Bob Maistros

Rising health costs.  Problems with access.  Epidemics of chronic disease, from obesity to diabetes to asthma.

To address all that, do we really need a trillion buckaroos for the President’s healthcare boondoggle with its hydra of government panels, commissions and agencies?

A mom all the day keeps Doc Barack away.

Nah.  Turns out that when it comes to improving the nation’s health, the real answer is not Obamacare but rather Mamacare.

That at least according to the lead article in the latest edition of my personal favorite journal, The Family in America.  Dr. Bryce Christensen shows us that as in so many other areas of society, being married and having two natural parents at home – especially when one of them is a stay-at-home mom – is the best prescription for better health.

Christensen pulls together a raft of research to show that the health advantages of marriage are “remarkable” and hold across all demographics.  Men who are hitched are healthier than their unattached counterparts, and married mothers are heartier than both single women and single mothers.  Old married folks, far from the troubled individuals portrayed in so much of the popular culture, are way likelier to exhibit “’very good or excellent’ mental and emotional health,” while those single baby mamas are far more likely to get depressed.

Not only that, kids in a household with both natural parents are in better shape, too, both mentally and physically.  Christensen cites an American Academy of Pediatrics statement blaming “paternal absence” for “multiple and sometimes lifelong disadvantages” and concluding: “Unequivocally, children do best when they are living with [two] mutually committed and loving parents who respect and love one another.”

Think mayhap the same benefits inure to “families” consisting of cohabitating parents or stepfamilies?  Think again.  Cohabitation “produce(s) worse outcomes for children” and “in general, children who are raised in a stepfamily do [only] about as well as do children of single mothers.”

So much for the notion that marriage doesn’t matter anymore.

And why is Mamacare such a boon to kids?  Because married moms are more like to breastfeed – which dramatically reduces the incidence of respiratory disease and ultimately, asthma – and married parents do better keeping their kids from smoking, drinking, doing drugs, eating wrong, sitting on their duffs and getting fat.

Then there’s that taboo subject of – DA-AA da DUM dum – daycare, and its downright nasty harm to youngsters.  Less breastfeeding than kids home with Mom.  More infectious diseases, from recurrent ear infections to including tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B, meningitis, bronchitis, influenza, rubella and gastroenteritis.  (Yuck.)  Three times as many doctor’s visits and more than four times as many hospitalizations.  The health effects of daycare are so nasty that the lead editorial in a special issue of a pediatric journal was entitled:  “Day Care, Day Care: Mayday! Mayday!”

Yikes.

Meanwhile, the effects of family breakup – and the benefits of marriage – are lasting.  Children from divorced families have shorter lifespans, in part because they are less likely to make it in marriage, single or divorced older adults are less healthy and more prone to be shuffled off to the nursing home.  And when older married folks do end up in the hospital, they get out sooner – plus their spouses help plan for and deal with adversity.

What does all this mean for healthcare?  You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that it all spells billions in higher costs for doctor’s visits to hospitalization to drugs to psychiatric care to institutionalization.

So the Obamites have gotta be focused like a laser beam on the health benefits of married parenthood, right?  Get real.

Christensen points out that Obamacare’s insurance benefit formula creates marriage penalties, and that it fails to undo the disincentives Medicare creates for family care.  Meanwhile, the O-Ring is doubling down on daycare at the expense of the stay-at-home-mom families whose lifestyles are simply healthier for kids.  Maybe Doc Barack should be less concerned about whether the pediatrician in his hypothetical was getting rich off his young patient’s tonsillectomy – and more about the potential source of the germs.

Anyway, the benefits of Mamacare only make sense when we think about our own lives.  My wife and I are in a position to hound our kids in the morning to eat breakfast, put on jackets and cover their heads. (We’re not always as successful in pushing the sleep thing in these days of Facebook and texting.)

Meanwhile, the other day I went off for a day trip to Richmond, and you would have thought I was headed out to the Iditarod.  My wife hovered over me and made sure I had had enough to eat and wasn’t too tired and was bringing along water and warm clothes.

It wasn’t nagging.  It was love.  And it’s the basis of sound public health policy.

Want to save a few hundred billion?  Skip Obamacare.  Stop worrying about the “red pills” versus the “blue pills.”  And pass the chicken soup.

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