Posted on 06/12/2009 10:24:38 AM PDT by Ooh-Ah
Market-based solutions can reduce the national health-care bill by 40%.
Effective health-care reform must meet two objectives: 1) It must secure coverage for all Americans, and 2) it must dramatically lower the cost of health care. Health-care spending has outpaced the rise in all other consumer spending by nearly a factor of three since 1980, increasing to 18% of GDP in 2009 from 9% of GDP. This disturbing trend will not change regardless of who pays these costs -- government or the private sector -- unless we can find a way to improve the health of our citizens. Failure to do so will make American companies less competitive in the global marketplace, increase taxes, and undermine our economy.
At Safeway we believe that well-designed health-care reform, utilizing market-based solutions, can ultimately reduce our nation's health-care bill by 40%. The key to achieving these savings is health-care plans that reward healthy behavior. As a self-insured employer, Safeway designed just such a plan in 2005 and has made continuous improvements each year. The results have been remarkable. During this four-year period, we have kept our per capita health-care costs flat (that includes both the employee and the employer portion), while most American companies' costs have increased 38% over the same four years.
Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Most diseases can be managed inexpensively but people demand more expensive care.
Coronary artery disease. Treatment: exercise, weight loss, cutting back on the greasy stuff, adding some greens to the diet, all free. Plus a daily ASA and a $4/month anticholesterol medicine would be adequate treatment for 90% of people.
High blood pressure. Exercise, cut back on the greasy stuff and add some greens to the diet. $4/month prescription again would take care of 90% of people.
Diabetes type II. Exercise, cut back on the carbs and greasy stuff. $4/month prescription plus a blood glucose machine and supplies. This is all that about 90% need.
Cancer. Exercise, cut back on the greasy stuff, add some greens to the diet. Don’t smoke. Colonoscope age 50. PAP screens for the women and you would probably avoid 25-50% of cancers.
We really don’t need the government to dump trillions of dollars into health care to fix the problem. It will only make the problem bigger and costs will go up.
I love my HSA, which is just an employer-subsidized version of a voucher system (or “health stamps”), combined with a high-deductible health plan. My wife and I have accumulated, over the past three years, a tidy sum in our HSA.
No I am saying that I am healthy, 43 year old, normal weight, no health issues and i JUST DO NOT BUY the stories that eating a cheeseburger or smoking a ciggarette will kill you on contact. I want the ability to CHOOSE what I do with my life and not have some Health Nazi telling me how to live it.
If I want fast food one day and tofu the next, that’s MY business not my employers or the governments.
Leave this lifestyle garbage out of health care, kick out the illegals who we ALL end up paying for, and attack the greed in the system already.
The YES, I would be willing to pay more for my “evil” choices. I suspect the more that I would be would be a WHOLE lot less than what it is now.
And to think.. years and years of people eating what they want, smoking what they want.. and no one seemed to need all this “paranoia-care” like we do today. Seems the more health care people have the sicker they are.
Yup, thats my fear as well. First they took our cigarettes, next our food, then who knows..
After watching the PUSH for all this health care over the years, I keep thinking of how the “police” of society will now include your doctor.
Obviously you can’t make a list of habits. However, you can have consequences that aren’t covered. For example - you break your leg sky diving - either not covered, or you have to pay a steep deductable. You wreck your car while drunk driving- not covered at all. Any sexually transmitted disease? I would lean toward not covered. If you have high bloodpressure and/or diabetes and you’re 50 pounds overweight - Not covered. I would cover your gym membership though.
You can have plenty of bad habits that can be mitigated. I ate at McDonalds yesterday. Had a big cheeseburger and fries (did have a diet coke though :-)). Bad yes. But today I ran 7 miles (I’m training for a marathon). So did I mitigate my risk?
Other than certain inherited health problems, people control their own health destinies. Actions have consequences. TANSTAAFL.
I’m saying treat or don’t treat the result. I’m not for banning behavior. But if you show up in the clinic with a sexually transmitted disease - I’m saying I don’t care how you got it, I’m just not going to cover it. Same with drinking. Drink all you want, but when you show with cirosis (sp?) of the liver - tough titty. If you show up 50 pounds overweight and are now diabetic - save up for your own insulin.
To summarize, do what you want, just be prepared to accept the consequences.
I have studied this for the past 30 years as a community-based health planner and later as a hospital planner. I have looked at the impact of weight on health care costs and could not find any correlation in that one factor. Children with congenital heart problems (premies that survived) were at the top of the list for costs. Some of the thinnest people I know have horrible cholesterol/triglyceride and blood pressure problems - heredity played the biggest part for a lot them. I am overweight yet have no problem with blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar. At 61 I was diagnosed with breast cancer after a routine annual mammogram (very small tumor caught early with the lowest score for recurrence). My Gyn said that my weight is a risk factor - to which I responded, tell that to Cheryl Crow, Jacqueline Smith, Melissa Etheridge, et.al. Detecting it early is the key - there was simply nothing that I could have done to prevent BC, but I had total control over catching it early. Elizabeth Edwards admits that she went four years in between mammograms when her BC was caught. No excuse for that - hell to pay. So, should I get a break for doing everything right on the early detection and yet still got the disease? I am very concerned about the OBAMA crusaders that will so micro-manage our lives once they get their hands on our medical insurance.
