Health-Autonomy 18dec2012 Rev9

Health Autonomy:
A Populations Voice of Reason

By Scott Perkins
There is a general assumption in life that every individual desires to be healthy. This includes an understanding that life has a beginning and an end with varying degrees of health status changes throughout a lifespanor any variance within how an individual perceives or measures an actual state of health in any given moment in time. The question is: How do individuals rationalize decisions that correlate to healthy living? The knowledge needed to answer this question begins by first identifying three broad categories that account for our health status: healthcare, genetics and environment/lifestyle factors. Even though healthcare-or a system that provides medical care to individuals-only accounts for 10% of our health status, it retains the greatest capacity to rationalize the decisions that change our health status. By quantifying the actual changes, healthcare can demonstrate how treatments cause a positive effect to our health status. Healthcares decision methodology positions the knowledge of one individual in a very influential position over other individuals. The knowledge that healthcare
2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.
providers utilize in making decisions that change a patients health status are useful when an individuals health status is diagnosed as abnormal. This state of health could be broadly labeled as a health outcome-or an abnormal health status beyond an individuals ability to control on his or her own. Patients who are unfortunately diagnosed with a health outcome will be in receivership of treatments and procedures that help them return to and then preserve more normal health status. It is therefore a rational decision to receive healthcares treatments in ones desire to live a healthy life. Generally, healthcares methodology involves periodic check-ups with a primary care physician. These visits may eventually lead to a diagnosis of a health outcome. If there is a diagnosis of a condition, disease, syndrome or injury, a primary care physician or specialist will decide on what form and amount of treatment will be needed to improve this health outcome. When being treated, a patient will then receive some form of evidence that the treatments caused a positive effect to a health outcome. The proof is normally
Scott Perkins has been
a health and fitness entrepreneur for over 20 years. He received a Bachelor of Science from Springfield College and a Masters in Business/ Health Care from The Heller School at Brandeis University. In addition to creating a successful health and fitness company, Scott has authored over 30 articles and essays.
objectively quantified in the form of imagery or statistics. This provides a basis for both parties to interpret and analyze the reasoning behind why these decisions were made in the first place. Again, generally speaking, most individuals would agree that these decisions are of great value and meaning within any individuals desire to live a healthy life. These decisions are rational. It is difficult to take a position against these actions within healthcare. These actions are virtues because they attempt to preserve the quality of health status within an individual. In
1
121812 rev9
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/HealthAutonomy
Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

fact, we should encouragenot discouragean increase scientific research and innovation that improves the production of technologies that apply modern miracles to address and ameliorate future physical and emotional distress and dysfunction. When healthcare treats a health outcome accurately, we can all benefit from this methodology at some point in our lives. Logically, healthcares ability and capacity to successfully identify and treat health outcomes will continue to grow within the context of innovation and practice as the knowledge and understanding of the human bodys function and dysfunction increases. In fact, according to The World Health Organization, approximately 13,000 conditions, diseases, syndromes and injuries have been identified that use over 6,000 drugs and 4,000 procedures to treat health outcomes. However, this diagnosis and treatment paradigm creates a very complicated decision-making process that has many disadvantages and problems. The less prominent issue comes from the position that healthcare shares in providing the actions, responsibility and accountability for population health. Though healthcare has a moral obligation to care for those who are ill, healthcare is in a less favorable position to help the general population with actions that prevent disease. Such actions are largely outside of the scope of healthcares methodology for changing health status. In order to achieve this, the general population needs to be more accountable for health-related decisions by increasing a shared sense of responsibility for its own health. We all experience health throughout our lives and the decisions and actions we take constantly change our state of health. Even though these changes may eventually lead to a diagnosis of a health outcome, it is by no means healthcares job to be accountable for what is an individuals responsibility for choices that may accumulate and manifest into preventable conditions and diseases over time. Of course, individuals do have freedom of choice not to exercise, not to eat properly and to smoke and/or take dangerous drugs despite overwhelming evidence documenting how these selfdestructive choices contribute to the increased or decreased risks of preventable conditions and disease such as high blood pressure and heart disease. More abstract factorsunemployment, violence, education, divorce, housing, finance, poverty, work environment and othersalso contribute positive and negatively to an individuals health status and may even add to the aggregate of factors changing our health status over time. However, there is no basis for individuals to measure how they perceive these factors contributing to their health status changes that accumulate and manifest into preventable diseases and conditions over time. Therefore, individuals have a difficult time changing their healthrelated behaviors due to their inability to accurately interpret and analyze whether or not decisions within these factors were rational. Individuals have no basis for measuring the cause-and-effect relationship of how they perceive these factors changing their health status over time. This places healthcare in a morally responsible position to use its knowledge to change our health status when its too late. So instead of developing ideas that are more proactive in preventing disease, we perpetuate discussions within our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts about how to change the delivery of a system that reacts to illness. Healthcares knowledge and methodology is therefore of very little use in helping the general population learn and understand how to change the environmental and lifestyle factors that account for 70% of an individuals health status. This point was underrepresented within the deliberation and consensus-building effort in the 2008 Affordable Care Act (ACA). Cost was the central issue. Given that the United States has the highest healthcare spending in the world and close to 50 million uninsured residents, the amount of money we spend in healthcare cannot be ignored. Logically, an argument that is formed around affordability is a sound strategy if the goal is to insure more people. With per capita spending within the United States healthcare system at $7.960 (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) many provisions within the ACA focus on inefficiencies and waste.

According to Shannon Brownlees book Overtreated, there is a lot of it. Approximately 20-30% of healthcare spending does nothing to improve our health, which is another way of saying that much variationmisuse, overuse and underuseexists within healthcares ability to correlate how its treatment decisions translate to quality health outcomes. Forty percent of patients with coronary artery disease get incomplete or inappropriate care; 60% of asthma, stroke, and pneumonia patients get incomplete or inappropriate care. So if the ACA is focused on inefficiencies and wasteful spending within a system that is focused on treating disease, the obvious questions are: what are the conditions and diseases that account for the majority of healthcare spending and what is the system doing to prevent these conditions and diseases? Answers to this question include: chronic conditions and diseases and Im not sure. These diseases and conditions such as type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol contribute to 75% of healthcare spending. The often talked-about Federal and state entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare spend 83% and 96% on the direct care of patients with these diseases and conditions. The paradox being that most of these diseases and conditions have been labeled preventable for decades and when a short window of opportunity opened to initiate a national discussion surrounding a strategy to help decrease the risk and onset of these diseases, we failed. If these conditions and diseases are preventable and if they account for the majority of healthcare spending, why wasnt this issue a central theme of the ACA? This makes no sense at all. If healthcare assumes that we all desire a healthy life and have the ability to reason the benefits of certain health-related decisions over the costs of others, why cant we increase our capacity to rationalize decisions that are more conducive to healthy living? Why cant the general population prevent chronic diseases or compress these diseases to the later stages of life? A large portion of this question needs to be answered by the general population and not by a healthcare policy expert, healthcare provider or politician! With no basis for measuring how population decisions within environmental and lifestyle factors correlate to healthy living, it is impossible to harness the power within each and every individuals ability to change their health status. With no basis to interpret and analyze whether health-related decisions are rational, the general population is left with an inability to weigh or explain the reasoning behind why certain decisions within factors provide benefits over the costs of others. And with a limited ability to improve the efficiency and productivity in deliberating and building consensus in directing a course of actions that pursues a universal desire that we all share in common, we will always have difficulty harnessing the essence of power: to learn and evolve the understanding of how to live a healthy life and teach this art to future generations. Uncertainty Due to Missing Link A major part of the solution to this problem can be found within the feelings of how our choices and actions are subjectively based from one person to the next. Even though this feeling is universal within each individual and indeed pervasive throughout the general population, it also poses a problem. It only complicates matters when we attempt to communicate our perception of how and what we need to live a healthy life. The irony being that when any individual attempts to explain the reasoning within the nuances of what resources need more action over others in achieving a standard of healthy living they will inevitably face disagreement with others. These differences create an obvious barrier within our understanding of how to live a healthy life. No clear platform exists to increase the efficiency and productivity within our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts that could be used to guide a course of population actions. Even in the case of chronic diseases and conditions, there is sufficient evidence showing that environmental and lifestyle factors are causing these conditions and diseases. Yet, there is a missing link: An instrument that first, combines and quantifies our negative and positive feelings within how we perceive health in order to begin the deliberation and consensus-

