Saturday, June 13, 2009
How our behavior affects our health
The CEO of Safeway wrote an interesting article on health-care in the June 12 WSJ. He points out that "70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. 74% of all health-care 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." Safeway has instituted health-care coverage based on how much progress its employees are making in each of the four above-mentioned disease categories. Employees save big bucks when they demonstrate progress.
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This is a toughie. Will there come a time with type of approach that someone who has trouble "preventing" one of those be penalized? I'm just not sure I like the idea of entities telling people what kind of health care they get based on what happens. For example, my dad was in Vietnam, was exposed to Agent Orange, now has insulin-dependent diabetes, now overweight...none of this was his fault. Will that be taken into consideration?
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