-Care Efficiency Index America has one of the least efficient health care systems in the world because it is so fragmented. Only Jordan, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Brazil and Russia ranked lower in the countries assessed.

For decades, Americans have been aggressively sold the idea that a national health care system is a socialist nightmare that runs counter to American values of freedom and choice. This started after the Second World War, when President Truman proposed a universal national health insurance program. His project failed in large part because it was fiercely attacked by the once-influential American Medical Association.

The AMA invoked fears about communism and branded the idea of universal healthcare as “socialized medicine” and un-American. Truman retorted “I put it to you, it is un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity.” Well, it’s not the sort of Christianity that Republicans practice it seems.

You must have been born with un-operable heart defects not to agree with Kimmel’s statement that “if your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make.”

The fact that Kimmel can make headlines for pointing out what should be the obvious – in a supposedly civilized country – is just mind-boggling. The health care debate may seem complex but at its core it boils down to a simple question of who matters and who doesn’t. And it seems very clear that, in America, if you’re poor you don’t matter.

Jimmy Kimmel reveals the heartlessness of healthcare in America | Arwa Mahdawi

A moment that changed me: a clump of hair falling out in the shower | Arwa Mahdawi

For what is essentially dead matter, your hair can have an enormous impact on your life. I found that out the hard way.

It started when I was 14. I was at summer camp in Maine. In many respects, this was one of the best summers of my life. At school in New York I was socially awkward and a bit of an outsider. At camp I got the chance to reinvent myself. I became more confident and outgoing; boys suddenly seemed to like me. The new me came with a new body. I’d always been a gangly kid, but that summer I gained weight and filled out. I developed breasts. Puberty seemed to strike all at once and, when I got back home to New York, I realised I wasn’t quite ready for it.

So I did what women often do when they feel uncomfortable in their own skin: I made myself smaller. To begin with I just became “health conscious”. I developed a keen interest in nutrition and started to exercise. I turned into one of those irritating caricatures in magazines; running five miles at 5am then subsisting on handfuls of almonds and smugness for the rest of the day.

I got steadily thinner. Seeing the numbers on the scale going down was exhilarating. Having so much control – measurable control – over something was addictive. So 125 pounds became 115 pounds became 100 pounds. At my lowest point I weighed just under 90 pounds (around 6 stone or 40kg). I was 5ft 6in (1.68m). I looked disgusting.

Want to know just how odd I looked? I grew a tail. I’d spent my entire life blissfully ignorant of the existence of my tailbone. But suddenly I had a bony little protrusion that made sitting down agony. Still, the tail didn’t really bother me. Nor did the fact that my periods had stopped. The constant warnings that my bones were growing brittle, that I was jeopardising my fertility and killing myself – all of this had very little effect on me. Seeing my family upset was upsetting, sure, but I was more preoccupied with my illness. It was the only thing I cared about.

For months I convinced myself that I was fine; that I was in control of my rapidly deteriorating body. Despite being fragile I still exercised feverishly. I did well at school. I’d lost interest in other people but other people seemed to have developed a new interest in me. The popular girls at school suddenly started to pay attention to me. I wasn’t just the dorky girl with an English accent and an Arab name any more. I was skinny – I was the skinniest. I had a brand.

I had regular appointments with a nutritionist, a doctor and a therapist. I read all I could about anorexia and attended these appointments with a certain superiority complex. I knew better than all of these people, I thought. I was in control.

Then, while having a shower one day, a clump of hair came out in my hand. Hair loss often happens with anorexia: the medical name for it is telogen effluvium. Basically your starved body enters crisis mode and concentrates all its energy on staying alive. Luxuries like maintaining a full head of hair are quickly cut from your body’s energy budget.

The popular girls at school suddenly started to pay attention to me. I was skinny. I was the skinniest

I’d suspected for a while that my hair was thinning. There had been a growing trail of evidence on my pillow, on the bathroom floor, on my clothes. But I’d never actually pulled a handful of my hair away from my scalp before. I remember feeling so sick in that instant that I almost threw up. Except, of course, I hadn’t eaten anything, so there was nothing to throw up. Holding a fistful of my hair, something inside me clicked. I realised what I’d done to myself and, for the first time since becoming sick, I actually wanted to get better. So I set about doing that. I changed schools and started over somewhere a little less nurturing of neuroses than New York.

