The health care and energy industries got their people in control of both Houses and the White House then took advantage of the situation . Over charging by doctors , insurance companies of all types , and energy companies has been the norm for the past 8 years and the only possible fix is competition . Alternative fuels would cut energy costs and government owned and operated health clinics and hospitals as they had in California before President RR became governor of that State would fix the halth care problem . The Federal Government and several cities , counties and States presently own several hospitals and clinics around the country so this would not be a learning experience . Insurance is not necessary for treatment at these facilities so the government need not get in to the insurance business which allows care givers to game the system with unnecessary treatments and over pricing as is the condition today and with the government in the insurance business it would be business as usual . What we now have is a lot of double speak around Washington and finger pointing whch can be defined as "smoke and mirrors" and when the smoke clears things will be same as they are now .
THE SPECTRUM
Dean Ornish M.D.
Why Health Insurance Doesn’t Work
Because of a growing awareness that the current system is unsustainable, reformers are promoting disease prevention. A look at one campaign leader.
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Health-care costs—really, disease-care costs—continue to rise faster than inflation and wage increases, and are reaching a tipping point. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums have risen 87 percent in the past six years to an average of $11,480 annually for family coverage, which is almost what a minimum-wage worker earns. And over 47 million Americans don't have health insurance at all, which is appalling. This issue is already playing an important role in the presidential campaign.
Most Americans receive health insurance from their employers. As costs continue to rise, there is a growing awareness that this system is unsustainable. An unusual alliance is beginning to emerge between management and labor, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. One of the leaders of this influential movement is Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway. We met a few years ago, when the Safeway Foundation provided a grant to the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute (which I direct) in support of our research showing that comprehensive lifestyle changes may stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer. I interviewed him earlier this week. Excerpts:
Dean Ornish: What are you trying to accomplish?
Steve Burd: We're trying to take a leadership role in solving the nation's health-care crisis. We want everybody in this country to have health insurance. In our experience at Safeway, we're confident that we can actually improve the quality of health care while taking costs down and using the savings to help finance coverage of low-income people who are clearly going to need help to pay for insurance. And there's no need to raise taxes.
How did you get interested in this issue?
Our health-care costs for our employees reached $1 billion and were exceeding our net income by about 20 percent.
Clearly, that's not sustainable.
No, it's not. We're a high-volume, low-margin business, so we decided to reinvent our own approach to health care. The great revelation was that 50-70 percent of health-care costs are driven by people's behaviors. Ten years ago, I thought genetics played an overpowering role. I've now come to believe that personal behavior really plays a much larger role.
The Interheart study looked at 30,000 men and women in 52 countries on every continent and found that nine factors—all related to diet and lifestyle—accounted for more than 90 percent of the risk of coronary heart disease, which is the No. 1 cause of premature death. So, your number may be an underestimation.
Most people really don't have any idea that behavior is that important. And, for the most part, insurance plans don't take behavior into account as directly as we've done at Safeway.
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