Obama's Health Care Reform Disaster - Bruno Update # 4

As we promised several months ago, we will periodically go back to the disaster know as Obama Care to review the status and ramifications of this horrid piece of legislation. In past updates and other related posts, we have shown that this bill reformed nothing as it relates to high and rising health care costs in this country. All it did was increase taxes, extend coverage in the same cost environment to uninsured Americans, and mandated a forced purchase of a service, health care insurance, by all Americans. It never identified the root causes of the problem underlying rising costs and thus, was never able to provide solutions to wipe out those root causes.

In addition, several recent announcements by the Congressional Budget Office and other sources have confirmed that the bill will not reduce the deficit as Obama, Reid, and Pelosi claimed but will actually become a budget buster within the next twenty years as the baby boomers retire. We questioned whether the supporters of the bill were too dumb to figure out the actual costs before the vote or were being devious and suppressing the actual costs until after the vote, in essence lying to America. In either case, costs will go up, deficits will go up, taxes will go up, and the root causes of the problem will remain.

Based on research of knowledgable health care sources, none of whom worked for the political class, we identified some major root causes, that if properly attacked, would significantly reduce the disease levels in this country in the biggest categories, resulting in lower health issues of the nation as a whole, and in the process, reduce health care costs. These root causes include:

• Americans eat too much.
• American smoke too much.
• Americans are overweight.
• Americans do not get enough exercise.
• As the baby boomers age, increasing levels of dementia related diseases will increase.
• Breast and several other types of cancers are big components of health care costs.

If you can attack these root causes, high health care costs will take care of themselves since you would have reduced the demand for health care services. When you reduce demand for any product or service and supply remains the same, prices/costs have to come down. The added benefit of this approach is that the country does not become a police state where everyone has to carry health care papers on their person.

Consider the following math, based on an article in the June, 2010 issue of Money magazine, "Should health insurers penalize people for their unhealthy behavior?":

• 21% of U.S. adults smoke and there are about 230 million adults in the country today.
• the additional lifetime medical costs for a smoker vs. a non-smoker are higher by $17,500.
• if you assume a lifetime of smoking is fifty years, then combining the above numbers shows that the nation's annual medical bills are about $17 billion a year higher because of smokers.
• This comes out to about $170 billion over ten years, the time frame Obama likes to use to fudge his numbers.
• If you reduce smoking by 50%, you could save about $85 billion a year in health care costs.
• Furthermore, another smoking-related number from the article stated that the average bill for a hospital lung cancer stay is $45,500.
• About 163,500 people die from lung cancer every year.
• Conservatively, lets say every one of them had to stay in the hospital during the last year of their life. We will not count those that were in the hospital for lung cancer but did not die.
• If you combine the 163,500 with the $45,500 estimate, you will estimate that the nation spends about $7.5 billion a year on lung cancer hospital visits each year or about $75 billion over ten years. Cut the amount of lung cancer occurrences in half and you could save tens of billions of dollars every year.

The same article also spoke about obesity in America:

• 34% of U.S. adults are obese or about 78 million people.
• The extra annual medical costs for obese people vs. those of normal weight is $1,429.
• Thus, America incurs an extra $111.7 billion a year in medical costs due to obesity of a whopping $1.1 TRILLION over ten years. Cut the obesity problem in half and the country could save a half a TRILLION over ten years in unnecessary medical costs.
• These savings do not include any savings from being just overweight, but not obese, which is about another third of the adult population.
• Furthermore, according to the article, the average bill for a hospital stay for a heart attack victim is $54,400.
• According to the American heart association website, about 1.3 million Americans suffer a heart attack every year.
• Thus, the costs of heart attack hospital stays is $71 billion a year or $707 billion over ten years. Many of those heart attacks are caused by people's weight problems, get their weight under control and you could save billions of dollars.

Thus, in just a few short minutes, the above math identified more than two TRILLION dollars in potential health care costs savings that are available to be reaped if we can get the amount of smoking down and the levels of obesity down in this country. Those are root causes without a "papers please" environment. This is called problem solving.

To answer the question posed in the article, those that smoke and who are overweight should be penalized for their behavior. It is called personal responsibility, they are the costs causers, they should be the cost payers. Unfortunately, the political class knows nothing about personal responsibility, they just want to get re-elected regardless of the costs.

These savings just cover smoking and overweight people. Consider the following statistics from the American Cancer Society as reported recently in the Tampa Tribune:

• On out of every two men will get cancer in their lifetime.
• One out of every three women will get cancer.
• About 77% of all cancers are diagnosed in people 55 years or older.
• Over 190,000 Americans will get breast cancer this year.

Even if these percentages stay the same, the number of older people in the U.S. population will continue to grow and thus, the absolute number of people getting cancer will grow in the years to come unless the cure rate is significantly improved. The same holds true for dementia-related diseases, the older one gets the likelihood of getting dementia rises. These are the types of issues that need to be addressed to get health care costs under control. these are the types of issues Obama and the rest of the political class did not address in any effective way in Obama care.

Thus, as always, two steps in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are cited as having the potential to solve this national problem. Step 28 would convene a panel of smart Americans to do a zero based, ground up analysis of the root causes. This panel, which would be void of lobbyists and politicians, would propose legislation and steps to address the root causes as opposed to the charade we have seen in Washington over the past year in this area.

Step 4 would direct more funding to researching and solving the riddles of cancer and dementia-related diseases in order to avoid the large costs facing the country as the baby boomers mature and enter the prime years for coming down with these diseases. Solve the root causes and the economics of health care will take care of themselves.









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