Health Routines

Let’s brainstorm for healthcare reform.

Time to think outside the box. What follows is a “what if” discussion that could help us discover new solutions to existing problems of national concern. If the following numbers are somewhat inaccurate, it should not matter.

Premise: There are three large rocks in the road for Obama’s Health Care Reform.

First is that solutions based on more government are anti efficiency and anti economy. The Russian experience with communism proves that “What’s in it for me” and “use all the brain power available” are better means to good solutions.

Second is poor transfer of information, even with the internet. Perhaps that problem lies with our education system. Self responsibility is simply the best approach to health care via prevention based on good life styles. Despite this, folks still desire to lose weight while eating all the calories they can find, and to be healthy while smoking, vegetating in front of the TV, and drinking too much alcohol and sugary beverages.

Third is greed. Drug companies manage to sell us on pills that are less effective than good life style, and other companies still promote worthless herbal pills and magic weight loss products. Imagine making placebos, sugar pills, for 10 cents per hundred, including packaging. Charge $1 per pill and recommend one pill per day. 90 cents times 365 days per year is $328.50 income per year. Of course, most magic pills are sold for much higher prices, and to far more than 1 person. Re run that calculation for n – million people, where n ranges from 1 to 316 (USA 2008).

Here is one approach to health reform that just might work. It can’t be less effective than all the policies already tried.

1. Go for national health care, also known as free health insurance.
Remove ALL restrictions on out of pocket payments for health services, such as are now making Medicare such a frustrating tangle. (Let individual choice warn us when the national programs are not cost effective.)

2. Speed up deliberations by the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) on approval of new medicines and review of old approvals. Require honest clinical trials with no sponsored authors or bribed publishers. Demand full disclosure of all claims and evidence, available via internet, both for on and off label use.

3. Deny free health care to anyone who smokes, is overweight, does not exercise at least with a 2 mile daily walk, uses any recreational drug, and generally ignores basic health common sense. Of course, the fast food industry will have to reform or go under.

4. While we are at it, let’s also wipe out the major incentive for most organized crime. Make all recreational drugs available at very low cost with no legal restrictions on use. And emphasize prior paragraph. One option would be to tax such drugs as we now do tobacco and alcohol.

5. Now take all the monies presently spent on fighting illegal drugs, plus funds raised from “sin taxes” on tobacco, alcohol, plus the proposed decriminalized recreational drugs and apply them to paying for the free national health insurance.

What are ballpark dollar amounts for this discussion? Even with internet search engines helping, the following numbers are rough estimates.

We now spend nearly $12 billion per year to fight illegal drugs, plus several times that for legal prosecution of dealers and users, prisons, government employees, and related police work. The total is estimated to be on the order of $50 billion per year to fight drug war. How much we spend on the actual drugs is hard to estimate, but is probably several times as much. For discussion, say $100 to $200 billion. (Wow!)

Obama has said that “Healthcare is one-sixth of our economy, …”
The U.S. GDP for 2008 was estimated on the order of $14 trillion, so that means about $840 billion, or around $3000 per capita of roughly 300 million USA population. (That is actually not a bad average figure, if true.)

So, let’s say we transfer roughly $100 to $250 billion a year from the drug war and drug purchases. Were talking maybe 12 to 29 percent of the cost of health care. Not enough to make “free health insurance” really free, but probably enough to keep the trust funds for Medicare and Social Security from near term bankruptcy.

Is this discussion merely a fantasy? Perhaps. But so are all the government programs for fighting drugs and providing health care to our masses.

Remember, the Great Prohibition on alcohol did not work, but awareness programs and self help groups do. An element of self responsibility is essential.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.