building necessary to learn and understand how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. With no quantitative basis for individuals to interpret and analyze how a population perceives healthrelated factors and resources that contribute to a standard of healthy living, we have only a limited basis to improve our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts for learning how to change healthrelated behaviors. There is no basis for individuals to draw from in communicating the reasoning behind why certain resources make more sense to consume over others, because no instrument exists to measure and correlate how these resources change the status of factors contributing to a standard of healthy living over time. This will continue to place a disproportionate amount of weight and responsibility in healthcares methodology to treat illness as long as a continuum is lacking to help us proactively understand how to live healthier lives. Without such a continuum, society will continue to experience an unprecedented level of uncertainty in rationalizing the value of resources that could change the status of factors contributing to a truly healthy standard of living. Thus, as the general population becomes more aware of how environmental and lifestyle factors are largely causing preventable chronic diseases and conditions in the future, the level of uncertainty about what to do about them will only increase. When this level of awareness becomes saturated within society, will individuals have
the opportunity to decrease their level of uncertainty by identifying resources that are perceived to change the status factors that contribute to a future healthier standard of living? How does one individual possibly change the status in societal factors like poverty, activity, and global warming when we inevitably face differences in opinions of how to go about this change with others? The information from such differences, however, can provide a robust environment for changing the status of these health-related factors if properly utilized. In fact, every individual has a unique and proprietary perception of his/her own reality and this information could become very valuable in filling a knowledge-gap within our understanding of health. Certainly, with every individual unique and proprietary perception, there is an equally unique and proprietary feeling as well. The question is: can we use this subjective feeling within any individuals perception in such a way as to combine it with others and then somehow quantify how a population perceives health? Record, Quantify, Measure My answer is yes. But this information must first and foremost be used to build a foundation of knowledge that empowers any individual to decrease the uncertainty within their healthrelated decisions by improving our health autonomy, that is, our ability to self-govern our own health and to evaluate the health within our surroundings. Our current knowledge of health
lives within healthcares ability to change internal dysfunctions within our bodies. This source of knowledge largely ignores the external factors that lead to preventable chronic diseases and conditions. With a general understanding that we all have the ability perceive certain resources that could change the current status of factors causing these diseases, we can use this information to guide and influence each others decisions and actions so as to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. A concept of healthy living within todays modern society places great value and demands on certain levels for resources within transportation, energy, education, activity, nutrition, housing and finance that all help to achieve a certain standard of living. An instrument is needed to incent and reward individuals that record, quantify and measure how they perceive these resources as making positive or negative contributions to such a standard of healthy living over time. Without this instrument, attempts to deliberate and reach consensus on how decisions and actions in policies, goods and services change our standard of healthy living will continue to be fruitless and polarized. Without such an instrument, there is also no point of reference to interpret and analyze how certain resources successfully changed the status of any one factors contribution to a standard of healthy living over time. So we will continue to muddle conversations about directing a course of actions
4

within resources that could be perceived to change the status of environmental and lifestyle factors that currently lead to almost 50% of our 65-and-older population being estimated to have at least one chronic disease by 2030. Most disturbingly, these same factors will cause close to 1 in 3 children born in the United States to develop type-2 diabetes in their lifetime. This is unacceptable. Just considering the projected growth of the number of Americans 65-and-older expected to reach 88.5 million by 2050, more than double that of 2010 (40.2) places a huge demand on the ACAs improvements to better coordinate the care to decrease waste and inefficiencies within the system in preparation. But healthcares current decision methodology will have a very difficult time keeping up with this demographic shift, which is not equipped to decrease the level of uncertainty within the general populations decisions that could change the status of how environmental and lifestyle factors manifest into preventable health outcomes. A healthcare decision to treat a health outcome such as type-2 diabetes will certainly demonstrate a positive causeand-effect relationship between how treatment decisions change a patients health outcome. A measurement of blood sugar levels will show more normal levels after treatment. However, healthcares decision methodology to treat type-2 diabetes is really treating the effect of what manifests as a disease internally from external factors causing such a condition
in the first place. Therefore, it can be asserted that the root cause of preventable chronic diseases and conditions must be the aggregate of interconnected population decisions and actionsor indecisions and inactions-within factors and resources contributing to a standard of healthy living. Paradoxically, this translates into the majority of healthcares decisions being morally-based, non-rational decisions that treat preventable conditions and diseases. Objective Measurements Matter These factors causing preventable chronic conditions and diseases are so entrenched within todays society that it is not a cynical statement to remark that solutions to these issues keep getting deferred to future generations. Indeed, if the recent experience within deliberations and consensus-building used to pass the ACA is any indication of how future debates attempt to change other complex issues; it leaves one with little optimism. Even if our general population increases its sense of responsibility toward a goal of achieving a higher standard of healthy living for all, how do we determine where actions should be focused? Without an instrument to measure the populations progress or regress toward this goal, the challenge to overcome healthcares shortcomings is all but insurmountable. This is not to say that healthcare is not different from most markets; it is indeed different and very unique. The critical difference
in this market, however, is really within the meaning that an individual derives from their health interpretation. Or at least what we currently conceptualize and explain within our health interpretation regardless of what role you play in society. Generally speaking, when individuals interpret health, healthcare becomes our predominant voice of reason. Factual and evidencebased language usually trumps opinions and perceptions when we attempt to explain the meaning within health and its relationship to health-related factors and resources that contribute to the abstract notion of what most of us think health really is. Certainly, if two individuals are having a reflective conversation describing the meaning within their health interpretation, and one refers to an experience of how healthcare objectively measured and cured her bout with cancer, it tends to resonate a tad bit more than a subjective experience within how daily habits of exercising and eating fresh fruits and vegetables cause subjective change. Objective measurements matter in communicating the value and causal relationship of how certain decisions within resources effect what we interpret as health. We obviously value the quality of life within ourselves and generally appreciate the freedom we share within our desire to live a healthy life, but healthcare has an overarching perceived and actual value within our health interpretation. The development of healthcares knowledge that it currently

