Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Can Community Bridge the Health-Wealth Divide?
The stark reality of how money influences health outcomes remains one of society's most uncomfortable truths. As someone battling cancer for over six months while navigating America's complex healthcare system, I've experienced firsthand how financial status dramatically shapes treatment options, care quality, and ultimately survival itself.
From high-deductible insurance plans to astronomical medical bills for even brief consultations, our healthcare system creates nearly insurmountable barriers for anyone without substantial resources. The $1,600 bill for a five-minute appointment with questionable results illustrates why so many avoid seeking care until absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, numerous potentially life-saving therapies remain tantalizingly out of reach for those without the means to access them – hyperbaric treatments, ozone therapy, specialized infusions, and even basic supplements that insurance won't cover.
But healthcare access represents just one dimension of this pervasive disparity. Wealthy individuals generally consume higher-quality nutrition, live in less polluted environments, maintain stronger support networks, experience less chronic stress, and enjoy greater health literacy than their less affluent counterparts. The capacity to reduce stress through vacations, pursue preventative care without financial concern, and access educational resources about health management creates a compounding advantage that extends lifespans and enhances quality of life.
Perhaps most telling is the uneven access to cutting-edge medical innovations. When Magic Johnson received his HIV diagnosis at a time when it was considered a death sentence, his wealth enabled access to experimental treatments that likely saved his life. This pattern repeats daily across countless conditions – those with resources can pursue alternatives when standard protocols fail, while others must simply hope conventional approaches will suffice.
Despite these sobering realities, community offers a powerful counterbalance. Through meaningful connections, shared knowledge, and collective support, we can partially bridge the health-wealth divide. This podcast aims to build exactly that kind of community – one where information flows freely, support is readily available, and health resources become more accessible to everyone regardless of financial status. Join us in creating a network where good health depends more on strong relationships than on bank account balances.
Intro for podcast
https://www.wcsblog.com/podcast-episodes
Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we're going to talk about a subject that's a little uncomfortable and I'd like to maybe consider it the elephant in the room and this is the topic of money and health care, or money and health and health care, or money and health. So throughout all of history since there has been a difference, since people were able to climb up and be more wealthy than each other, so there was a point where we were all the same. Everybody worked together, everybody hunted, they gathered, everybody worked together. Everybody hunted, they gathered, they did whatever. But over time, some people did better than others. And then money came to be in existence and people started to gather it and all the things we're not going to get into, all the reasons why people become wealthy and others don't, all the reasons why people become wealthy and others don't.
Speaker 1:But as you start moving into society's evolution, you start having wealthy classes of people and impoverished classes of people, and throughout all of those times, the wealthy people would generally live a lot longer, and there's a lot of reasons for that. Probably the simplest one is they had food and you could have land, so your people would pay you taxes. Taxes might come in the form of food, livestock, whatever. So if you were not in a situation where you're constantly struggling to eat, well, you generally if that was the only thing that was different you'd probably live longer. And so you know, as society continues to grow, here we are fast forward 20, 30,000 years and all of a sudden we've got, you know, very complicated societies. We have places in the world where poverty is still the norm. You have places where there's different casts of people, where people are born into poverty and they stay that way. People are born into wealth and they stay that way. And then you have societies, like in America, where it's dynamic. You could be born into poverty and build your wealth, or you could be born into wealth and lose it all and become impoverished.
Speaker 1:But regardless of this, there are fundamental reasons why having wealth can bring you better health, and people talk about universal health care, and you know we just take it from the rich and give it to the poor and all of these things. And you know, if there was a model for that that really worked, there'd be evidence of it. And you know, maybe there's a few countries that are very mineral resources or just very, very wealthy countries because of internal reasons you know, oil reserves or mineral reserves or things like that and they can afford to shower their usually very small populations with a high quality of life. But that's few and far between and I don't know what the statistics are on that. But I suspect those people have better quality of health. But in most places where they've tried universal health care I hear the same stories.
Speaker 1:It's worse than Kaiser in the sense of long waiting lines, limited access, very short diagnosis times, all kinds of problems, misdiagnoses, bad prescriptions, all kinds of reasons why it's not functioning well. Is it better than nothing? Of course it is. Is it something? Yes, of course it is.
