Did you know that about 5 percent of the population is responsible for nearly half of all health care spending in this country?
On the flip side of that, a whopping 50 percent of the population – the healthy ones – only makes up 3.1 percent of all expenditures, according to a new report out of the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation.
Of course, this also means we have 5 percent of the population responsible for inflating premiums for all of us.
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What drives this hyper-concentration of health care spending? Well, according to the report, half of that expensive 5 percent suffer from high blood pressure, at least a third have high cholesterol and about a fourth have diabetes.
So what does all this mean? It means chronic health conditions, most of which are somewhat self-inflicted, drive chronic health spending, which makes things more expensive for all of us. A few bad apples, or fat ones, spoiling the whole batch of cider.
You don't have to look any further that the latest annual obesity report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to tell us we're all fatter than ever. And I need to quote them directly, because this sums it up better than I can:
"In 1995, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent. Now, all but one does."
And it's not that we're necessarily eating more, but we're certainly eating worse. We're exercising less. And when that makes us sick, we want someone else to pay for it.
(How is it we can condition ourselves to take the keys away from someone who's had a litte too much to drink, but we can't take the forks and spoons away from the people making health care more expensive for all of us?)
It's this kind of lazy, adolescent logic that's led us driving health care costs more than any government program or "greedy" insurance carrier. It's time we started taking some responsibility for our own actions.
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