Our guest blogger is Danielle Moodie-Mills, an Advisor for LGBT Policy and Racial Justice at the Center for American Progress and the Director of Environmental Education at the National Wildlife Federation.

Obesity has long been framed as an issue of personal responsibility. The prevailing notion has been that if people simply stop eating junk food and start eating healthy fruits and vegetables, they will maintain a healthy weight.

And even though most Americans agree that obesity is a critical public health issue facing the nation — 83 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Independents and 65 percent of Republicans rank it as a “serious issue” — opinions about how personal responsibility factors into the epidemic are somewhat divided along party lines. Democrats tend to believe that both the individual and government are responsible for combating the obesity epidemic, while Republicans believe the onus falls largely on the individual.

The “personal responsibility” argument assumes that people can simply avoid sugar and other unhealthy additives by staying away from fast foods. But Dr. Robert Lustig, the author of the new book Fat Chance, explained this week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that avoiding sugar — which he believes to be a major cause of America’s weight issue — may not be as easy as it seems:

One-third of the sugar in our diets comes from soda and sweetened beverages, you can taste it. One-sixth is in desserts, you know about those as well, but half of all the sugar consumed in this country comes from food you didn’t know had sugar in it — like hamburger buns, hamburger meat, and salad dressing, for instance.

So even when people make a concerted effort to make healthy choices, there is still a great possibility that they are consuming the very product that is causing their weight gain. And the government isn’t doing enough about it.

A few years ago, a group of doctors at Mount Sinai took out an advertisement in the New York Times pressuring the government to stop subsidizing food that was making Americans sick. “High-fructose corn syrup [HFCS] now represents 40 percent of the non-calorie-free sweeteners added to U.S. foods. It is virtually the only sweetener used in soft drinks,” the research physicians wrote in their advertisement. “Because of the subsidies, the cost of soft drinks containing HFCS has decreased by 24 percent since 1985, while the price of fruits and vegetables has gone up by 39 percent.”

But after the negative comments regarding HFCS went viral, corn refiners simply released a commercial rebranding HFCS as “corn sugar,” and purporting the safety of the re-named additive saying “corn sugar or cane sugar, sugar is sugar and your body doesn’t know the difference.” Watch it:

Nearly one-third of American children and adolescents are labeled as overweight or obese, and they are expected to be the first generation who won’t live as long as their parents due to high cholesterol, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases. So will the government finally see fit to engage in the sugar debate and take a hard look at the crops they are subsidizing — or will Americans have to wait for this epidemic to reach its precipice, much like the battle against cigarettes? Let’s hope not, because the current health care system may just break under the extra weight.

Former Senator Jim DeMint, the new president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has decried Obamacare as “a cancer” that is “is fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” During the Senate Obamacare fight, DeMint famously declared “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

But a new report from DeMint’s own organization suggests that, far from being incompatible with freedom, countries with health care systems with as much or significantly more government control over healthcare are the freest countries in the world.

The report in question is Heritage’s Economic Freedom Index, released annually since 1997. The report defines the concept of “economic freedom” in misleading right-wing terms, but even by those standards, it appears that universal health care systems far more expansive than Obamacare aren’t “fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” In fact, the ten “freest” economies in 2013 by Heritage’s lights range from mandating individuals save a certain amount of money for health care to almost the entire health care system, including hospitals, being owned and operated by the government:

1. Hong Kong: The semi-autonomous city inside China has a universal, publicly run health care system: about 80 percent of Hong Kong hospitals are government owned and operated. While private supplemental insurance is available, it’s more expensive than public services.

2. Singapore: Singapore is often cited as a free-market health care system that works. But one of the centerpieces of the Singaporean model, as conservative David Frum notes, is a government mandate requiring citizens to place a certain percentage of their income in “medical savings accounts” to ensure they can pay for routine health care costs out of pocket (when their income is inadequate to pay, the government pays direct subsidies a la Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion). Hardly seems consistent with DeMint’s point that health care mandates are “slippery slopes” towards the death of freedom.

3. Australia: Australia has a single-payer system in which, like Canada, doctors are privately employed but all Australians are eligible for insurance coverage through a government-run provider called Medicare.

4. New Zealand: The Kiwi government has made most services free or nearly free to all residents; the government covers roughly 80 percent of national health care expenditures and directly owns and operates about half of all health care services in the country.

5. Switzerland: This Swiss system is closer to the American health plan post-Obamacare than most other national systems; Switzerland has both privately owned health care and privately-provided insurance together with an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Interestingly, Swiss insurers are legally prohibited from profiting on the basic, mandatory insurance package.

6. Canada: Our northern neighbor is, of course, the most famous example of a single payer system in the United States.

7. Chile: Like Singapore, Chile mandates that individuals pay into health savings accounts to cover health care costs and supplements the accounts of poor Chileans. It also has both publicly and privately run health care services.

8. Mauritius: A tiny island nation in the Indian ocean, Mauritius has government-run health services that cover roughly 70 percent of the country’s health expenditures, with private supplemental practices making up the remainder. All government health services are provided free of charge to Mauritian citizens, which has helped the country improve quality of life for its citizens markedly in the past two decades.

9. Denmark: As in Mauritius or the United Kingdom, the Danish government owns and operates the vast majority of the health care system.

Number 10 on the list is, of course, the United States, which will finally join the rest of the top ten “most economically free nations” in providing universal or near-universal health care when Obamacare is fully implemented.

ThinkProgress has previously reported that a massive contributor to America’s annual $2.7 trillion health care expenditures is the staggering 50 percent of Americans who simply do not take their prescribed medications properly.

Now, Wonk Blog’s Sarah Kliff is reporting that corporate pharmacy giant Walgreens wants to start bucking that trend by forming “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) in conjunction with local physicians and hospitals. ACOs are coordinated care systems that are paid on the basis of their performance. If an ACO successfully provides Medicare beneficiaries with quality care while keeping costs under a year-to-year target, it is rewarded with higher Medicare reimbursements from the government by netting the savings — but if it goes over the annual target, it has to swallow the losses.

Although most ACO applications so far have been partnerships between more specialized health care providers, more convenient access to local pharmacies might make them effective venues for managing and tracking Americans’ treatments after their hospital visits:

While a pharmacy-run ACO is not the traditional model, [Walgreens' Senior Vice President Jeffrey Kang] argues it actually makes a lot of sense. Pharmacy stores are open every day of the year, making them a more accessible point of contact than most doctor offices. They have begun to handle basic health care, like vaccination and preventive check-ups, right in the store, which could prevent more costly diseases down the line.

Health care research shows that unnecessary hospital readmissions are often caused by a patient not following the prescribed medical regiment after discharge, creating another place where pharmacists could easily intervene. [...]

“The way I like to describe it is as a physician-led plan where we’re an active partner,” Kang says. “They’re the quarterback who creates the treatment plan. We can be care extenders who help implement and execute the plan.”

In order to make that active partnership work, Walgreens is working to become better integrated with its partner health care systems. While both the pharmacies and doctors, for example, already have electronic medical records, they now need to ensure that each system can interface, allowing all health care providers to track a given patients’ care.

Walgreens’ decision to venture into the coordinated care market underscores the broad innovative potential of Obamacare provisions such as ACOs. Centering medical treatment followups in pharmacies could go a long way towards making sure that Americans stay on their treatment regimens, thus reducing sickness, deaths, and costly hospital re-admissions.

However, lawmakers should make sure that pharmacies that provide more extensive services have the proper oversight, so as not to fall into the same pitfalls as laxly regulated compounding pharmacies in the wake of last year’s deadly meningitis outbreak.