Tackling the High Cost of Health Care

Any way you look at the cost of health care – or rather, disease care – in the United States, it's extraordinarily expensive. If you pay your own health and medical insurance, or at least contribute to its cost through your employer, you know that the premiums and copayments are always increasing. And the cost of health care is going to get much worse.

Different experts come up with different numbers, but they're all pretty chilling. In one analysis, health-care spending is expected to double from $2 billion annually to $4 billion annually in just 10 years. That amount would add up to one out of every five dollars spent in the United States. Another analysis projects that more than $8 billion dollars will be spent just to cover the new Medicare prescription drug plan over the next four years. I know, and you probably do as well, many people who take five to 10 prescription medications each day, putting them and our nation at risk of financial ruin.

There are many reasons behind these enormous increases in health-care spending. One is the aging of the population. Another is the aggressive advertising by pharmaceutical companies to sell their proprietary drugs. Still another is the competitive hospital environment – though many hospitals are technically nonprofit, they seek earnings and market share the way any for-profit corporation does. More disturbing, the number of for-profit hospitals is increasing rapidly, whereas the number of nonprofit hospitals is quickly shrinking.

With so many businesses and organizations intent on profiting from disease care, genuine efforts at prevention get the short shrift. After all, many businesses would suffer financially if large numbers of people got healthier and didn't need drugs and medical services. Yet our financial security, as individuals, families, and a nation, depends on significantly reducing the costs of medical care.

Improving eating habits and encouraging people to take dietary supplements to prevent (as well as to treat) disease is a sensible, low-cost approach. Nutrients are cheaper than drugs, and they correct the underlying causes of disease, not just its symptoms. With this credible approach to preventing disease, drugs and hospitalization would be reserved for when there is no reasonable alternative. It would certainly require a retooling of our economy, one that would probably be greater than retooling from manufacturing to high tech, but the economic payoff would (along with our health) would be impressive: healthier people are more productive people.

Spread the word. Explain this to your friends, your employer, and your insurer, and convey these thoughts to your senators and congressman. We have to start sometime, and there's no better time than now. The alternative, sometime in the future, will be economic collapse.