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CIO 的见解 are written by Angeles' CIO 迈克尔罗森
Michael has more than 35 years experience as an institutional portfolio manager, investment strategist, trader and academic.
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有分量的
Published: 01-08-2015Among new year resolutions, losing 重量 tops the list for the majority of Americans. 实际上, I made up that statistic, 但在我看来, (a) it probably is true, and (b) it most certainly should be true.
As the chart below shows, 50年前, more than half the population was at a healthy 重量, with about one-third over重量 and less than one-in seven obese. The good news is that the percentage of over重量 Americans hasn’t changed much over the past 50 years, it’s still about one-in-three. The bad news is that more than one-in-five migrated from healthy to obese. So maybe we can say that we don’t have too many over重量 people, we have too many obese people.
There are many diseases and ailments that are positively correlated with 重量 gain, 不幸的是, this correlation between 重量 and disease is not linear: the prevalence of 重量-related diseases, 比如糖尿病, is multiples higher among the obese than among the over重量.
There are many causes/explanations for the alarming surge in obesity. Much of the popular media lay the blame with evil corporations (which, 当然, is a redundant phrase, as all corporations are evil, by definition) that (literally) push down our throats high-caloric, 高脂肪的, high-sugar processed food-like substances that we unwittingly and helplessly consume in ever-rising amounts. There may be some truth to this. But we also encourage the consumption of low-cost, high-calorie products by subsidizing food by cost, not by quality or balance, especially among the poor, including the 47 million receiving food stamps (see graph below).
I’m not sure what the plan is to reduce the number obese (there may be no plan), but I did see that our government does plan to adopt new billing standards. The International Statistical Classifications of Diseases (known as ICD) was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). They recently released version 10 (sort of like Windows), which will now be adopted by the US government. Version 9 had about 14,000 different diagnoses codes and about 4,000 procedural codes. The “improved” Version 10 has nearly five times as many diagnoses codes (68,000 versus the 14,000 heretofore) and, 令人印象深刻的, 超过87,000 procedural codes (a 22-fold increase). Some examples of the new codes are (I’m not making this up):
• W5611XD: Bitten by sea lion, subsequent 遇到
• W6152XA: Struck by goose, initial 遇到
• V9130XA: Hit or struck by falling object due to accident to merchant ship, initial
遇到
• W2202XA: Walked into lamppost, initial 遇到
• V9027XA: Drowning and submersion due to falling or jumping from burning water-skis,
initial 遇到
• V9542XD: Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, subsequent 遇到
• V9603XD: Balloon collision injuring occupant, subsequent 遇到It’s clear that the new billing system will increase the demand for more capable (and expensive) software, as well as more administrative jobs, 这很好. It’s not so clear how this reduces the number of obese, but I’m sure someone in government has a good plan that will be shared with us in due course.
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