Rising Health Care Costs

The New York Times today features this op-ed written by Michael Pollan, in which he argues that most of rising health care costs in the US can be attributed to “preventable chronic diseases,” due to our choices in food consumption. Pollan, author of the best-seller “In Defense of Food,” says that if the country is truly serious about curbing health care costs and providing universal coverage, Congress and the president must go head-to-head with the food industry.

No small order, he says, as it’s led by that behemoth – and politically well-connected – interest group, agribusiness. Here’s a sample:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care.

Purposefully or not, his argument seems to mirror what many opponents of the Obama health care plan are saying: differences in health care cost across countries may have more to do with personal choices than with the lack of a national health care system.