The fourth installment of this series continues to lay out why "insurance" is the wrong model. While I previously stated that the use of health care is a certainty not a risk, we all suffer from disease, old age and death, but how we get there and the cost is not random.
For the last 7 years, the CDC has been conducting a massive study it calls Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is in my opinion the most important study ever conducted on the cause of disease and health care utilization.
Yet few have ever heard of the study, much less the results. I again say this is because the truth is too ugly. We hear about the health crises, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity....We hear about the new wonder drugs (often wondering how safe they are) and how they are the hope to save us all.
What we do not hear is the truth. The truth is that illness is not randomly distributed. Those that are raised in unhealthy and often violent homes bear the burden of chronic illness and early death, and as a society we all pay for it. Our health and health care crisis is a societal systemic problem that is reduced to trying to address the human and economic symptoms but not the causes.
There is no need for me to go into a lengthy explanation because the study and website does that. I will jump ahead of the study a bit. They are currently in the phase where they are not looking only at the illnesses but health care utilization. Without a doubt they will find the economic cost to be enormous.
The ACE Pyramid represents the conceptual framework for the Study. During the time period of the 1980s and early 1990s information about risk factors for disease had been widely researched and merged into public education and prevention programs. However, it was also clear that risk factors, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and sexual behaviors for many common diseases were not randomly distributed in the population. In fact, it was known that risk factors for many chronic diseases tended to cluster, that is, persons who had one risk factor tended to have one or more others.
Because of this knowledge, the ACE Study was designed to assess what we considered to be "scientific gaps" about the origins of risk factors. These gaps are depicted as the two arrows linking Adverse Childhood Experiences to risk factors that lead to the health and social consequences higher up the pyramid. Specifically, the study was designed to provide data that would help answer the question: "If risk factors for disease, disability, and early mortality are not randomly distributed, what influences precede the adoption or development of them?" By providing information to answer this question, we hoped to provide scientific information that would be useful for the development of new and more effective prevention programs.
The ACE Study takes a whole life perspective, as indicated on the orange arrow leading from conception to death. By working within this framework, the ACE Study began to progressively uncover how childhood stressors (ACE) are strongly related to development and prevalence of risk factors for disease and health and social well-being throughout the lifespan.
http://www.cdc.gov/...