Physical fitness can save billions on healthcare

By Kathy E. Read

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The best strategy for intercepting and shooting down the skyrocketing costs threatening our sprawling, often disjointed health care system won't come from Capitol Hill, but from the hearts and minds of every American.

All 306 million of us have the power to lop hundreds of billions of dollars off our nation's annual medical tab by making a commitment to eating better and exercising more.

Sadly, even with the physical fitness mania of recent decades, the vast majority of Americans don't eat "heart smart" or exercise on a regular basis.

According to a host of recent studies, the United States remains a fast food nation that gulps Big Macs and French fries and guzzles calorie-loaded soft drinks and coffees.

Our public schools spend millions of dollars each year building and repaving parking lots so kids can drive rather than walk to school, at a time when the majority of U.S. school systems have dropped physical education as a requirement.

In homes where annual incomes easily top $300,000 a year, parents seem more focused on fiscal fitness than the physical fitness of their children.

Every dollar Americans spend on treatment of obesity-related chronic illnesses enlarges a growing pile of wasted money that could be used to modernize health care delivery and discover cures for serious diseases such as cancer and HIV-AIDS. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimate that chronic disease accounts for 75 cents of every dollar spent on health care in this country.

The U.S. economic output takes a staggering hit when chronically ill workers take sick days for maladies that might have been prevented by eating healthier and engaging in daily exercise. Their lack of commitment to wellness reduces the available supply of labor, drives up the cost of goods and services, and slashes billions off the gross domestic product. Consider just a few of the deadly consequences:

By midcentury, the preventable impact of the seven deadliest chronic diseases -- diabetes, pulmonary conditions such as asthma, hypertension, mental disorder, heart disease, cancer and stroke -- will cost our country $6 trillion a year.

More than half of all Americans -- some 153 million men, women and children -- have at least one chronic disease.

All told, chronic diseases cost the U.S. economy $1.3 trillion annually and wreak untold anguish and disruption in people's lives. In California alone, the tab is more than $100 billion a year.

Instead of beginning a quixotic quest to ramrod a costly and ineffective universal-payer system through Congress, our politicians ought to make funds available for an aggressive nationwide campaign that focuses on preventing chronic diseases and improving the lifestyles of those who already have them.

With due diligence, Americans with a chronic disease can mitigate its effects with early diagnosis and the proper use of noninvasive medical treatments such as prescription drugs.

At the same time, Congress should demand all schools receiving federal aid reinstitute physical education courses or risk the loss of taxpayer dollars. And, wherever feasible, it should require schools to provide parking for able-bodied students only if their homes are so far from school that walking is impractical.

Finally, every American can put healthy eating and exercising as vigorously as possible at the top of their daily to-do list. You don't need to shell out megabucks for a personal trainer or dietician. Effective workouts and diets are available at dozens of sites online, and your doctor likely can give you a list of the best.

As we begin to take these steps, we'll discover that our health care crisis wasn't a crisis after all, but just us -- all of us -- failing to exercise intelligently our individual responsibilities.

Read is an independent journalist and the former publisher of The Wilson Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE