Our aging societies are going to create an increased demand for healthcare. The reason that this is so critical is that healthcare is so expensive. The US spends over 15%¹ of GDP on healthcare, Canada 10%¹, the UK over 8%¹ and France about 11%¹. A 25% increase in demand will have a devastating impact on national budgets.

There are not a lot of options available to control healthcare spending. Would you like your care rationed? Do you want your cancerous relative denied the latest treatment? You, just like everyone else, probably answered “no” to both of those questions. 

This begs the question then, how do you reduce demand without reducing the available health services or rationing care? The only way to do so is to reduce the inputs to the health system, that’s to say reduce the number of sick people.

In the US, the biggest growing diseases are all, largely, preventable. Cancer, obesity, diabetes are all western diseases linked to the western way of life. The bad news is that they are growing in most western countries, but he good news is that behaviour is a large factor in a lot of these diseases and behaviour can be changed.

Precedents have already been made. Tobacco consumption is largely under-control, if not on its way to becoming a niche activity. Hence, a similar campaign needs to be waged against products that are making westerners sick.

A lot of these products are provided as processed food. Governments need to take subsidies away from products that are being grown, such as industrial corn, that are used in processed foods. These foods are artificially cheap, yet are driving governmental costs in the health system! The government is subsidizing our ill health! Processed foods need to bear taxes to help cover the costs of education campaigns and other initiatives to help people eat better.

The agricultural industry, especially the livestock industries, need to start paying the costs of cleaning up their environmental damage. Large ponds of cattle manure and antibiotics that are infiltrating into ground water need to be cleaned up, and big-agriculture needs to bear the costs, even if that means food costs will rise.

We need to arrive at a situation where good food is cheap and plentiful and bad food is expensive. In many places, this is the exact opposite of what is happening today. In the US, Obama has reformed healthcare, but he hasn’t spent time improving the inputs to the system.

There is also a huge human cost to ill health, in terms of quality of life, ability to earn, self-esteem and happiness. So much can be done to help people feel happier through better health that it’s terrible more effort is not spent on this.

Make your impact, eat better yourself and lead a more Zen life. Hopefully then you’ll need to use fewer medical services.

¹ OECD 2006 figures
Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aturkus/272624100 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/3366720659

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