You know what send 20,000 children to the ER each year? Little League Base Ball. Look out America!
Are they going to only sell heart healthy foods? I doubt it.
For most people it is not the food but the quantity....snip
Try finding a breath freshener or gum *without* phenylalanie - can we say across-the-board drugging of the masses? Phenylalanine is structurally closely related to dopamine, epinephrine (adrenaline) and tyrosine. OUR KIDS DON’T HAVE ADD or ADHD - they are having it given to them. Try finding a teenager who doesn’t chew through a pack of Orbit a day. Their teeth don’t decay, but they can’t really focus on anything, either. Or else they feel really hyper and stressed. Nutrasweet/Aspartame is finding its way into everything.
When I was little, Heinz Ketchup *didn’t* have High Fructose Corn Syrup in it....why does it now? Why does EVERYTHING have it in it, yet, no one is connecting the dots that diabetes is on the rise (and not just in the obese) as well as pancreatic cancer?
Fluoride intentionally put in our water? Look that one up - that’s a GOOD one - across the board “prozac” plus the cause of several auto-immune and degenerative diseases. Has nothing to do with good teeth, everything to do with $$$ and control.
Oh, and your 25 neighbors on birth control pills and anti-depressants? RIGHT BACK into the water system and not filtered out. Gee - we wonder why the fish in our rivers are being born with both sets of sex organs, but no one is making the connection between the rise in both breast cancer and prostate cancer.
Save yourself the effort of buying bottled water - the chemicals in the plastic bottles cause the same cancers with the release of xeno-estrogens. And if the water isn’t purified by reverse osmosis, that pesky fluoride is still in there, too.
(I could go on an on.)
The same companies that make the chemicals that poison us are the same companies that come up with the “medicines” to manage the afflictions they cause.
“THEY” get us coming and going. And I truly believe this has been carefully and intentionally orchestrated.
Getting on a treadmill and abstaining from McDonald’s is just a small piece of the pie.
So when are they going to go to genetic testing? ;-)
re: The key to achieving these savings is health-care plans that reward healthy behavior.
That is all very curious to me in light of their recent corporate push to encourage and promote the gay lifestyle, including gay marriage. Since gays engage in risky behaviors which lead to high medical costs we have a huge contradiction.
Here is the email I received today from the American Family Association:
Safeway wants you to know how proud they are to support homosexuality. In fact, they want you to support it too!
In Safeway branded stores across America, Safeway is placing large posters encouraging you to celebrate the gay lifestyle with them during the entire month of June.
Safeway is dedicating itself to promoting homosexuality. An AFA supporter in New Mexico reported to us that her local store also included a “WE SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE” poster. When she returned a day later to take a photograph of it, it had been removed because of the huge number of complaints by local customers.
Safeway owns and operates 1,516 stores in the U.S. Safeway operates under these names: Safeway, Dominick’s, Vons, Genuardi’s, Randall’s, and Tom Thumb
And there you go! Look at all these athletes who are getting their knees and hips replaced. Yes, exercise can be dangerous to your health - so, I want another break for being a very safe couch potato.
Now that you are older and less healthy you don’t have insurance at all. You have a medical-care continuous prepayment plan that pays for your medical needs and for many bureaucrats salaries and government mandates.
The article says that they have implemented this program among their non-union employees, and 74% are participating.
They are currently negotiating with the union to expand it to their other employees. My guess is that it will be approved, once the (healthy) members realize it will be money back in their pocket.
Nobody is saying eating a cheeseburger or smoking a cigarette will kill you on contact. What they’re saying is being overweight or having smoke damaged lungs tends to put you in a group of people who spend more time and money on medical care, which thus makes you more expensive to the insurance company, which thus makes the insurance company want to charge more to cover you, and Safeway is finding that passing that additional cost onto you is saving them money. They aren’t removing anybody’s ability to do anything, they’re just no longer footing the bill for their employee’s health damaging habits.
It’s really not that unusual. Back in the day when insurance was almost exclusively privately bought they ran you through a physical and the worse shape you were in the more they charge. Life insurance still does that. And like they say in the article, auto insurances charges more for people that get tickets and make frequent claims. Somewhere along the lines employer paid health insurance got disconnected from this equation, it became universal, everybody paid the same regardless of what kind of shape they were in and how much they cost the insurance company. This caused “healthy” people to get punished because the insurance companies had to up the rates on everybody. Safeway is reconnecting their insurance with the equation.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re going to be a more frequent user, which obese smokers usually will be, you’re going to be more expensive, nothing wrong with charging more.
HA!!!
Not yet.
There's still *free* choice, don'tcha know.
Not to worry Bruinator, zerO's just getting started & "We ain't seen nothing, yet." ;^)
Patience pal, your side won.
You'll be happy, soon enough.
There's a lot of truth in that. My best friend started taking some sort of cholesterol-management drug. Didn't work, so he tried something else. That had side effects, so he needed a prescription to deal with the side effects. That scrip had side effects, so that touched off a whole 'nother round of doctor visits.
Now, he takes a half-dozen pills. No idea if he feels any better, or if he's any healthier.
Mom and Dad are in the same boat, as are many others I know.
I'm not a doctor-hater, or a Big Pharma hater...but I do think that people get over-prescribed.
did you read the article? it’s for the non-union employees
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