Before I get into this, I want to say that I'm the first to say, from a reality-based perspective, that Americans are, in a sense, "over-medicalized". I'm no shill for doctors, and in my ideal world, we would all spend less time at the damn doctor. But the reason that we are in doctor's offices more than we should be is a complex one---if fact, it's multiple reasons. And most of them are things the medical establishment is trying to fix. A lot of the reason doctors order too many tests and prescribe too many drugs is that if they didn't do so, their patients would flip the fuck out on them---because Americans have never once really gotten behind the idea that less can sometimes be more---and since it's in a doctor's best financial interests often to do more, they aren't going to fight you as hard as they probably should. Another reason that is completely unrelated that we spend more on doctors than we ideally should is that we, as a nation, don't invest nearly enough in prevention. We let young people go uninsured, making it years and even decades that people go without just basic check-ups, so that when they do finally start seeing a doctor, illnesses that could have been caught early have festered. We eat too much and exercise too little, and then we end up spending way more on diabetes management and cholesterol drugs than we should. We underfund contraception spending and shame women for being slutty if they use contraception, resulting in high unintended pregnancy rates that lead to even more preventable health problems.
