Healthier lifestyles reduce health care demands

Health care costs in the United States exceed those of any other nation. Millions of Americans aren’t insured, partly due to the high cost of premiums, and end up resorting to payday loans to finance emergency and routine medical expenses.

With health-care reform issues taking the political center stage, is this not a good time to step back and assess the problem from a more basic point of view? Is it possible to have a healthier society and far more effective medical care without reducing need, and thereby demand and therefore cost?

Broader access and lower costs do not mix

Presumably, the goals of various medical-reform packages are to broaden access to health care and, at the same time, reduce medical costs. The merits of any particular political agenda aside, however, absent a reduction in the demand for medical treatment, industry reform will only serve to create new costs, further restrict access, ration limited services, and adversely affect the economic interests of health-care providers, especially small businesses. Obviously, increasing access and reducing costs are at best conflicting ideas.

Education is the key to more effective health care

Without illnesses and accidents, obviously, there would be no health care costs. According to a New England Journal of Medicine article by James F. Fries and C. Everett Koop, et al., (”Reducing Health Care Costs by Reducing the Need and Demand for Medical Services,” Volume 329:321-325, 1993), in the last century, medical costs have soared as a result of an enormous increase in chronic disease, despite a concomitant reduction in the occurrence of acute illness.

Obesity, heart disease, and adult onset diabetes and other preventable chronic illnesses, along with unnecessary emergency room and doctor visits waste a lot of medical resources. Generally speaking, healthy people don’t smoke or consume alcohol to excess. They aren’t overweight, and they exercise regularly, eat wisely, wear seat belts, and take advantage of readily-available preventive health-care measures.

Not all preventive health-care measures have been shown to save money. But despite an overwhelming societal reluctance to admit it, an emphasis on disease and accident prevention and individual restraint in the use of medical services would, over all, reduce health-care costs.

Proper use of medical services reduces demand

A health policy directed at reducing medical demand would make a major contribution to lowering societal health-care costs because:

  1. Preventable illness makes up an inexcusably large portion of our current demand for medical treatment;
  2. Risky behavior is expensive in terms of lifetime medical costs;
  3. Approaches involving self-management have been shown to reduce unnecessary medical treatment;
  4. Health-promotion programs in the workplace have been shown to reduce overall health-care costs; and
  5. Our present health-care system does not closely link the use of medical resources to the requirements of illness.

Unhealthy lifestyle choices are expensive

Fries and Koop, et al., state preventable illness and injury account for 8 of 9 leading causes of death in the United States. The sources they cite are sound, and support a simple and common sense idea: Lifetime medical costs are linked to lifestyle choices and unhealthy habits. Fries and Koop observed that obvious things like regular exercise was associated with fewer trips to the doctor, health costs and morbidity rates were higher among smokers and others with lifestyle factors with greater risk (smoking, obesity, hypertension, hypercholestolemia, and adult onset diabetes) were double that of people without those risk factors.

Education reduces the demand for medical care

Many studies have shown that educating patients about self-management, especially when coupled with modest medical intervention offering objective guidelines to help decide whether medical assistance is needed, reduces the demand for medical services. This is observed as true even in the case of chronic disease sufferers.

Education reduces the demand for life-sustaining treatment

Not only are overly intensive services for terminal illness extraordinarily expensive, they are not desired by most people. Fries and Koop note that “Seventy percent of people request no life-sustaining treatments for themselves when they are dying, and 89 percent desire living wills and other advance directives. Only 9 percent made such directives.” An emphasis on educating patients about the importance of health-care directives could result in an enormous reduction of health-care costs.It would also emphasize humane treatment and a more effective allocation of already strained medical resources.

Deep pockets stand to save by spending on education

It costs money to educate people, especially when that education involves altering long-standing lifestyle choices, and, even more so, on a wide scale. However, if entities bearing the costs of skyrocketing medical care - insurers, government, and industry - were convinced that educational programs designed to reduce dependency on medical services would work, then they’d be funding those programs right now.

 

Popularity: 14% [?]

StumbleUpon It!

Technorati Tags: , , ,