More Proof That My Approach To Health Care Is Better Than Obama Care

About a month ago I laid out my reasons for vehemently disagreeing with Obama Care and the reasons why it will not work while I also laid out the steps that I would take to solve the problem. The underlying premise for not believing in Obama Care is that the President, Pelosi, and Reid never identified and quantified the underlying root causes of high health care costs and if you do not do those basic steps, you have very little chance of coming up with the right solution.

The political class looked for a solution that was financially based, i.e. tax more, move around some existing government money (e.g. Medicare funding), and hope that things fall into place. My solution, based on facts, was that this is really a public health care problem and until you change the underlying behaviors that lead to bad health, no financial manipulations in the world will fix the problem of escalating health care costs. These bad behaviors that were identified by knowledgeable people, not myself, include:

• Americans are too fat.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.

Ten years after Obama Care is in effect, unless heaven helps us and we can get it overturned, Americans will still be too fat, smoke too much, and not exercising enough. The root causes and bad behaviors will still be in place and the nation will be bankrupt from the political class's failed financial approach to solving the problem.

Now, an April 27, 2010 Associated Press article adds further proof to my solution rather than Obama's. The article, written by Lindsey Tanner, summarized the research findings from a twenty year long British study that tracked about 5,000 English adults. The primary finding: four bad habits/behaviors can age you by twelve years. What to these bad habits include? According to the researchers:

• Poor diet (i.e. not eating the right foods, likely leading to being overweight)
• Inactivity (i.e. not enough exercise)
• Smoking
• Drinking too much alcohol

Wow, their results sound an awful like my recommendations to fixing the health care cost problem in this country. During the length of the study, death certificates were checked to see what the death rates were of those that indulged in the bad habits (test group) and those that did not (control group). The death rate for the test group was more than three and a half times that of the control group and the leading causes of death in the test group were heart disease and cancer, both maladies linked to unhealthy life styles. Thus, in addition to aging people quicker, these habits also killed them sooner.

We have gone over the statistics from reputable sources (e.g. the Cleveland Clinic) in past posts. Get obesity under control, reduce the rate of smoking and get everyone exercising and you could substantially cut the national costs incurred to treat those that do not follow these steps by at least 50%. Reduce the demand for medical services by over 50% and costs would come down, making health insurance affordable for many more people. Treat the problem as a public health issue (think about how the country increased seat belt usage which in turn, reduced highway deaths) and you will make much more progress at a much lower costs than raising taxes, making criminals out of any American who does not purchase health care insurance, and setting up massive government bureaucracies that never work.

See Step 28 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" to see how easy it is to solve the problem if you know how to look for underlying root causes, something Obama and just about every other American politicians either does not know how to do and is too lazy to do, to the detriment of every American.



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