Prevention is the long-term answer to health care costs that everyone can get behind.
I was watching the most recent "Real Time with Bill Maher" on my DVR last night. Not the greatest episode -- thirty minutes of listening to two truly slimy Republican congressmen. Toward the end, Arianna Huffington came on as a guest. Bill Maher brought up the point that all this focus on expensive treatments obscures the importance of preventing serious medical conditions in the first place (he likely brought this up in response to the recent post by Dean Ornish on Huffpo).
At this point, both the Republicans spoke up in support of Maher's point, as did Huffington. This was after everyone had been arguing about the public option.
I think we like to argue. We like to identify and exacerbate our differences. In part, this is why we're not talking about shifting our actual style of medical care -- we're too busy destroying the enemy (the insurance companies, the Republicans). I'm all for universal coverage, of course, and think the insurance companies are sleeze, but the fact is that we have a means of dramatically improving quality of life and lowering health care costs -- and it's not even a part of the discussion.
Stop and think how much heart disease is preventable. Same with diabetes. Why the dramatic in asthma as of late? Could air pollution have anything to do with it? What about the quality of our water?
We need nutrition programs in schools -- school gardens as well. We need to refocus on our industrial food supply chain -- not only is the quality of food sold in supermarkets generally poor, centralized farming and ranching could easily lead to disease epidemics (and probably does cause more sickness than we care to admit).
The fact is, prevention isn't glamorous. At my local Safeway supermarket I'm always being asked to make a donation to fight some form of cancer, or perhaps autism, but never am I asked to make a donation to teaching proper nutrition in schools, or hell, providing everyone with simple multivitamins. Yet these simple and affordable measures would drastically reduce health care costs.
The joke is that the president could just do this stuff. I don't imagine he'd encounter serious resistance. We wouldn't need "CALLS TO ACTION!!!"
I'm going to end here, but I wanted to make one last observation about the Kos community. People here give a lot of grief to anyone who advocates "alternative" medicine (Huffington, for example). While not every form of alternative medicine is especially effective or sane, I think the Kos community is equally brainwashed by the glamor of sophisticated science.
Take the vaccine debate -- people on this forum harshly name-called anyone who would dare not vaccinate their child. I'm not anti-vaccine exactly, but I was amazed that among all the "scientists" here, nobody brought up points about natural vs. artificial immunity, the adverse affects of the chicken pox vaccine on adult immunity, and so on.
Most disheartening, for me, is the lack of sympathy here -- as if the medical community has never advocated procedures that turned out to be dangerous, as if pharmaceuticals have never been contaminated or posed a greater health risk than first thought -- as if people have never been called stupid for asking very reasonable questions of their doctors. The hubris has got to stop.
Why am I bringing this up? It's because in every respect we need to reconsider how to improve the health or our society. What once seemed like a miracle solution (say, petroleum-based farming) now seems a curse. Antibiotics, another miracle, are now leading to super bacteria. It's great that we're finally going after Big Insurance, but our health care woes simply aren't that simple.