HEALTHCARE FOR A NATION

HEALTHCARE FOR A NATION

There are those who feel that the best way to approach healthcare is from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. Using money to solve our healthcare problems is like using a band-aid to cure cancer. It creates the impression that we are doing something about it, while enabling the cancer to go untreated. The healthcare crisis in this nation will not go away because we fund another program and create another bureaucracy.

By focusing on the fire, we ignore its main cause—bad dietary and exercise habits. If we approach healthcare proactively in the first place and change our diets and our exercise efforts to include much healthier eating habits and physical conditioning which lasts for our entire lifetimes instead of just the formative years, we can greatly improve the length and quality of our lives.

Some will suggest that reversing a nation’s habits will take several lifetimes and cost more than it is worth, but this is to ignore plain facts which suggest otherwise. Our government’s anti-smoking campaign has been highly successful in a very short time, has been worth every penny spent, saved trillions of dollars in present and future healthcare costs and improved the environmental quality of life immeasurably for every citizen.

When there is a healthcare concern, such as the swine flu outbreak, which threatens to become a worldwide pandemic unless we proactively introduce preventive measures and safeguards to immediately thwart its advance, we find that we are quite capable of addressing the issues in a timely and effective manner. Why should a healthcare plan be perceived as any less urgent when it involves the health and safety of our entire nation?

When a salmonella outbreak is perceived, there is an immediate response focused on the discovery and quarantine of the offending source, and these guidelines have well-known and established protocols familiar to the general public. We expect our government to respond aggressively to threats to our health and safety and correctly assume that these proactive guidelines to safeguard the nation’s health and food supply are properly within the jurisdiction of government.

Government has a vital role in the establishment of healthcare guidelines because the public has increasingly demanded that publicly funded programs assume the collection, distribution and supervision of the associated costs of such a system. If the government assumes a more active role in healthcare, it must also mandate guidelines that increase health and reduce disease. The government must supervise this critical area holistically by demanding that proactive health education, diet and exercise programs be established nationwide before increasing levels of tax-and-spend programs which mistakenly focus on damage-control and post-disease response. Prioritizing the cure rather than the prevention of disease can only lead to the financial collapse of our healthcare system, because it becomes infinitely more expensive to cure than to prevent disease.

Our government has learned expensive lessons about delayed-response to emergencies and disease, and it is clearly in our best interest to be certain that we establish correct wellness priorities focused on improved and sustainable health. This issue presents twin opportunities for the advancement or decline of national healthcare, with the associated benefits and disadvantages, both for the improvement and further deterioration of our national culture.

What can be done while this transformational healthcare is being implemented? How will we continue to provide efficient healthcare to those whose habits are ingrained, so that the maximum benefit can be derived? There is no better time than now to improve our diet and exercise plans. Those with ingrained habits will discover how much better they will feel by participating in major positive changes to their lifestyles.

By improving our health first, we will be able to think more clearly about priorities in healthcare, be able to redirect trillions of dollars of disease-response treatment into much- less expensive pre-disease prevention programs and be able to fund necessary research and treatment for those diseases which have no present cure. Improvements in diet and exercise have a profound effect on everyone, regardless of age or circumstances.

Let us devote our limited healthcare budget to the development of advanced education, superior diet and exercise programs which will effectively reverse the effects of our bad habits and drastically improve the health of our nation. Age and condition-sensitive wellness programs which mandate dramatic improvements in lifestyle and establish higher health standards will raise the bar on expectations and results.

Incentives which offer equal opportunities for verifiable progress must be instituted for students, employees, self-employed and retirees whose healthcare rates are lowered and raised to correspond with the degree of compliance which is commensurate with positive and negative results. Those whose health is compromised by circumstances beyond their control must receive the full resources of a sympathetic nation whose stated goal is the elimination of those diseases for which, as yet, there is no cure.

Those who continue to make unhealthy lifestyle choices will soon discover that the costs of preserving the health of poorly maintained bodies becomes unmanageable when those costs are passed along to the perpetrators and enablers by way of increased premiums and denied coverage. Healthy lifestyle programs will attract an ever-increasing majority when undeniable wellness advantages are coupled with lowered premiums.

Ultimately, the costs of treating diseases which have no cure are far less than the costs of treatment for diseases brought on by poor habits of nutrition and exercise. Members of the inactive public who are waiting for the government to rescue them and assume the supervision of their healthcare consciousness, responses, discipline and self-enabled disease-prone routines will discover an ever-increasing majority who oppose funding cures for self-inflicted illnesses. Ignorance and laziness are not easy problems to solve, but they can be addressed and cured once they are recognized, with educational programs and monetary incentives which enable verifiable results, financial benefits and improved health in appropriate doses.

Over the years governmental agencies and businesses working together have helped to lower rates of work-related injuries, disease and death through accountability and employee education programs, inspections and various requirements which encourage and reward safety reform and innovation and punish non-compliance. This shared relationship between government and businesses invites a closer association focused on improved health and lowered costs through managed-care and wellness programs that reward proactive and verifiable healthy lifestyle choices by employees with reduced rates and bonus incentives. These same incentive programs can be adapted to fit the improved lifestyles of the self-employed and retired by offering similar rate reductions and incentives.

Victims of legitimately contracted disease will receive the empathetic treatment and priority status which their conditions demand, and their care will be fully-funded from those ample capital reserves which result from a proactively-preventive approach to health and wellness. We must all bear the burden of increased vigilance, research, safety, prevention and cures for those diseases which are the result of unforeseen circumstance and unpreventable illness.

Rather than devising plans for raising revenues to combat rising healthcare costs, we should concentrate on a healthcare plan which will reduce costs by focusing efforts on prevention, health-improvement and wellness programs that raise the bar on existing standards and offer sustainable and improved healthcare for the present and future generations of our nation. Responding in a suitable way to our healthcare crisis in the midst of the worst global recession since the Great Depression requires that we both implement a program which can realistically address the challenges and respond with a budget-sensitive program which considers our financial hardship and plans appropriately.

Mark Overt Skilbred