Health Care Crisis

THE PROBLEM: Health Care Crisis

U.S. health care costs are the highest in the world, yet health care quality is rated #37 (or #77 in another rating system) compared to other nations, with unsustainable costs continuing to rise and quality continuing to decrease.

Poor Lifestyle Choices

While 95% of American health spending is on medical care, poor lifestyle choices cause the chronic illnesses that create 78% of the costs and preventable deaths.¹

In 2006, health care spending accounted for 16% of the nation’s GNP². Over 75% of total health care dollars are spent on patients with one or more chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure³. Forty percent of Americans have chronic health problems⁴ and that is expected to increase to about 47% by 2020⁵. The good news is that most chronic diseases are preventable.

Obesity, a lead indicator of poor lifestyle choices, has quadrupled in 30 years: now 1 out of 5 children and 1 out of 3 adults are obese and 2 out of 3 are overweight. And it will get worse according to the 2012 Healthy Affairs-sup-1-sup-, “Not surprisingly, the proportion of the population diagnosed with chronic conditions increases with age. More worrisome is the striking gap between the high prevalence of chronic conditions among people who are below the federal poverty level compared with the average prevalence in the general population…The number of people with diabetes is expected to double in the next twenty-five years, from twenty-four million to forty-eight million. By 2023, the number of people with chronic mental disorders may increase from thirty million to forty-seven million. Similar increases are forecast for virtually every common chronic condition.

The Institute of Medicine reports that inadequate healthcare is responsible for only 10-15% of deaths, as compared to preventable lifestyle patterns at 40% to 70%, yet 95% of all medical spending is aimed at that small percentage of inadequate care rather than addressing lifestyle choices through education and prevention.⁶ So long as much of the population engages in junk food, little exercise or sleep, high stress thinking and lifestyle, costs will keep rising even with insurance reform. Health promotion is the only viable solution: getting people healthy so they are less dependent on the medical system–see Impact of Lifestyle Behaviors for a sampling of articles.

Focusing on insurance reform simply profits the current system that emphasizes medical approaches over keeping people healthy, so that even with the Accordable Care Act, costs will continue to climb. Among the many flaws of the present system that misapplies an acute care model to chronic illness is the practice of deploying drugs-or-surgery as the first and/or only option which discourages the individual from taking personal responsibility for their health and thus fosters dependency on external intervention methods. While there is certainly a time and place for external intervention, unhealthy lifestyle choices and lack of basic knowledge, together with a host of other causes (needless/ineffective medical treatments⁷, unprincipled research and the burgeoning use of pharmaceuticals), have conjoined to create a costly, ineffective and imploding medical system.

Confusing Health Information

Why is health education so important? Most of the population are unaware of the relationship between their lifestyle habits and health outcomes, but what is missing is accessible, easy-to-understand information about how the body works, yet the current health information system is equally as flawed. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 79% of online users utilize the Internet to research healthcare information⁹, yet health information system confuses the public—and health professionals—with a wide range of information via websites and the media that is conflicting, inadequate, and produced in many cases by vested interests offering deceptive or incorrect information, making it biased or sometimes downright fraudulent.¹⁰ And while 95% of medical research and virtually all medical training and insurance are about biomedical solutions, and there is relatively little scientifically solid research or information about health consequences of various lifestyle choices available for health education.

Moreover, corporate health promotion plans emphasize reporting, risk assessment, individual action plans, etc., rather than the quality, comprehensiveness, or effectiveness of lifestyle information, and how the body works is almost never discussed. Most wellness programs deal with limited content areas (diet/weight control, exercise, tobacco/alcohol cessation, some add stress management) delivered by newsletters or websites which lack comprehensive, validated resources or interest or engaging content— a SIGNIFICANT disadvantage since success depends on user participation.

The current health care and health information systems simply do not support lifestyle change and yet there is no single body of knowledge about lifestyle impacts on health outcomes.

 

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