cost control must be addressed
Cost control won’t be addressed without a radical departure wrt how medicine is practiced in this country, imho.
All this diddling about wrt (what amounts to not much more than) Health Insurance Reform, simply reflects how medicine is practiced (in general), in the modern (western) medical model. In many many cases we suppress symptoms instead of dealing with the root causes of the problem. Yes, we are excellent with crisis-care and getting better at treating life-threatening diseases, and yes, we do need to find a better way to pay for it, but, but, but, according to the CDC 75% of our medical costs are spent on treating chronic (lifestyle) diseases eg diabetes, heart disease, obesity etc. Until doctors are both trained and rewarded to deliver “lifestyle” medicine, ie true preventative care, the system will fail to adequately address both the source of these spiraling costs and the principal causes of disability in the USA. |