yields doesnt begin to explain the reasoning behind the value in making decisions that result from objective measurements that provide changes to diagnosed health outcomes. It began instead with subjective measurements of change that were experienced from people who needed care. Emotions motivated by human empathy were the primary drivers for healthcare professionals seeking positive changes in patients. All of todays machinery and gadgetry actually began due to compassionate individuals who desired to care for others who needed their help. No one enjoys seeing another person in pain and distress, and healthcare has developed a sophisticated means to improve treatments that decrease these emotional states. However, our use of healthcares knowledge has created a perceptual divide within our health interpretation due to the overwhelming influence of empathys ability to motivate actions that decrease pain and distress. This dynamic becomes more apparent when we attempt to examine the abstract notion of health. Health reflects many of the choices we have made throughout our lives and not just the incidence of something which enters our body that is defined as symptom or disease. Environmental and lifestyle factors (inactivity, poor nutrition, smoking, poverty etc.) should not be viewed as separate entities from greater society when interpreting health. This begins to explain why there is such a barrier in initiating a proactive approach to decrease
the risk and onset of chronic conditions and diseases within our healthcare system. There are very few outward signs of pain and distress from the inward changes of stimuli that are experienced within a development cycle of most chronic diseases or conditions. Diseases such as heart disease and diabetes may take years to develop. Empathys ability to act as a portal for transmitting feelings that motivate human action can be difficult when lacking outward signs of detection. So what we currently experience as modern healthcare really begin with doctors empathizing with the poor and homeless who were in pain and distress. Distinguished institutions such as Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) began with empathic doctors being motivated to change the abnormal health status of those whom they knew would benefit from their care. MGH was established in 1811 by Drs. John Collins Warren and James Jackson who reached out to 50 of the most prominent and influential people in Boston to help fund a health institution that would care for the poor. Human empathy provided this portal to motivate these doctors to take actions on behalf of people experiencing deep emotional distress. The reasoning surrounding the history of what people now experience within the walls of MGH began as a result of these two individuals who were motivated to act by a feeling. But couldnt all of us, today, use empathy to motivate our learning and understanding of how to achieve a higher standard
of healthy living by proactively seeking increased states of happiness and pleasure? A Basis for Achieving a Higher Standard of Healthy Living The Health Perception Index (HPI) can begin a process to help us learn and understand how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. The HPI is a webbased instrument that measures a populations perception of health of a given town or city. Similar to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the HPI consists of composite index computed from the value of its component indices, each of which has real-time daily averages and volumes (Figure 1). The difference in the instrument begins by understanding what the indices measure and what the averages and volumes represent. The list of component indices measures how these factors contribute to a standard of healthy living. The real-time averages and volumes represent the changes in how a town or city population perceives the indices negatively or positively contributing to the goal of the HPI. The goal of the instrument is to motivate actions within resources that achieve a higher standard of healthy living. Regardless of how you define your role in society, your decisions and actions will somehow be interconnected to the dynamics that change the supply and demand of resources that achieve a certain standard of living. We all need a certain level of resources for self-preservation and the marketplace certainly offers an array of resources to assist. But can

individuals learn how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living by increasing their awareness of how other town and city residents perceive resources that advance a standard of healthy living? And is it our shared responsibility to be more accountable for motivating and influencing actions within these resources that correlate to a higher standard of healthy living? The HPI will begin to answer these questions by improving the efficiency and productivity within our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts. The instrument will incent and reward residents who choose to record and quantify how they perceive listed indices, variables and resources that contribute to the goal over time by using a simple mechanism to quantify perceptual data from these same individuals. Resulting in a historical database that people can use from which to draw reference from when they deliberate and build consensus on what decisions and actions within resources related to any one of the twenty indices make sense to make. The HPI is not intended to introduce a decision methodology that somehow measures how individual decisions within health-related resources directly correlate to changing their health status. Unlike healthcares treatment methodology that largely measures how resources correlate to changing the states of health outcomes in individuals, the HPI methodology is structured to influence and guide decisions within resources that are perceived to change external factors that are
indirectly related to changing an individuals health status. In theory, the HPI will show evidence of how a populations perception of listed resources is leading (or not leading) to a higher standard of healthy living. The recording and quantifying mechanism will report how a given populations past perceptions within listed resources have correlated to changing the status of component indices. In theory, this will provide indirect benefits to an individuals health status by creating an environment that is more conducive to healthy living. The instrument will first build statistical consensus on what a town or city population perceives as listed resources that change the status of any one of the twenty related indices contributing to the goal. As populations use this daily information to influence decisions and actions surrounding these resources, correlations will eventually form in how a populations past quantified perceptions within listed resources have caused actual changes within a current indices status. Comparative metrics (see Figure 1 below) will act as a gauge for individuals to interpret and analyze trends that develop in changing the status of any one of the twenty component indices status over time. Comparative metrics will reinforce or discourage actions within listed resources by encouraging actions within resources that are helping to achieve the goal and preventing actions that are hindering. An HPI can be implemented within any town or city, and residents must be
at least 18 years or older to use the instrument. The HPI has a patent pending status and is currently theoretical and not operational. What are the main features and benefits of implementing an HPI within a town or city? One significant benefit is found within the instruments framework to empower any individual who wants to learn how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. This is established by using the HPI goal to guide and transcend more value and meaning within health-related decisions. The HPI channels an individuals recordings and quantifications of how he or she perceives listed factors, variables and resources contributing to healthy living toward a data storehouse tabulating how large pools of populations perceive the same listed items. These quantifications will first increase and then exponentially grow the level of awareness within which listed items are perceived to bring about the most change over time. Then, as the database is built, any individual has the opportunity to continually reference, interpret and analyze the different aspects within how their towns or citys perception of health has changed. The overall index, indices averages, comparative metrics, and an array of different tools that develop over time within the HPI can help any individual interpret and analyze perceptual trends within the instrument. This provides the basic foundation for how the HPI will create and evolve a knowledgebase that empowers any individual to learn and understand how

