Some thoughts. The wizards in Washington are focusing on how to pay for an ever growing health-care budget. Another way to look at it is to ask what does it cost and why and what can be done to do it better. That is regrettably a business approach. I have been looking at the proposals from the White House, still somewhat vague but clearly lacking the strident approach of the old Hillary Health Care Plan, which would have left her solely in charge of every health decision any human would make, a rather terrifying thought, especially if one were a male!
Thus to best understand the health care problem one must first understand the costs and processes. The chart shows a model presented by the California Healthcare Foundation and is an excellent paradigm for understanding the issue. It starts with the problem, namely people and diseases and the incidence of a disease, the new occurrence of it. Then it goes to the prevalence section, namely how many ongoing event, then to the services and processes, namely what is done to treat the incidents, and finally, if you will, the unit costs. The problem starts at the beginning. One should note that 75% of the disease states are chronic and half of the disease states are due to "lifestyle" issues, namely type 2 Diabetes, heart disease, chirrosis, lung cancer and the like. Get people to be responsible and you potentially cut these issues in half! That saves 1.2Trillion a year and growing.
The following two charts indicate the costs and incidence of the major diseases and disease states. Note that Trauma and Mental Disorders are significant factors. Heart and cancer are major problems but as we have said much of the heart problems are avoidable with the elimination of smoking. better diets and exercise. The same could be said for several major cancers. In addition prostate, breast and colon cancers, the big three, can be detected early and effectively managed.
The biggest expense is Type 2 Diabetes which can be eliminated by diet and exercise in over 90% of the cases. The problem is that it is treated medically using drugs which in many cases just exacerbates the problem.
We will be preparing a White Paper on this shortly.
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