Government Can Afford Natural Care for All

by Jacqueline L. Jones

The evidence is clear. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), people with chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease account for more than 75% of the nation’s $1.4 trillion in medical care costs each year. That figure could jump 42 percent by 2023, according to an Oct. 2007 report by the Milken Institute, a think tank in Santa Monica, Calif.

As the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), and practitioners in emerging and ancient disciplines report positive results in fighting these illnesses, the path to reducing health care costs seems clear. Equal access to disease prevention services and effective natural treatments could reduce costs for all.

You wonder aloud if we can afford to increase entitlements. The government is so inefficient, you protest. Let’s discuss why these concerns are unfounded.

Medicare and Medicaid are headed for disaster. The cost of treating advanced chronic illness in the aging baby-boom generation is a major cause. But many chronic ailments can be prevented through lifestyle changes. As early as 1949, The Commision on Chronic Illness warned of the costs of delaying treatment until the advanced stages.

Public health campaigns are sounding the alarm, but the majority of Americans still look to their physicians for specific advice. According to IFM, the majority of mainstream medicine is based on acute care and not on correcting the underlying causes of disease.

By training physicians to detect these causes, and paying lifestyle educators such as nutritionists and exercise physiologists to teach patients how to reverse these causes through instruction tailored to their needs and learning styles, we should see a rapid decrease in lifestyle-related diseases and, thus, realize a dramatic savings in health care costs for individuals, businesses, and the government. The Milken Institute estimates that just by lowering the rates of obesity, which leads to diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments, we could see productivity gains of $254 billion and avoid $60 billion in treatment expenditures per year.

But what about government inefficiency? Inefficiency in health care is not limited to government programs. An Institute of Medicine report in 1999 titled “To Err is Human” estimated that avoidable errors in hospitals throughout the country were killing 44,000 to 98,000 Americans a year. They were injuring thousands more.

According to a Feb. 7, 2005 report by the Newshour on PBS, the Veterans Administration (VA) ran one of the most efficient health care systems in the country before its recent problems with handling the influx of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The VA has taken the lead in reducing common medical mistakes by developing checklists for routine procedures, requiring reports on medical mistakes, investigating their causes, developing strategies to prevent repetition of those mistakes, and computerizing health records and prescriptions.

The cost of all these changes except the electronic records system totaled ten cents for every $100 spent on medical care. Just think of the huge savings from reductions in both malpractice insurance premiums and lengthy stays caused by mistakes.

By providing equal access to disease prevention and proven natural treatments, and reducing preventable medical mistakes in the health care system, the government should be able to afford the cost of health care for all U.S. citizens.