to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. As individuals continue to make daily choices within how they achieve a certain standard of living, the HPI will provide an ongoing opportunity to record and quantify how they perceive listed resources achieving a healthier standard in the future. Individuals can record and quantify a positive or negative perception of any listed resource that is related to any one of the twenty indices. The relative silence characterized by how one individual voice perceives a listed resource changing the status of an indices contribution to the goal will drastically change by gathering more and more voices as a result of the HPI. The many voices combine and exponentially grow as individuals record and quantify their perceptions of the same listed item. This quantified voice can easily grow into the millions within the HPIs ability to scale and disseminate a very powerful voice for those who desire change. Whether its the status of issues within education, nutrition, the natural environment, energy, violence, government or numerous others, the HPI allows any individual an opportunity to record and quantify a voice articulating how he or she perceives changing the status of any one of the twenty indices. Thereby disseminating a clear statement of what resources a population values to change the status of any one of the twenty indices. The beginnings of how the HPI acquires knowledge in understanding how to use resources to change the status of external factors contributing to our health status are actually very similar to the beginnings of how healthcare acquired its knowledge in understanding how to use resources to change the status internal factors contributing to our health status. The HPI uses human empathy to motivate actions that will evolve our understanding of how to use resources that correlate to changing external factors that contribute to changing our health status. However, the HPI uses empathy to proactively seek actions within resources that are more closely associated with increasing states of happiness and pleasure, rather than ones that decrease states of pain and distress. How the HPI is Organized The HPI is organized by listing all items into three main sections, which include; component indices, gradient variables and resources. The component indices and gradient variable sections are standard within any HPI implemented, and a resource section is unique to each town or city. The sections provide framework to scale the instrument that positions each town or city population in competition so as to increase the benchmarks for resources they perceive will advance the goal. Listed resources can be recorded and quantified within an HPI by building perceived pathways. Perceived pathways provide a daily opportunity for individuals to record and quantify a feeling within how they perceive any listed indices, gradient variable or resource. Pathways are the heart of how the HPI develops its database. An individual builds a perceived pathway by choosing one component index; one gradient variable; and one resource. These selections involve a short sequenced set of recordings that take less than one minute to complete. Any computer or mobile device with internet access can be used to build a pathway, and each day a resident will be allowed to build three pathways in their town or city and one within any other town or city. A perceived pathway will always begin by an individual recording a negative or positive perception of how one component index is currently contributing to the goal. A pathway will always end by an individual recording a negative or positive perception of how one listed resource is contributing to the goal. The logic is that we can instinctively perceive how a listed resource will change an indexs contribution to the goal long before the actual changes occur over time. Pathways can change very quickly and help populations influence and guide decisions throughout the research, development, distribution and consumption phases of resources perceived to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. All of the pathways built within the instrument will be recorded and tracked each day. This allows an individual to conduct a trend analysis that can help them interpret the data from any number of perceived pathways built within a given time period that can

also help them to translate their subjective sense into more of an objective sense of how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. Every listed index, gradient variable and resource will have a Real-Time Perception Volume (RTPV, Figure 1). In combination with an RTPV, each index, gradient variable and resource will have a Real-Time Emotions Average (RTEA, Figure 1). The combination of RTPVs and RTEAs provide an objective basis to help any individual, regardless of what role he or she plays in society, to influence and guide population decisions and actions within resources perceived or known to change the status of any one of the twenty component indices. The recording and quantifying mechanism within a perceived pathway begins by simply clicking on one of the indices. This would quantify an individuals perception of an index by adding one to the sum of an indexs RTPV for that day. These daily volumes always begin at zero and will grow throughout the day. A perceived pathway would continue by recording and quantifying a perception of one gradient variable. Again, this perception would be quantified by adding one to the sum of the indexs RTPV. This would lead to a final recording within a resource that repeats the same basic calculation to quantify a perception. The question then becomes how does the instrument quantify and account for the unique feeling of how individuals perceive component indices, gradient variables and resources? The answer is this: by way of a simple recording and quantifying mechanism that averages all individuals recording of a negative or positive feeling of how listed items are contributing to the goal. Each pathway that records a perception of an index, gradient variable and resource will be followed by an emotional scale ranging from -5 to 5. An individual will simply record and translate a feeling within how he or she perceives each index, gradient variable and resource contributing to the goal. Again, a perceived pathway will take less than one minute to complete. Pathways enhance the power within an individuals voice of how they perceive health by quantifying and disseminating a daily feedback loop of a populations voice. Regardless of what role one plays in society, the HPI provides an historical and daily reference for any individual to improve the efficiency and productivity within the traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts toward decisions and actions that help us all learn and understand which resources truly correlate to healthier living. Many of these decisions are within the supply and demand of healthrelated resources that contribute to our standard of healthy living now. How does any individual possibly explain the reasoning behind how personal decisions within resources related to transportation, housing, education, government, housing, energy, finance, activity or nutrition will predictably change how these factors contribute to a future societys standard of healthy living? The information generated from the HPI will help with an individuals ability to reason, but this would of course be nearly impossible without the marketplace having an incentive to cooperate in this effort. Although the marketplace does not currently have the incentive to supply resources that meet each individuals perceived demand for what he or she needs to achieve a higher standard of healthy living, there will be ample opportunity for enhancing a needed learning environment of understanding what resources improve a populations standard of healthy living as a result of the HPI. HPI as Economic Stimulus This leads to a second benefit: stimulating economic growth and activity. Any organization, company or policy-maker can list its policies, goods, services or entities within a town or city HPI resource section. It doesnt matter whether a company or organization has profit or nonprofit goals, and it doesnt matter whether the goods and services are sold to businesses or consumers. What does matter is that a listing somehow translates how its value proposition intends to motivate population actions within resources so that a positive change will take place in terms of an indexs contribution to the goal. Immediately after a company, organization or policy-maker is listed within an HPIs resource section, its market or constituency base is targeted so that populations within these markets have an opportunity to build perceived

pathways directly to a listing. If a company or organization is focused on a small market within one town or city, it would choose to list within that particular towns or citys HPI resource section. If focused on a larger market, the company or organization is given the opportunity to define parameters around a group of towns or a specific county within a state and may then list within all town or city HPIs within that area. Given that all HPI indices and gradient variables sections are standard, and that resource sections are unique within each town and city, a listing offers ample flexibility and scalability for companies and organizations to experiment with a variety of different marketing strategies to attract a populations perceived demand. Every town and city has a unique cultural profile of needs and the HPI will create a process for any individual, regardless of how one defines ones role in society, an opportunity to quantify perceived demand to listed resources that they sense will contribute to increasing their town or cities standard of healthy living. A resource listing would be similar to any other online medium that a company, organization or policymaker might use to advertise and market its goods, services, and policies. However this venue will be very different from all others in regards to how it may benefit residents who build perceived pathways and entities who list their resources. Any listing can attract and exponentially grow population pathways directly to its listing. A pathways RTPVs and RTEAs will create a real-time and historical feedback loop of statistical information on how targeted populations perceive a resource listings contribution to the goal. If a resource listing offers high perceived positive value, the quantitative growth within the listings RTPVs and RTEAs should show higher positive values. If a populations perception of a resource was negative, the numerical values would be negative. If the HPI is scaled and robust participation ensues, a simple perceived demand trend analysis could immediately influence and guide individual decisions on both supply and demand sides for resources. This would begin the process of learning and understanding how to stimulate and grow a more sustainable economic path in achieving the goal. Whether its referencing past information to make personal decisions within goods and services that improve your standard of healthy living as a resident or referencing the information to improve the efficiency and productivity within our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts in a board room or on the floor of Congress, the information generated from an HPI is always intended to motivate actions and decisions that stimulate the economic supply and demand for resources with a purpose always in mind. That purpose is centered on delegating the responsibility and accountability for actions that change the status within any one of the twenty indices by initially growing the awareness and building consensus on what resources populations perceive will make future change. Such awareness is then translated into quantified voices as represented by a pathways RTPVs that could easily reach into the hundreds of thousands or millions within any of the listed resources. Thats millions of quantified perceptions of individuals who sense a demand in how your listing will help or hinder their ability to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. It would seem logical that populations would first use the HPI to build perceived pathways within indices that have shown evidence of how actions within these factors change health status. Since many of the indices in the HPI stem from environmental and lifestyle factors, it makes sense that most resource listings would see opportunity for stimulating growth by listing resources related to these factors in order to attract a populations perceived demand. Since we currently understand that many of these indices are causing preventable chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes which result in 75% of the costs in healthcare, it also makes sense to initially use the instrument to concentrate on motivating population actions within these listed resources to potentially decrease the cost and burden these diseases are currently having on healthcare.
10

