Chronic disease eats most healthcare resources
By Thomas Day
Recently, I read a McKinsey article titled “Making health care healthy,” by Gary Cohen. While it seemed a call for a type of change that was beyond a comprehensible and actionable scale, he did discuss some very interesting and mind bending issues that gave me real pause.
The central idea is that chronic disease is swamping us. Cohen states that “70 percent of all health care expenditures in the U.S. are devoted to treating chronic disease; only 4 percent of the healthcare budget is focused on primary prevention.”
Some supporting statistics from the article: learning disabilities impact one in six children; infertility impacts one in six couples; one in three women and almost one in two men will get cancer in their lifetimes; among children under 14, cancer is the leading cause of death by illness. Also, obesity affects almost 90 million Americans – at a cost of $147 billion per year!
Cohen notes that our exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals in our environment is partially to blame. There are also other factors, such as food produced by a “failed industrial food system,” as well as poor individual choices. Our health care system seems to be like a machine designed to pull people out of a river, but that never moves upstream to keep them from falling in, he says. There is some evidence we can do something better. As evidence, he cites some really small wins: eliminating mercury thermometers; creating medical waste incinerators; and improving the food quality in hospital cafeterias.
Wow, if that’s the best we’ve done to date, this looks like a pretty huge problem.
Thomas Day is president of HMC.
