Diet Not Doctors
The most interesting piece to be written about the President’s speech and health reform can be found in yesterday’s New York Times.
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
The piece, in other words, doesn’t weigh in on the public option, Medicare reform, or tighter regulations for the insurance industry. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, mulls the link between America’s poor diet and its expensive health care.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care…
There are, of course, numerous reasons for this epidemic. Let’s start with one that doesn’t quite involve the lobbyist-Washington-agribusiness connection: Americans eat more than they should.
But Mr. Pollan hits the nail on the head with his conclusion that big government (with big subsidies) has made the situation significantly worse: “To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.”
As I’ve noted here before, too little of the debate about health-care reform has focused on bettering America’s health. Mr. Pollan is right to bring this up and right to focus on the subsidies.