In theory, if resource listings attract increased perceived demand within the HPI and individuals translate this virtual demand into actions in their reality, relationships will form over time that show how a populations quantitative perceived demand of resources correlated to actual changes within a related indices contribution to the goal. Again, these changes can be measured by analyzing and interpreting trends within any one of the twenty component indices comparative metrics. If the status within a significant number of indices change, individuals can anticipate an indirect benefit to their health status by successfully creating an environment that is more conducive to healthy living. HPI indices such as education, activity, nutrition and smoking have all shown evidence that they contribute to an individuals health status. If individuals begin to build perceived pathways that quantify high perceived demand of listed resources, the RTPVs within these resources will begin to integrate and translate more meaning and value within decisions and actions related to these resources. Whether its seeing RTPVs reach into the hundreds or into the millions, these numbers provide meaning and value within decisions and actions because they become better predictors of how populations are motivated toward and anticipate future change. This motivation and anticipation of change could become somewhat contagious. By first exponentially growing a populations feeling in how people perceive change in the HPI, and then using this information to motivate, influence, guide population decisions and actions within the reality of achieving the actual results populations desire. Medicaid, Medicare and Politics However, it is difficult to conceive how our capitalist marketplace will provide all of the solutions to all of the problems that are currently related to health. For example, government entitlement programs Medicaid and Medicare are very complicated and have been embedded within society for decades. They both retain millions of beneficiaries and have many problems resulting in extremely high costs for our government. Given that our Constitutional Republic elects officials to speak on behalf of their constituents interests, arguments from these officials are usually concentrated on driving down costs in these programs. So if elected officials talk about ideas that drive down costs in these programs, whether its solutions within government or within the marketplace, they ought to be voicing ideas that center around decreasing preventable chronic diseases and conditions that account for 83% of Medicaid and 96% Medicare spending. Shouldnt they? It is well known that Medicare and Medicaid populations have an increased risk and onset of preventable chronic disease. The vulnerability of one population is mainly due to its age and the increased risk and onset of another is mainly due to socioeconomic status. Both populations have unique circumstances and complications that are attributed to why they are at risk, but with any problem there are certainly always opportunities for solutions. And theres ample opportunity within these two populations. Given these combined programs account for a population composing approximately 1/3 of our countrys population, or slightly more 100 million people, the opportunity for goods, services and policies that decrease the risk and onset of preventable chronic diseases and conditions is urgently needed and available. Yet there is a constant struggle within our governments leadership to reach a consensus and compromise on ideas that reform these healthcare programs-or any other issuewhich is far removed from just having disagreements on principal and ideologies. Politicians who introduce policy ideas that attempt to reform entitlement programs should first be commended and not criticized. However, politicians that attempt to persuade populations by introducing largescale reform efforts that rely on basic budgetary mathematics as a means of shifting costs and responsibility should take a few steps back before moving forward. These ideas certainly seem rational on paper, but they fail to tackle the root of the problem and in Medicares case these problems have been growing long before 1965. A solution that shifts the financial responsibility to beneficiaries and the marketplace by using a voucher to choose their medical insurances will in the short-term largely benefit the provider of insurance, whose motives are far removed from the
11

reality of empowering beneficiaries to help decrease the true costs of the program. This would not be in sympathy in decreasing a beneficiarys level of uncertainty within his or her ability to make rational decisions that attempt to get healthier. If a politician has policy ideas that decrease the costs in Medicare, the policys strategy needs to focus on increasing the long-term viability in the program by decreasing the level of spending on preventable chronic diseases and conditions. This creates an opportunity for our elected officials to restore the level of trust and honesty in their leadership that is desperately needed for the American people to believe that our political system can make big changes in the way we live. Politicians need to increase their level of responsibility and accountability for producing quality policies that attempt to change big issues within entitlement programs that affect the lives of millions of beneficiaries. A policy that simply shifts the programs financial responsibility and accountability to beneficiaries and the marketplace is not a good idea. Any individual can communicate the reasoning behind why they think less government spending on entitlement programs makes sense, especially given the shortterm fiscal crisis and long-term government debt issues. However, this sort of reasoning is completely disconnected from the impact it will make on a beneficiaries ability to self-govern their health and to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. Wouldnt it benefit a politician to first listen how beneficiaries perceive how their policies will negatively or positively change their standard of healthy living within the HPI before they communicate what they think is best for their constituents? A politician who attempts to reason why his or her policy will produce a positive change to a healthcare issue-or for that matter any issue-is missing the power of how their constituents first feel about this policy. Any politician can improve his or her sense of how any individual perceives and feels about issues affecting their ability to achieve a higher standard of living by way of the HPI. Politics play an important role in directing our populations course of actions in policies that can change the status of issues of any one of the twenty indices. In the Medicare population, nearly half of the beneficiaries have at least one chronic disease or condition. Therefore, nearly half of this population must be experiencing an extremely high amount of uncertainty in terms of how their decisions related to many of the component indices are causing these health problems. These will manifest over months and years as diseases and conditions that could in theory be prevented. Medicare beneficiaries are having a difficult time in self-governing their own health, and need healthcare for medicines and procedures to improve the quality of their lives. This only perpetuates a knowledge gap within our general understanding of how to prevent chronic diseases and conditions that are pervasively scattered throughout the Medicare population. The entitlement of having medical insurance is but one aspect of Medicare, adding only a fraction to the total costs of delivery in either privately or publicly sponsored plans. In fact, Medicare administration costs are much lower than privately sponsored plans. Therefore, competition for insurance-as in the proposed voucher system-will do very little to drive down costs. The essence of the entitlement and costs associated with its benefits are within the treatments that beneficiaries receive from healthcare providers who administer them. The treatment decisions are usually made between a doctor and a patient. There is no cost and benefit analysis for patients to consider in choosing treatment plans A, B or C that delivers varying benefits depending upon how much they spend. Doctors and patients dont have to enter a marketplace to listen to a person sell the value within each plan and then make a decision on which one the patient can afford. A doctor simply counsels a patient on how treatments are known to change a diagnosed health outcome. And suffice to say, providers know a lot more than private insurance companies and beneficiaries in making these decisions. So how can a politicians voice possibly make sense of wanting to decrease the responsibility for decisions away from the people in healthcare by placing more responsibility onto seniors and private insurance companies who know very little
12