Speaker 1:But here in America we've got it set up to where, unless you have nothing, you can't get much, and so I have been struggling with a battle with cancer for now more than six months, and I had to learn the hard way about all this, and so I fell into a situation where I was self-employed. I made some money, but not enough to really pay my own medical bills. I get hit with this diagnosis and the coverage that I had was a very high deductible, relatively low premium, but even still the premium was high for me relatively low premium, but even still the premium was high for me and because of that I have run into all kinds of complications because of things not being approved or taking a long time to approve and because of the deductible, I've got this huge amount of bills adding up and so that's certainly puts a giant stress and it's even caused, you know, a hardship, because once you start dealing with a problem like cancer or any major disease, your whole life turns into treating it and it's pretty difficult to spend time working and making money or even putting thought into that while you're trying to keep yourself alive. And that's something that I don't know. If people really think about how much time it takes to work on yourself when you have a major illness or disease or even injury, and the amount of time it takes to go to doctors and just to traveling and dealing with it all and any therapies or anything you might have to do, it's just huge amounts of time and all the time is huge amounts of money. I mean, I don't know. It seems like medical bills have gone up so much I don't even know what to say. I've gone into a five-minute doctor visit where they looked at me, put a little camera down my throat and I walked away with a $1,600 bill and I'm just like what the hell? And it turned out even I got some bad information from that. It doesn't matter, you know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:In talking with the Dr Hoffman's group, we came up with a notion that said maybe healthcare should be like sometimes lawyers work, where a doctor only gets paid if they actually help you and otherwise they'll make some kind of a salary, but you know, and you don't get the big bucks unless you actually make a difference. So let's just get into some of these things as to what the difference is. So you know just straight up access to health care situation where you either live in a country where you've got some kind of you know Medi-Cal, or or you know the type of subsidized health care or even some kind of a universal health care, and you don't have money. What? How are you going to get any health care at all? How are you going to get any medicine at all? It's, people don't just give it to you, and there are free clinics and things that are sponsored by nonprofits and whatnot. How are you going to get any medicine at all? People don't just give it to you, and there are free clinics and things that are sponsored by nonprofits and whatnot, but few and far between.
Speaker 1:And then when you get into things like health insurance, you know, like I was just talking about, I know people that have multiple layers, like in me, going and I tell them, well, I've got this, you know this, this PPO health insurance. They're like well, do you have any other coverage? Like some people apparently have multiple layers of insurance and that affords them all kinds of things and you can have different services, different medications. You know, the first thing that I've learned is, before you walk into anything, before you make an appointment, anything, it's like well, what's your, what's your date of birth, what's your name? And then they check your insurance and if you don't have everything right, you don't even get in the door, you don't even get to talk to anybody. And I know, you know, in the years past I was a cash patient. That was a different story. I don't know how it works now, but I don't have any cash right now. So it's, it's crazy. So the quality of care really makes a big difference when you have either the resources to pay for it or the good insurance and like for me right now.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of therapies I could be doing right now if I had money. You know, I could be doing hyperbaric, I could be doing EBU ozone treatment. I could be doing hyperbaric, I could be doing EBU ozone treatment, I could be doing infusions. There's all kinds of therapies that I could be doing that could potentially have a very positive effect. Even some of the supplements that I could take I've had been generously donated some supplements from a doctor friend of mine, and and because I've built a network of people, it's made a giant difference in my life. But the amount of effort I've put into that has been the reason, not because I had any money and that's another big point that I'll get to maybe in another show but the other option, nutritional choices.
Speaker 1:I think this is one of the biggest issues. People that are impoverished generally eat shit food and that's not always true. So there are places where people live in a rural setting. They grow their own food, they take care of themselves, they don't have any money, but frankly, they can be way more healthy because of that. So they're not eating processed food, they're not eating sugary foods, they're not eating empty calories. They're growing good, wholesome foods, whether it's meat, eggs, poultry, vegetables and fruits, fish, whatever. There are plenty of places where people that don't have a lot of money also are what they call in the blue zones or they live generally very healthy lives.
Speaker 1:But typically if you get into it, if you're poor, you're going to eat crap. You're going to eat, you know, cheap gas station food. You're going to eat fast food. You're going to eat box food, government cheese, that kind of thing, lack of nutrition, full of poisons, pesticides, chemicals of all kinds, all the problems that come from that and generally, if you've got money, well, you're going to Erewhon and eating your frigging $20 strawberry. You're eating the organic, the best of the best, going to the farmer's markets and eating the foo-foo food, and well, you're generally going to have a better quality of life. You go to a restaurant where they're making fresh food farm to table all this stuff. You know you're going to generally have a better quality of life. You'll also maybe know more about different supplements, different resources and things like that.
