Reform Health Care Now: We need to practice preventive medicine - Daily Finance
Reported that the historic anti-smoking legislation Congress passed last week could curtail "the 400,000 deaths and $100 billion in health care costs attributed every year to smoking in the U.S."Some have criticized the legislation as unnecessary government intervention, but these types of actions may be needed to advance what President Obama referred to as "the cause of healthy living" in his speech to the American Medical Association (AMA) on Monday. "Five of the costliest illnesses and conditions -- cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lung disease, and strokes -- can be prevented," he said. "And yet only a fraction of every health care dollar goes to prevention or public health."
Let's look at obesity, which affects half the U.S. population and has become an epidemic, as we've heard many times. In a recent Fox News interview, Ken Thorpe, a professor at the Emory University School of Public Health said that the number of obese people in the U.S. has doubled since 1985, and this has led to a 30 percent increase in health premiums.