about how to change health? Wouldnt this shift in responsibility only increase the amount of uncertainty that seniors currently have in regard to the increased risk and onset that they share of having little understanding of how to prevent chronic diseases and conditions in the first place? If political arguments are going to be based on the dollars and cents saved in government spending by empowering individuals to become more responsible, wouldnt any politician who represents this platform benefit from listening to our voice? Why not use the HPI to first lower your voice and listen more closely to how the millions of voices of Medicare beneficiaries feel about your policy? If your policy idea is indeed perceived to be a good one, wouldnt listing it in the HPI help you to implement it? Im sure that the millions of Medicare beneficiaries would gladly add to your voice by inputting their own within the HPI. Our political system is an integral element of our economy in that it represents the voice of the population. The tone within this voice can be disseminated and amplified directly to our politicians within the HPI. We need to hold our politicians more responsible and accountable for their actions or inactions that are perceived to benefit an individual and society as a whole. Any elected representative who truly desires change in the status quo has the power to reform issues within transportation, education, healthcare, natural environment, energy and many others. Certainly, politicians have constructive ideas
of how policies can stimulate economic activity and govern population behavior within the marketplace. Our political and economic systems will always remain a critical element within anyones notion of how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living and lies within the populations interest to create more wealth and power by optimizing our use of both of these systems. The HPI would give politicians and other government officials much more insight into how their constituents feel about their policies. The HPI would afford a politician a real-time and ongoing quantitative feedback loop of how constituents perceive listed policies, goods and services contributing positively and negatively to their standard of healthy living. Wouldnt such information improve the efficiency and productivity within our traditional deliberation and consensus-building efforts to change the status quo? If our Constitutional Republic represents the voice of the people, wouldnt we all somehow benefit from amplifying and disseminating the interests within our collective voice directly to our elected representatives right now? Of course companies operating within our capitalist marketplace can benefit from this voice as well. The HPI will help companies and organizations gain more certainty within decisions surrounding the distribution and consumption phases of their resources. They can also have an ongoing quantitative feedback loop of a target markets perceived demand
for goods and services. Each day, the HPI resource section offers a competition for companies, organizations and policy-makers to capture a populations voice of perceived demand. We all need and desire certain resources to achieve a certain standard of healthy living, but which ones do we perceive as currently advancing the goal? What resources will change the status of an indexs contribution to the goal? An example could be illustrated within the HPI index transportation. Most of us are aware that automobiles, our countrys basic means for transportation, are powered by combustion engines that use fossil fuels. The vast majority of our countrys population drives such cars which in fact pollute the air we breathe whenever we drive. The exhaust from engines that use fossil fuels is released into the air as greenhouse gases. These gases contribute to what we have been experiencing and have come to known as climate change. You may have a sense of responsibility in motivating a behavioral change in the way you use your car as a means of transportation because you believe these actions contribute to climate change. Thats fine. You can thus use the HPI index transportation as a motivational basis for changing your behavior and attempt to influence others. However, the motivational basis for building perceived pathways in transportation is not necessarily aimed at changing the status of what we define as climate change
13

or proving that human activity is causing climate change that some believe is linked to more frequent natural disasters that we have been experiencing as of late. The motive is to perceive resources that will change the status of how transportation contributes to the goal by focusing on distributing and consuming resources that are perceived to be healthier. Cars are of course only one form of transportation in the US. There are many other forms and therefore many ways to change our behaviors when using resources for transportation. One form of transportation is not necessarily more right and one not necessarily more wrong. All population actions within these resources somehow contribute to the HPI index transportations contribution to the goal. It doesnt matter whether youre driving a Mack truck or riding a bike. Your actions, and therefore decisions, in regards to using different modes of transportation all contribute to the HPI goal. Therefore, individuals have to judge for themselves how their own use of transportation resources contributes to healthy standards of living. Our use of cars for transportation is in fact just one of them. So one example of how a transportation company would benefit from the HPI would be in car manufacturing. Lets say a company wants to capture and test a populations perceived demand for a new line of hybrid cars they plan to roll into production within 6 months. The car manufacturer chooses the Northeast to target and then decides to list within
all participating HPIs in the Northeast. The HPI would begin a short campaign of this future listing within the instrument to build awareness. Populations can use this awareness to begin to interpret and analyze the value of building perceived pathways to the future listing. Typical factors that involve cost, style, gas mileage and others will be considered that begin the process of incorporating more value and meaning in terms of how this resource is perceived to change the status of transportations contribution to the goal. The car manufacturer would select the specific gradient variable and index that form the perceived pathway that residents will use to build to the listing. The manufacturer would prepare a plan for marketing strategies in how it will compete for a populations perceived demand in this market. When the listing goes live, residents within participating towns and cities in the Northeast can begin building perceived pathways. This company would then implement its marketing strategy and reinforce or change the strategy based on the quantitative perceived demand that populations build to their listing. The daily quantitative trends will offer both residents and car manufacturer an ability to constantly adjust their strategies in building or attracting perceived demand by constantly interpreting and analyzing how or why the daily RTPV and RTEA totals are changing. Both parties will also have to contend with any number of influential factors, variables and
events that change population perceptions over time. Each party will begin a long journey to jockey for strategies that influence a populations perception of how this listing will change the status of transportations contribution to the goal. Is it positively or negatively perceived? Six months prior to a company rolling out its new hybrid line of cars, an HPI trend analysis will give car manufacturers quantitative information that can be used to deliberate and build consensus in communicating a more efficient and productive distribution and consumption strategy with dealers. The HPI then assists the communication from a manufacturer to dealers by incorporating a more predictable environment of how a populations perceived demand within the HPI can translate into the actual sales of cars over time. There is also the intangible aspect of anticipation within how the HPI can increase the motivation of individuals to go to the dealership and take a test drive. Its difficult after all to sell cars at dealership unless you formulate strategies that motivate people to act. So the HPI will help car manufacturers and dealers to actually motivate action. On any given day, populations can leverage the power and influence within their voice by building perceived pathways in what they perceive as common interests that will achieve the goal. As cars are only one common interest, what other common interests of resources can be perceived? How about housing, education, energy, technology, media, activity,
14

