Why Fixing Healthcare = Fixing the Economy
Wed Mar 05, 2008 at 03:39:56 PM PDT
Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, and strokes cost the U.S. economy $1.3 trillion dollars each year in treatment costs and lost productivity.
Chronic Disease Costs "Staggering" – CBS News
There is an old saying about problem solving: "Treat the cause not the symptoms." For example: if people get sick from tainted drinking water, you can treat the symptoms of everyone who gets sick or you can clean up the water supply and save a great deal of pain and suffering. A better analogy to our wounded economy would be an accident victim who has passed out from a loss of blood. There is no point in focusing on waking them up because they will just keep passing out. You have to stop the bleeding first so they can wake up and then focus on repairing the damage. Our economy is passing out from a loss of blood and we can try to wake it up with stimulus packages but it won’t stop the bleeding or repair the damage. Our broken healthcare system is a major cause of our economic problems. Please read on and I will explain further...
The life-blood of our economy is J-O-B, JOBS and the biggest obstacle to keeping and creating new jobs in the U.S. is the sky-rocketing cost of healthcare, which makes it too expensive for companies to compete in the U.S. and pushes them to operate in countries with lower overhead. The main reason U.S. companies hire undocumented workers is to avoid paying expensive healthcare benefits. Illegal immigration is a symptom, not a cause of our economic problems and fixing health care is one of the prerequisites to fixing our immigration problem.
The mortgage meltdown is another symptom, not a cause of our economic problems. It needs to be fixed right a way but it won’t stop the bleeding. Some people believe the occupation in Iraq is causing our recession because it is racking up such a massive debt on our children. It is destroying our credibility in the world and is creating a whole new generation of terrorists and it must be stopped for all of those reasons but the monetary costs are being deferred as debt and so it is not having the same negative impact on our economy as the high cost of healthcare.
Nothing else we do will ultimately fix our economy until we stop the bleeding first by fixing our broken health care system so we can create new jobs, stabilize the situation and then focus on fixing the other problems to revive our economy.
THE GOOD NEWS: We know how to fix healthcare
There are three basic areas of healthcare which are Prevention, Treatment and Cures. Right now our system is lop-sided with a top-heavy focus on very expensive but highly profitable drug "treatments." To fix the problem we need to restructure the incentives to focus more on "prevention" and "cures" that will prevent and cure diabetes, heart disease and reduce the risk of cancer. Preventing and curing disease and conditions is the right and moral thing to do but it also helps our economy because it lowers treatment costs, which lowers the cost of health insurance and also increases productivity, which makes our country a more competitive place to operate.
WARNING: Do not fall for this crap. (Smells like Big Pharma)
Prevention is good medicine, but it's not a fiscal panacea (in the Netherlands)
The article above from USA Today refers to another article, which refers to a study done in the Netherlands that throws a wet blanket on health care prevention as a cost saver. The problem is the Netherlands already have excellent preventive care and spend nearly half as much per person as we do in the US and therefore would have considerably less potential cost savings. In fact the article should be supporting the idea that compared to the Netherlands; the US could save about $630 billion dollars each year by adopting their health care system. That’s nearly the entire annual budget of Health and Human Services (~$700 billion), which includes Medicare, Medicaid, FDA, CDC, and NIH. That’s $630 billion dollars of fat profit that pharmaceutical companies won’t give up easily.
Health Spending Per Person by Country
THE BAD NEWS: Easier said than done
Back in the early 1990’s universal health care and campaign finance reform were the two signature issues of the Democratic Party. More than 80% of the American people wanted universal health care and the Democratic Party held both houses of Congress and the White House and yet, the health care industry managed to prevent universal health care with an army of lobbyists.
This was a clear signal that our government is broken. Certain special interest groups have wired our government and most of the time they get their way. But here’s the thing: The grip of special interests on our government is actually very week. The only way they win is when only half of the American people show up to vote. The half that shows up is then divided and pitted against itself in partisan gridlock, leaving the back door wide open for whatever the special interests have in mind.
HOW DO WE FIX IT? Thomas Jefferson said it best:
"We are not a country governed by the people. We are a country governed by the people who participate." -- Thomas Jefferson
Most democracies around the world average higher than 80% voter turn out. Canada averages 70-75% while the US averages a dismal 50-55% during presidential elections. That number drops to an embarrassing 35-40% during midterm Congressional elections (1). These numbers are simply not high enough to make our elected officials respond to the will of the American people. When we turn out to vote in large numbers and a few incumbents get booted out, it sends a clear signal to all elected officials that the people are paying attention and that has a sobering effect on how our government operates.
A large part of the problem in the attempt to get universal healthcare back in the early 1990’s was that it was done behind closed doors without harnessing the power of the 80% of the American people, who wanted universal healthcare. We should have been able to get a much better health care system back then but with the economy so severely affected, we are in a much better position to make it happen now.