I didn’t get better right away, of course. I gained weight fairly quickly, but my relationship with food remained dysfunctional for a long time. Anorexia isn’t a disease of the body; it’s a disease of the mind. For years I didn’t like to eat in front of people; I treated carbs like they were cancer; I had intermittent bouts of bulimia. But slowly I got better.

Today I can finally say that my relationship with food is normal. Although, in a society that encourages women to treat their bodies as their enemy, I’m sometimes unsure what normal is. I know very few women who don’t have some degree of disordered eating. I know very few women whose self-worth isn’t linked, in some small way, to their weight. And the same, by the way, can be said of our hair. Like many things in life, you don’t realise how important your hair is to you until you start to lose it. You don’t realise how conditioned you are to see your hair as a measure of your worth as a woman.

After years of my body being the enemy, I’ve finally made peace with it. It’s just a shame that it took my hair falling out for me to finally confront what was going on inside my head.

A moment that changed me: a clump of hair falling out in the shower | Arwa Mahdawi

Cigarette marketing back on Television: decades of campaigning up in smoke | Arwa Mahdawi

‘The several e- prefixes even more obfuscate the potential well being risks, generating them seem significantly less physical, a lot more digital.’ Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Photographs

They are disease-riddled, snaggle-toothed pariahs. Some have misplaced limbs, some have misplaced lungs, and some of them poison babies. Smokers, as portrayed in today’s ad breaks, tend to cut a pretty disgusting figure, cautionary tales rather than aspirational role-models. But, following a notable return to Tv marketing by Big Tobacco, the modern day Marlboro man seems to be acquiring a makeover. For the first time in a lot more than 20 many years, cigarette ads are back on British Television screens, and many decades of anti-smoking campaigning could be undermined.

On Monday night, British American Tobacco launched the 1st-ever Tv commercials for its Vype brand of e-cigarettes. If you missed the spots, you may be questioning how you go about promoting a vaporising device designed to deliver a potent parasympathomimetic alkaloid into a person’s lungs. The response, apparently, is “eye-catching people jumping”. The Vype ad functions two urbanites sprinting by means of city streets before getting propelled into the air through massive clouds of vapour. From their seems of elation, one can only surmise that vaping Vype is borderline orgasmic. Goodbye Sickly Smoker hello Vigorous Vaper watch out Everyone Else.

Britain banned tv advertisements promoting cigarettes in the 1960s, and ads for other tobacco items, such as cigars, have been prohibited given that the early 1990s. Nevertheless, recent advertising codes weren’t created with e-cigarettes in thoughts and the principles around what is now a $ 3bn (£1.8bn) business globally are still somewhat hazy. This regulatory gap has not gone unnoticed by Huge Tobacco, which is capitalising on the current state of flux with what is arguably the sector’s most prolific spate of marketing action since the 1980s.

The advent of e-cigarette advertisements in the airwaves is harmful for a number of reasons. To get started with, it dangers renormalising smoking negating the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer cash that have gone into overall health campaigns developed to make puffing on a cigarette seem to be a lot more gormless than glamorous.

“Encounter the breakthrough,” breathes a throaty voice at the finish of the Vype ad. It’s not quite clear what this breakthrough is, but you’re evidently meant to want a bit of whatever’s sweeping the great-hunting pair in the advert off their feet.

Then there’s the wellness implications of e-cigarettes which are still ambiguous. Proponents argue that they are effective quit-smoking resources that can conserve 1000′s of lives and, as a result, need to be actively advertised. Nevertheless, nobody truly knows what extended-term hazards e-cigarettes pose. And it is worth bearing in thoughts the degree to which arguments about the health benefits of e-cigarettes echo the claims with which typical cigarettes were initial promoted. Viceroys were “dentist-advisable”, hospital patients puffed on Chesterfields, and “a lot more doctors smoke[d] Camels than any other cigarette”.

Whilst Vype may not be generating any explicit claims to be GP-accredited, every thing about its marketing, from the lithe protagonists in the ad, to the vamped-up nevertheless vapid vocabulary, is created to make it seem like component of a healthier, aspirational lifestyle. “Our secret is ECOpure, a premium top quality e-liquid that consists of pharmaceutical-grade nicotine,” reads the web copy: it is jargon formulated to existing the image of all-all-natural substances sanctioned by science. The quite a few e- prefixes even more obfuscate the prospective overall health risks, generating them seem much less physical, more digital. Even so there is practically nothing electronic about the effects of nicotine and no this kind of issue as e-cancer, e-addiction or e-death.

