The Real Cost of Our 'Disease Care' System

"Everyone knows health care costs are busting us, as individuals and as a nation. Reform is needed, but the question is whether it will come and whether it will do the job.

Here's how bad it has gotten: Medical bills were behind nearly two-thirds of all U.S. bankruptcies in 2007, researchers said in June. And most of those folks were middle class; most were homeowners; most went to college; most had health insurance. And that data came from before the economic downturn.

Our health care system should really be called a "disease care system," says Mohammad Torabi of Indiana University Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

As we've heard, the system is busy trying to stamp out diseases without focusing on the prevention of them, which would've cost a lot less. And with nearly 75 million Americans uninsured or underinsured, according to Dr. Mutaz B. Habal of the Tampa Bay Craniofacial Center, more and more of these folks end up at the emergency room, which is a much costlier way of caring for people than seeing them before their conditions become emergencies.

Spending on U.S. health care was more than $2 trillion in 2006 (that's about $7,026 per resident), almost three times the $714 billion spent in 1990, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Health care expenditures that year grew at a rate of 6.7 percent, outpacing inflation, the foundation states.

So will Congress pass a bill that realizes President Obama's commitment to health care reform? And if so, will that stop the madness, described by Habal as insurance companies and hospital administrations competing as armies "to develop and impose a business model for their own profit"? That description was published in a recent editorial in The Journal of Craniofacial Surgery.

"Society is ripe and eager for reform," Habal says, adding that "traditional players in patient care are out. New players are in, and they want a system that works."

Apparently, we weren't eager enough in 1993-94 ... or six other times before that in the past century when legislators failed to pass health care reform legislation, said Timothy McBride, associate dean of public health at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. (The only successful health care reform in the past 100 years has been the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1964-1965.)

Still McBride thinks that once the debate dust settles, "it is much more likely that legislation will pass this year."

More at link. What's your solution for Health Care Reform, and what do you think Obama should do?