Speaker 1:Your living environment. This is something that, again, people maybe don't pay attention to and it's not entirely dependent on wealth, because there are rural areas again, where people have created safe places for themselves, family compounds and things like that, where you don't have to. Your safety does not necessarily just depend on money. It can solely be built on community. But generally speaking, impoverished areas are riddled with crime. When people don't have any resources, they sometimes resort to a lot of bad choices and you know, drugs and all kinds of things happen as a result of that. And maybe as important as that is is it just brings stress, and I think stress is a gigantic contributing factor to health. And that's not to mention pollution. If you go to a bad part of town, you drive around, what do you see? You see filth, usually you see industrial areas, you see polluted water, polluted air, polluted streets. You go to San Francisco and you see frigging shit all over the walls and all over the floor and just horrible situations. And you know it's nasty, disgusting, and people are living in it and wondering why they're getting sick.
Speaker 1:Then you get to education. This is another big disparity, probably one of the biggest disparities between the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots have to spend their time working and foraging and hustling and the haves well, they get to take their time and get some education, get to learn more, get to distance themselves from the day-to-day issues and, as a result, you can likely often make better choices. You create better networks of people. These are all things that matter, and especially when it gets into the support system. So when you have means, then you generally gather with people who have means and you generally have an opportunity to create a social environment, which is very good for health and being able to do things like relax, being able to go on vacations, being able to do things you want to do, remove stress, even being able to do things like exercise regularly.
Speaker 1:You know, the guy who is impoverished is working all the time. Maybe you get exercise from working, but it's a very specific kind of thing, maybe repetitive, maybe causing problems to your health, and, frankly, the person who gets up and has a personal trainer and a nutritionist and all of that, you know who do you think is going to be the healthier one? And then it also comes down to things like the likelihood of taking on habits like drinking, smoking, drugs and others. When you're going through a rough time, people have a propensity to want to cover that up, to not have to feel the pain and the suffering of all of that, and that's where a lot of these behaviors come from, and not to say that the wealthy people don't do that as well. And there's plenty of examples of excess and all that. But I think if you look at the disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, you're going to find a whole lot more issues with substance abuse and other toxic behaviors.
Speaker 1:And then when it comes down to things like time, you know I don't know how many times when I'm working a lot there's no time to go to the doctor, I don't have time to go and get a checkup, I don't have time to get that blood work done. I got to work, I got things to do, and if I don't get those things, I'm living so close to the edge. Then all of a sudden bills start coming in due and I can't pay them and then that turns into this cascading problem of collections and calls and stress and it adds up and it turns into this tidal wave of negativity. And you know there's another layer, for that Stress reduction is another huge one.
Speaker 1:I think money is probably the biggest stressor of most people. It destroys marriages, it destroys sanity, it destroys relationships. If you have money it's really easy to walk around. And I'm not saying money buys you happiness. I'm just saying it's a lot easier to be happy when you have money than when you're not. And I have had money and not had money and my level of happiness has not changed one bit. But I recognize that I control that. And a lot of people find themselves falling victim to their circumstances and it's prevalent Preventative health measures.
Speaker 1:These are things that you know. If you believe in vaccines and you think that's a good idea, well, you can afford them. You can go and take your time and get that. If you believe in things like supplements, if you believe in things like therapies, a sauna, maybe a swimming pool or gym equipment or all the things that people do to get healthy, a juicer there's all kinds of tools and things that people do when they have resources. I'm not saying that you can't find it otherwise, but it's certainly a lot easier when you've got this money.
Speaker 1:Now here's the kicker chronic disease management. If you've never been dealt with a chronic disease, whether it's cancer or emphysema or MS or whatever, people don't realize that this stuff just doesn't stop. And if you need a therapy, well, you just keep needing it until you don't. And if it's a drug, or if it's a treatment or whatever it is. Not only is it going to take your time every time every week, every month or however often you have to do it, but it costs you every single time. It certainly gives you nothing other than whatever it's doing for your situation, but it takes a lot, and it takes not only from you but of your loved ones, and I think that that's something that people don't realize.
Speaker 1:You know, in this disease that I'm dealing with and even when I was battling the government, you know for over six years, people lose sight of the fact that you're doing it every day. And you know I was on bail for six years and dealing with the stress of that and can't get anything go wrong or I'm going to be locked up, and every day I'm dealing with that stress. I'm certain that contributed to my cancer. But you know people hadn't seen me for a while. Hey, how's that thing going? Oh, hey, how's the battle going? You know, because they're not thinking about it. But you deal with it every second of every minute of every day and it's can be brutal and if you don't have the, the wherewithal, people crack all the time.