“Our wish to redefine smoking satisfaction knows no limits,” proclaims Vype’s corporate site. But it must. The regulation of cigarette marketing, coupled with policy adjustments and price hikes more than the years has led to a important reduction in the price of smoking.

Fewer than 1 in five grownups in England are smokers, the lowest figure in close to 80 many years. If laws are not brought into curb e-cigarette advertising, we could see decades of progress go up in smoke. Or, maybe, vapour.

Cigarette marketing back on Television: decades of campaigning up in smoke | Arwa Mahdawi

The unhealthy side of wearable fitness devices | Arwa Mahdawi

The Nike Fuelband. ‘Society is more and more embracing a trend that rewrites compulsive behaviour as healthier.’ Photograph: Hugh Threlfall / Alamy

Probably the worst chat-up line I have ever had the misfortunate of overhearing was when a guy in a Brooklyn bar sidled up to a girl and complimented her on her Jawbone. “I’ve commenced to put on a Basis as well as a Jawbone,” he sniffed, extending his wrist for inspection. “The Jawbone is elegant, confident, but the Basis is a much more critical piece of hardware. I genuinely like how its galvanic skin response sensor tracks my perspiration levels.” The lady made a polite little noise then swiftly eliminated herself to the other end of the space.

There are a couple of things to be realized from this unhappy story. The 1st is that enthusing about how you like to quantify your sweat statistics is not a great way to get laid. Even in Brooklyn. The 2nd is that the proliferation of wearable fitness products this kind of as Nike’s Fuelband, Jawbone Up, and the Basis band, coupled with the rising recognition of well being and fitness apps, has pushed self-monitoring from niche geek action and into the mainstream.

A recent examine by the Long term Laboratory and Confused.com identified that about 60% of 18- to 34-12 months-olds in the Uk have employed a self-quantifying app or support to keep track of their fitness amounts, mental well being and sleep patterns. These figures are mirrored across the pond. In accordance to a Pew report, 60% of US adults say they track their excess weight, diet or physical exercise regimen. And these numbers are increasing. Certainly, it is extremely probable that you or somebody you know will be have obtained or offered some kind of wearable fitness solution this Christmas season.

Evangelists of self-monitoring technological innovation proclaim that by way of information lies enlightenment. Measuring ourselves, they say, will aid us comprehend ourselves. We will all end up a number of percentage factors more healthy and happier. Nonetheless, I’m not positive this is appropriate. Even though it is accurate that self-monitoring can support push individuals into generating constructive lifestyles changes, it could also be argued that the growing popularity of this kind of technology is normalising neurotic behaviour.

When I was a teenager I went through a brief phase of compulsive self-quantification. It was known as anorexia. I counted every calorie, weighed myself obsessively and exercised fanatically. For about a 12 months my daily life was a running tally of power-in and power-out and I would diligently feed all these numbers into a type of anorexia algorithm regularly adjusting different variables in purchase to maximise excess weight-reduction efficiencies. The end result was that I weighed six stone and my hair fell out in clumps. I looked grim, but I did get a very good grounding in data analytics.

This was all a long time in the past and I am now totally recovered. This is in no tiny element due to the reality that I actively steer clear of weighing myself and attempt not to count calories. It took me a long time to quit seeing foods as a spreadsheet of numbers and commence thinking about it as nutrition. It would have taken me even longer if the type of self-tracking engineering that is ubiquitous these days was offered when I was unwell. Dr Kimberly Dennis, a psychiatrist who specialises in eating disorder therapy, estimates that about 75% of her younger-adult sufferers use their phones in a way that enables their consuming disorders. Apps that facilitate calorie-counting and food-logging are an anorexic’s best friend and worst enemy. With society more and more embracing a sort of “techorexia” that rewrites compulsive behaviour as healthy, it is getting to be simpler for people with serious eating problems to pretend there is nothing wrong.

All of this is not to say that strapping on a Jawbone or monitoring your foods consumption and workout with some type of mobile app is inherently harmful. Indeed, for some folks, this kind of self-tracking can be amazingly helpful. I just fret that as our lives turn out to be far more data-driven, we are becoming overly fixated on the worth of the variables that we can measure. In our developing obsession with counting every thing and anything at all, it is attainable that we are losing track of what truly counts.

The unhealthy side of wearable fitness devices | Arwa Mahdawi