nutrition and others? If we do indeed seek a healthy life, and we do indeed desire change in the area of leveraging the power within our political and economic systems, we have to use the HPI to increase the power within our common interests to dilute the power of special interests. This is especially true in how interconnected and embedded lobbying firms are within our political and economic systems. These firms attempt to influence elected officials to wield their power for special interests which benefit only small, distinct populations and not the common interests of large populations. And any one of these entities or institutions will certainly have the opportunity to project a much more powerful voice of interest if their listing proposes value in helping to achieve the HPI goal. So why wouldnt a lobbying firm use the HPI to gain more traction and influence within a voice of a constituent base of a particular congressman or women? Before they take the valuable time away from this elected official in performing his or her role in our government, why not start with the HPI? Does it make sense for elected officials to spend so much time listening to the voice of special interests rather than the voice of the common interest of possibly millions of constituents in the HPI? Does it make more or less sense for a lobbying firm, company and congressional representative to leverage the influence and power of what they perceive the strongest majority voice within an entire constituency
in directing a course of actions that use both economic and political systems to benefit them? Or does it make more or less sense for a lobbying firm, company and congressional representative to leverage influence and power of the voice expressed in an HPI so as to direct a course of action that uses both economic and political systems to benefit the majority of us? This means we, the people, the greater population,the groups of individuals, the men and women,the workforce, retirees, these separate and individual entities who have been awarded power derived from our Constitutional Republic to direct a course of actions that increase our prosperity in using our economic system can now enhance and solidify that power by disseminating our voice in the HPI. This is not an attempt to block any lobbying firms effort in influencing an elected officials position on an issue. In fact, the HPI can help these firms if they list within the instrument and then successfully attract a populations perceived demand. Lobbying is a natural means of influencing an elected officials position on policies. Whether focusing on an individuals voice within a company or within a constituent base, a lobbyist or anyone else can strengthen their position by listing in the HPI. If a lobbying firm had HPI data showing positive trends within RTPVs and RTEAs to a listing within an elected officials constituent base, it can gain more strength and influence in lobbying for a cause. Wouldnt this information improve the
efficiency and productivity within the deliberation and consensusbuilding efforts surrounding issues that impact the roles that companies, elected officials, lobbying firms and constituents play within economic and political systems? All individuals within our Constitutional Republic have interests as well as a right to voice their positions on political issues. All individuals within our Constitutional Republic have interests in a variety of goods and services needed to achieve a certain standard of living. Both the public and private sector systems have leaders who could benefit from listening to the voice that will be disseminated within the HPI before they even begin to imagine the opportunity that exists in harnessing the essence of power that exists within this country. The power is within each individuals capacity to use these two systems to learn a new voice that pursues an understanding of how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. This could create a new precedent on what future course of actions the leaders within these two systems want to take. It could mean, for example, a future that guides and influences actions in listed resources still in research and development phases. Any academic institution, think-tank, company or organization can list within an HPI and thus potentially accelerate the commercialization of its innovations and resources that propose value in achieving the HPI goal.
15

This could be illustrated within the HPI index energy. Although the potential of fusion energy has been talked about since the 1970s, it has yet to be commercialized. The potential benefits, however, are impressive. It would take ten thousand pounds of coal to yield the same energy as one pound of fusion energy without emitting any greenhouse gases. There are research centers and institutions around the world that are now furiously competing to be the first to commercialize fusion energy. The United States could be the first country to do so but first our population needs to become more aware of how fusions future potential benefits might improve our lives. Enter the HPI: it can help. If a research center was to list, it could attract investments and donors. A listing for an innovation that is still in a research and development phase would attempt to attract perceived demand within the HPI in exactly the same way that resources within distribution and consumption phases do. Centers focused on fusion energy or any other innovation will have to propose value in how the future commercialization of this resource will advance the HPI goal. Securing investment and funding is usually one of the biggest hurdles for entrepreneurs and researchers within these development phases. The HPI will assist entrepreneurs and centers in leveraging the potential within their innovations by attracting perceived demand. When certain benchmarks are met throughout the phases of research and development, populations with
an interest in the development of fusion energy will want to be made aware. The HPI offers an effective venue for a research center to place a listing within a strategic geographical area in which a future pilot is planned, or in a geographic area that builds perceived demand within a constituent base that can then speak directly to an elected official who perceives the benefits of commercializing this energy source in the future. In the example of fusion energy, this quantified voice in the HPI would disseminate how various populations value a future resource within a common interest we all have in energy. Certainly all energy companies or research centers can make a case for why their value proposition based on this source of energy makes sense. The question then is: Why not list your company or center within the HPI to compete for a populations perceived demand? And if that doesnt work, the HPI also allows any resident one additional perceived pathway to be built within any other town or city. Due to this mechanism, there will surely be at least one town in the United States that will be receiving a lot of actions from outside residents. Prevention By Way of an IHPI This leads to prevention, the final benefit of the HPI to be discussed in this paper. The prevention mechanism is initiated by empowering individuals with health autonomy that enables increased responsibility and accountability for health. Each resident who chooses to participate will create an Individual
Health Perception Index (IHPI) during a short set-up phase. The data that residents enter within an IHPI will be directly (and anonymously) fed to their town or cities HPI. The importance of an IHPI will be critical in delegating and increasing the shared responsibility and accountability for health-related actions within both town/city and healthcare environments to prevent the risk and onset of chronic diseases and conditions. As the data accumulates over time within an IHPI, both individuals and healthcare providers will develop a stronger basis for incenting and rewarding the quality and/or quantity of actions that improve health status and outcomes. Each party has an ongoing quantitative feedback loop of how a patients perception has changed and evolved over time within the IHPI. Each party has an ongoing and comparative feedback loop of how this perception has changed within an IHPI in relation to the traditional measurements used within healthcare. The combination of these two methodologies that change states of health will improve a providers and a patients ability and capacity to learn and understand how to decrease the risk and onset of chronic diseases and conditions together. As data accumulates over time, healthcare providers can influence and guide patients decisions to resources within an index that is perceived to help change the patients behaviors. Providers become key stakeholders in helping patients learn by
16

increasing their awareness of what resources can enable them to change what they perceive as barriers toward achieving a higher standard of healthy living. The data from the IHPI will not shift or change the healthcare paradigm. The HPI will add knowledge to healthcares model over time by creating a seamless continuum of how to change health status that naturally occurs over an individuals lifespan merely by understanding what resources can be used to decrease the risk and onset of preventable disease. And more importantly, resources will be understood to correlate to a higher standard of healthy living over time. A healthcare provider could easily interpret and analyze a six-month trend within IHPI in seconds. The analysis will then alter dynamics within a routine doctors visit. Patients and doctors could use the IHPI as a basis to formulate proactive strategies that seek changes to an individuals health status. An IHPI trend analysis will show exactly what pathways a patient built in the past six-months. Doctors can use this information to gain more insight into what actions within an IHPIs perceived resources that were demanded in the past translated into behavioral changes. This analysis could also be used as a basis for questions that initiate substantive communication surrounding a patients responsibility and accountability for health during the routine visit. Patients can also use the six-month trend analysis to communicate to doctors which resources are
working and how, or which are not working, so as to change their behaviors. Whether its resources that motivate actions within activity, smoking, nutrition, unemployment, divorce, addiction, housing, education or others, healthcare can now create a seamless continuum of care that helps patients proactively seek changes at very little or no cost to the system. Without an IHPI continuum, there will always be a knowledge gap in our learning and understanding of how to prevent chronic diseases and conditions. These diseases and conditions pose an obvious barrier for patients attempting to achieve a higher standard of healthy living as well as foster an increased liability on healthcares ability to decrease costs regardless of whether an individual is covered by private or public insurance plans. The more complicated issue of changing human behavior falls within the realm of finding solutions for preventing unethical and immoral behavior. Indeed, the Great Recession has imbedded a strong memory and image of how a small group of individuals who are motivated by excessive greed can create tremendous collateral damage throughout society for the health of millions of people. The ripple effects from innovations such as sub-prime mortgages and complex derivatives have caused irreparable damage to the housing and financial sectors. The actions taken that caused these sectors downfall will change the value and meaning we derive within our health interpretation of these sectors for years to come. Most
importantly, the Great Recession ought to make all of us question the strength and vulnerability of our political and economic systems in terms of their capacity to generate vast sums of wealth that can invite misguided and unethical behavior motivated purely by greed. So the question is: how do we prevent future unethical behaviors caused by a small amount of people before they can adversely impact our entire society? The HPI creates such a prevention mechanism by empowering millions of people to continually interpret and analyze our economic and political behaviors. Thus if we perceive a negative trend within any one of the twenty indices, we can wield the power of our government to change behaviors. Indeed, our government already has the constitutional power to regulate many aspects of the economy. However, the level of efficiency and productivity of government policy will never keep up with the efficiency and productivity of producing innovations within our economy. Therefore, it is our personal responsibility to be more accountable for selfgoverning our own behavior as constituents of our Constitutional Republic. No one enjoys paying taxes, and a decrease in regulating certain aspects of business would gladly be accepted if we could only learn and understand how to regulate our own behavior. Finally, no serious person would deny the importance and role that government can have on helping individuals achieve a certain
17