Speaker 1:Um, and that gets to psychological well-being. You know you think to yourself healthy mind, healthy body. And if your mind isn't right, whether it's because of stress, or maybe you've got some kind of chemical imbalance that you're not able to manage because you don't have resources, you can't afford to go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a therapist or somebody that can maybe give you some direction. So you go around continuing whatever the cycle that you're in. Maybe it's bad choices, maybe it's bad relationships, maybe it's you know, who knows? Whatever the behavior is, and I think that that's another big issue that people don't realize.
Speaker 1:I think your psychological well-being has everything to do with your health. I think your psychological well-being has everything to do with your health and I think that you know it's a major issue. Even things like travel and experiences. You know, you think about the wealthy person and oh yeah, we went to St Bart's last week. Oh, I'm off in here, I'm off there doing this, doing that. Well, guess what? That's very helpful.
Speaker 1:You go on vacation and you decompress and you let go, and it's so restorative and so healing. And you know the handful of times I go on vacation, I do it because it's for my health, and whether it costs a lot of money or a little money, I will take time off, no matter what, and wash my spirit with that, and it makes a gigantic difference. And you know, sometimes people have the sense to do it, even if you don't have money, and you go to the park or you go camping or you go to the beach or whatever, and you find a way to get away and reset. That's really important. But a lot of folks are stuck. You know they got to work all the time, or, even worse, they're impoverished and they have maybe a loved one that they have to tend to or whatnot, and then not.
Speaker 1:Finally but this is kind of the last point that I think I'm going to bring into this is things like experimental research and cutting edge technology. You know, I can remember when Magic Johnson was diagnosed with AIDS and you know everybody's like, oh no, he's going to die. It's like, well, guess what that guy could afford? The latest greatest cocktails of drugs, the latest greatest cocktails of drugs. And he was actually part of probably the pioneering of what's now the norm. And now what used to be a death sentence is an inconvenience for most people and many, many, most people that have AIDS here in the United States or in first world countries. It's definitely not a death sentence like it was, but if it wasn't for the wealth, I don't know if Magic Johnson would be around today and I don't know how all of this would go.
Speaker 1:So there's all kinds of potential therapies, access to information. You know. It's really something that I think is something that we need to consider and think about, that I'm working on building this community because, as much as all these things that I've mentioned are factors and are truths, there is also plenty of ways that people that don't have resources can access, and it's generally through community, and that's what I'm building here. There are doctors that can share their resources and information and knowledge. I have built a team of doctors that aren't charging me anything and we talk and I've gotten some of the strategies that I'm working on from some of these doctors and having conversations. There are therapies that are not necessarily documented, you know, like this ozone therapies and glycerin, and you know things like this chlorine dioxide and some of these sound therapies that you know, even tuning forks for God's sake, it doesn't cost much and they can last forever and they can make a difference. I'm not saying any one of these things are a panacea. I'm just saying that there are answers that don't have to be expensive and we can share information and we can share time and energy and even just the community support is so healing.
Speaker 1:I can attest that with dealing with cancer. I come from a big family and most of my immediate family I have not even heard from and not that I'm going out of my way to tell anybody about it and it's really just about the truth. If we have a relationship, we spend time together. If we don't, we don't and I'm not being dishonest about that anymore. And the people that I do spend time with, that I have relationship, I share a lot with, and so the people that check in once in a while and see how I'm doing, or even people that donated and things like that, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1:But the people that are sharing my life, I talk to virtually every day and the people that are there in support when I have a down moment, they know and they're connected and they're the ones that are holding me up, and most of those people I've known for very little amount of time relevant to the rest of my life, and in all these family members there's a handful I got this giant family and maybe a handful of them have even reached out and talked to me, and that's, it's not on them. They don't owe me anything. I don't owe them anything. It just tells you that what you think or what, classically, you're told, this is what's important. Family, this family, that blood in all of these things doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 1:Build yourself a good community. Spend time with the relationships that you, that you cherish. Build them there. That is where your strength is going to come from. That is where health can come from. That's where answers can come from, and I think that that's really a big part of what we're doing here with the podcast. I'm so grateful for everybody that's supporting this podcast. We're increasing our reach and if you think this is a good show, please tell somebody about it, share it, maybe subscribe. I'm creating more and more subscriber content and encourage you to participate. And until next time, I thank you for being part of the Healthy Living Podcast.
