As the health care debate heats up, here is a spin with a theme common to many posts on this site: Incentives.
The title of the article in the Atlantic doesn’t mince words: Fat Smokers with High Blood Pressure Beware. It discusses the plan for health care reform held by Steven Burd, CEO of Safeway.
Mr. Burd recently wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled How Safeway is Cutting Health-Care Costs, but of interest to a larger audience is the subtitle - Market Based Solutions can Reduce National Health-Care Costs by 40%. The key, Burd says, is to reward healthy behavior. That is exactly how Safeway has been able to keep their costs flat over the last four years while the costs at most American companies have gone up 38%.
Basically, if you are healthy, you pay less for insurance. While that may seem discriminatory at first, consider these statistics used in his piece:
- 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior.
- 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity).
- 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable.
- 60% of cancers are preventable.
- 90% of obesity is preventable.
Mr. Hurd claims that had the nation begun the same incentive-based program in 2005, the country’s 47 million uninsured could have been covered with the savings ($550 billion) nearly four separate times.