The key is getting more people involved and voting in political elections and reaching across the partisan divide to build a governing coalition that can sweep the special interests aside and get a whole slate of issues resolved. This is done by bringing people together around important issues like the Economy and Healthcare, which are the two biggest issues in the 2008 election year. One way to amplify this would be to tie the Economy and Healthcare together in the minds of the American people and to bundle other top issues together and communicate how they can help fix our economy.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Healthcare/Economy: Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, and strokes cost the U.S. economy $1.3 trillion dollars each year in treatment costs and lost productivity. Fixing health care means cutting costs so we can create more jobs, increase productivity and begin to fix our economy.
Immigration/Economy: The main reason U.S. companies hire undocumented workers is to avoid paying expensive healthcare benefits. Reducing the cost of health care in the U.S. is a prerequisite for solving our immigration problem and for fixing our economy. Building a "Smart Fence" along the Mexican border is a waste of money and window dressing to make it look like something is being done about immigration and border security. The reality is the vast majority of undocumented workers travel by train and by truck and would be completely unaffected by a border fence. It’s time we stop the heated rhetoric and scape-goating and work out a fair and just solution with everyone fully informed. We can waste billions of dollars building a useless fence or we could invest that money in new jobs that streamline, modernize and reduce costs in our health care system.
Energy Independence/Economy: More than $290 billion dollars bleeds out of the U.S. economy each year to pay for foreign petroleum; which means we have to generate more than $290 billion dollars each year just to break even. This puts our economy and our national security in an incredibly dangerous and weak position. Every dollar we can keep in the U.S. through fuel efficiency, conservation and domestic renewable fuel is a dollar of economic stimulus that stops the bleeding, creates new jobs, strengthens our national security and helps create a cleaner and safer planet for our children. Domestic renewable energy is one way we can break our addiction to foreign oil and fix our economy.
Poverty/Economy: Reducing poverty means putting people to work by creating new jobs with a livable wage, adequate healthcare, and practical transportation. We can create new jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges and levees and new "Green" jobs to create, install and maintain more efficient and renewable energy systems. We can build energy efficient manufacturing plants that produce energy efficient products and we can ship those products on biodiesel trains and trucks, over newer and better highways, bridges and rail lines to more energy efficient stores, accessible by mass transit, where they can be purchased and used in more energy efficient homes and businesses. That’s how we can reduce poverty and fix our economy.
Education/Economy: Improving education means investing in education so we can compete in a global economy and our public school teachers serve the most important role in our society because they help create what we will become as a nation. One way we can attract and retain the very best teachers would be to give public school teachers an exclusive status by making hours teaching in a public school classroom exempt from federal income tax. Meaning if you are brave enough and patient enough to teach our children, you should be given a special status and incentive. And that is one way we can improve our education system and fix our economy.
Many of the biggest issues facing our country are very much connected in the way they impact our lives. As long as we allow each of these issues to be divided and isolated by special interest groups, they will be cast aside and ignored. As long as we fail to show up to vote and engage our elected officials, special interests will continue to get their way. The solution isn’t complicated but it will be difficult to achieve. We have to bring more people into the process, reach across partisan divides and we have to bundle these major issues together in the minds of the American people. If we can do that, we can fix our economy, fix health care, fix immigration, break our addiction to foreign oil, reduce poverty and improve education and the first step is fixing health care. What do you think?
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WARNING: Do not fall for this crap either. (Smells like Big OIL)
Clearing Land for Biofuels Makes Global Warming Worse (Not)
This is a similar deceptive article based on a false assumption, designed to throw a wet blanket on biofuels to replace petroleum. There is absolutely no reason to clear any new land to replace all the petroleum we use with biofuels. Articles like this use the worse case scenario of corn ethanol and soy or palm oil biodiesel and completely exclude breakthroughs in cellulosic ethanol and algae biodiesel, which have significantly less impact. They also exclude the fact that existing agricultural, industrial and municipal waste can replace about 30% of the petroleum we currently use, without any new land use. Algae can produce 100 times the yield of most biofuel crops, uses 99% less water and requires no farm land at all. Fuel efficiency can get us the rest of the way and we have 150 MPG turbo diesels appearing in Europe next year. Obviously the petroleum industry isn’t happy about this and won’t give up their record profits easily.
Biomass Feedstocks - DOE
Solix Biofuels - Algae Biodiesel
150 MPG Turbodiesel by 2009? - Loremo
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(1) US Voter Turnout
Presidential elections:
2004 presidential 57%
2000 presidential 51%
1996 presidential 49%
1992 presidential 55%
1988 presidential 50%
1984 presidential 53%
1980 presidential 52%
1976 presidential 53%
1972 presidential 55%
1968 presidential 61%
1964 presidential 61%
1960 presidential 63%
Congressional only:
2006 midterm 37%
2002 midterm 36%
1998 midterm 35%
1994 midterm 39%
US Voter Turnout Statistics
US Presidential Elections
World Voter Turnout
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