By taking steps to combat chronic disease now Americans can trim U.S. health tab by billions

- Kathy E. Read BETHESDA, Md. — The best strategy for intercepting and shooting down the sky-rocketing costs threatening our sprawling, often disjointed healthcare system won’t come from Capitol Hill, but from the hearts and minds of each and every American.

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We the people — all 306-million of us — have the power to lop hundreds of billions of dollars off our nation’s annual medical tab by making a simple commitment to eating better and exercising more. Sadly, even with the physical fitness mania of the last few decades the vast majority of Americans don’t eat “heart smart” nor exercise on a regular basis. According to a host of recent studies, the United States remains a fast-food nation that gulps Big Macs and French fries and guzzles calorie-loaded soft drinks and coffees. Our public schools spend millions of dollars each year building and repaving parking lots so kids can drive rather than walk to school. This comes at a time when the majority of U.S. school systems have dropped physical education as a requirement. In homes where annual incomes easily top $300,000 a year, parents seem more focused on their fiscal fitness than the physical fitness of their own children. Every dollar Americans spend on treatment of chronic illnesses that stem from obesity enlarges a growing pile of wasted money that could be used to modernize healthcare delivery and discover cures for serious diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that chronic disease now account for 75 cents of every dollar spent on healthcare in this country. The U.S. economic output takes a staggering hit when chronically ill workers take sick days for maladies that might have been easily prevented by eating healthier and engaging in daily exercise. Their lack of commitment to their own wellness, reduces the available supply of labor, drives up the cost of goods and services, and slashes billions off the gross domestic product. Consider just a few of the deadly consequences:

• By mid-century the preventable impact of the seven deadliest chronic diseases —diabetes, pulmonary conditions like asthma, hypertension, mental disorder, heart disease, cancer and stroke — will cost our country six-trillion dollars a year
• More than half of all Americans — some 153-million men, women and children — have at least one chronic disease.
• All told, chronic diseases cost the U.S. economy $1.3-trillion annually and wreak untold anguish and disruption in people’s lives. In California alone, the tab comes to more than $100-billion a year.

Instead of beginning a quixotic quest to ram-rod a costly and ineffective universal-payer system through Congress, our politicians ought to make new funds available for an aggressive nationwide campaign that focuses on prevention of chronic diseases and improving the lifestyles of those already beset with them. With due diligence, Americans suffering from chronic disease can mitigate its effects with early diagnosis and the proper use of noninvasive medical treatments such as prescription drugs. At the same time Congress should demand that all schools receiving federal aid reinstitute physical education courses or risk the loss of taxpayer dollars. And, wherever feasible, it should require schools to provide onsite parking for able-bodied students only to those whose homes are so far from school that walking is impractical. Finally, every American can put eating healthy food and exercising as vigorously as possible at the top of their daily to-do list. You don’t need to shell out mega-bucks for a personal trainer or dietician. Effective workouts and fat-melting diets are available at dozens of sites online and your doctor likely can give you a list of the best. As we begin to take these steps we’ll all discover that our current healthcare crisis wasn’t really a crisis after all, but just us — all of us — failing to intelligently exercise our own individual responsibilities. Kathy E. Read is an independent journalist and the former publisher of The Wilson Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Her articles have appeared in leading papers throughout the United States.

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