Want to see a different slant on health-care reform? Read on! It seems that the rapid increase in healthcare costs has been paralleled by the expansion of our un-healthy lifestyles. In a word, behavior is one of the largest indicators of healthcare cost. Observe the following statistic.
74 percent of health-care costs are driven by four chronic diseases:
A. Cardiovascular disease
B. Cancer
C. Diabetes
D. Obesity
What does this tell us about why healthcare costs are moving up? Our lifestyle choices do affect the cost of healthcare. Diet and exercise is after all the primary driver in containing the costs. Perhaps more to the point, our own lack of discipline is killing us. As a society, there must be incentives to live healthy lifestyles. It must start from our president as a national example. He must quit smoking and contributing to the image of an unhealthy lifestyle and start promoting a real and effective solution to the over-utilization of our healthcare system.
Right now our insurance companies are moving us away from the 'nose wipe' plans of the past to plans with much less 'first dollar' coverage. These plans include larger deductibles and coverages only after that deductible is met. In this way we have a personal incentive to keep our costs down, when it hurts us! However, this needs to be taken to a level of positive incentive, much like what happens with HSA's (Health Savings Accounts)
Some large private companies have already begun to incentivize health by offering discounts on the price of insurance for those whose body mass index is below 30%. Also there are discounts for those who have good cholesterol & blood pressure levels and who don't smoke.
It would be my own contention the there must be even more levels of incentives that include most measures of healthy lifestyles including paying slightly higher premiums while we are young healthy and working to pay for future costs when we are old and need the coverage.
This kind of incentive must ever be protected from 'Government' since they have already proven they can squander our future as in Social Security.
For more on this subject, watch for future articles.