standard of living, so if we truly yearn for less government control, we need to exhibit more control in self-governing our health. The HPI prevention mechanism can help by strengthening a populations voice. Not a voice that begins by using a first amendment right to shout and scream our anger caused by frustrations, but a voice instead that disseminates the relative silence by gathering and organizing the emotional tone of potentially millions of voices. Though a negative feeling from a daily perpetual cycle of unethical behaviors may not be detectable as a disease, this feeling will be detectable within the HPI. Citing the examples of the problems that arose from the housing and financial sectors, the HPI would have shown a more ambiguous and less precise prevention mechanism by seeing high negative RTPV and RTEA trends within housing and finance indices. A more precise interpretation and analysis would have been demonstrated if resources like complex derivatives and sub-prime mortgages were listed within the resource section. A populations perceived feeling of how these resources contributed negatively to the goal would have appeared long before we realized their full adverse impact by seeing high negative RTPVs and RTEAs trends within the listings. This places a great irony in President Obama being elected to a second term. His voice of eloquence will again attempt to explain the reasoning behind why certain policy ideas would be good for the country. The major issue is
still the economy. His voice will indeed transcend the value and meaning of words that begin to describe how policies will change the status quo. Indeed his voice is very capable of describing policies he thinks will change the status of issues that best represent the majority voice and the will of people in the United States. But how does a president transcend the value and meaning of words that attempt to change the status quo without first listening very closely to the meaning and values that ascend from a majority voice of the American people? How can the words from any politician possibly speak for how the majority feels about their policies negatively or positively contributing to their standard of healthy living without listening first? How is it possible for politicians to make sense of policies that motivate any other person to spend money that grows and stimulates our economy when we have very little understanding of how to rationalize decisions within goods and services that would truly advance a higher standard of healthy living? How can President Obama-or any other politician for that matter-possibly understand the circumstances and hardships that millions of Americans are currently experiencing without first empathizing with a feeling from a populations voice that helps our leaders make sense of directing a course of actions that move us forward? The point is not to identify how divided the two parties are due to their ideologies that spend
enormous amounts of energy and wasted time in communicating what is in principle red or what is blue. The issue is finding the unity and power in a voice that represents what is white. That white is within a universal feeling that all of us can use to guide and influence the decisions we need for healthy living. The question then is: can we use this feeling to guide and influence more rational decisions that correlate to healthy living? The answer is yes but first we need to accept the profound limitations within our current understanding of how to optimize the use of our political and economic systems to achieve a higher standard. This places another great irony in Adam Smiths legacy that is always associated with being the father of capitalism stemming from his publishing of The Wealth of Nations. This book coincidently was published on the same year that the Declaration of Independence was signed. But Adam Smith is not so well known for his previous book entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book began with a keen observation that people receive happiness and pleasure from actions that cause other people to experience the same emotions. Smiths point was to experience the power of human empathy. Its the same universal trait that motivated Drs. Warren and Jackson to help individuals whom they knew would benefit from action. Some questions we are left with include: can we increase and broaden the power of empathy within the HPI to proactively seek
18

increased states of happiness and pleasure? Can we use human empathy to perceive resources that negatively or positively contribute to the HPI goal? Can we use empathy to help guide and influence population decisions that will help us learn and understand how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living? Can we combine and exponentially grow a feeling in how we perceive resources that correlate to a higher standard of healthy living? Can we use empathy to motivate population actions that anticipate monetary and non-monetary rewards? Can we use empathy to increase competition for the supply and demand of resources that advance the HPI goal? Can the full potential of human empathy be realized by two decision methodologies that measure how decisions and actions using resources can change states of health, one concentrating its methodology on decreasing pain and distress, and the other associated with increasing happiness and pleasure? Again the answer to all these questions is yes but only if we realize that power that can be derived from teaching our future generations what we have learned and currently understand when it comes to how to achieve a higher standard of healthy living. This places a tremendous emphasis on our ability to cooperate with each others desire in achieving this goal, something difficult to imagine without leveraging the power within each individuals voice of how to change and stimulate both political and economic systems. The final question then is this: what do we value most in rationalizing decisions that fulfill our desire to live a healthy life? This ought to be an easy answer, but if it is not, if you are having trouble with answering this question, then you will never even begin to also answer why one out of every three children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with type-2 diabetes in their lifetime. And regardless of how you define your role in society, all of us together, contribute to the model of health that society has created for future generations to inherit.
19

FIGURE 1. Town X Composite Total -69,463 Composite Indices Section
Component Indices Education Housing Transportation Activity Nutrition Man-Made Environment Natural Environment Finance Work Environment Healthcare Government Poverty Violence Social Addiction Unemployment Smoking Media Technology Energy TOTALS
Real-Time Daily Averages -7720 -10545 18072 -26044 -18057 8867 -16520 -15142 5044 24549 -28048 -8388 2934 -7330 -4990 16530 -19388 -7492 9852 14353 -69463
Real-Time Perception Volumes 2300 3434 4543 6786 5674 2828 4321 3243 2321 5433 6546 1929 1232 2322 1212 3423 4532 2233 2322 4454 71,088
Real-Time Emotions Average 3.40 3.10 4.00 4.70 3.20 3.10 3.80 4.70 2.30 4.50 4.30 4.40 2.30 3.20 4.20 4.80 4.30 3.40 4.20 3.20
Comparative Metrics H.S. Drop Out Foreclosures Carbon Prod. Activity Rate Obesity Rate Alt. Energy Endangered Species Average Income Avg. Days Absent Per Capita Spending National Debt Poverty Level Homicide Rate Food Stamps Drug arrests Unemployment Smoking Rate Avg. Hrs. Kids Watch TV % of Pop. w/smart phones % Fossil Fuel Usage
Comparative Metric Trend 23% 1.4 million 33% 23% 33.8% 14.3% 12000 50233 25 $7960 $15 trillion 15.1% 16,799 46 million 1,841,182 8.1 19.3% 2.3 35% 84%
20

Health-Autonomy 18dec2012 Rev9

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Health-Autonomy 18dec2012 Rev9

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Health-Autonomy 18dec2012 Rev9

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Health Autonomy:

A Populations Voice of Reason

Scott Perkins has been

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

Health Autonomy: A Populations Voice of Reason

2012 Scott Perkins. All rights reserved.

You might also like