It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.
I was the first in my peer group to get pregnant. All I craved was reassurance. I needed someone to tell me that all the seemingly random symptoms I had - weird things, such as excess saliva - were normal. And I was worried because I wasn't getting any morning sickness.
When I was first pregnant, which was, let's see, in nineteen-eighty-three - I remember wearing a regular bathing suit to my in-laws' pool. It was just like a spandex one-piece, completely modest, and yet people were looking at me like it was obscene.
As obesity creeps into preschools, and hypertension and type II diabetes become pediatric problems for the very first time, the case for starting preventive health care in the cradle has become too compelling to keep ignoring.
