And until they do, don’t expect rising health costs to subside. Take a look at the backlash to tough wellness programs:
The conflicts playing out as employers try to contain skyrocketing medical costs mirror tensions in society’s views about privacy, personal responsibility and shared risk. They reflect growing intolerance for smokers and the obese. And they signal an erosion of a belief that once stood at the bedrock of employer health plans: costs ought to be shared equally regardless of health history or habits.
(via GoozNews)
Related posts:
- Personal responsibility: Penalties non-compliant patients
- Should patients bear some responsibility when doctors miss a diagnosis?
- Universal health care: Letting personal responsibility off the hook?
- Why personal health records may be unreliable
- A dose of personal responsibility
- How Americans are adverse to personal responsibility
- Poll: Should obese patients pay more for ambulance transport to the hospital?
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{ 3 comments }
Society needs to take responsibility.
There is a fundamental concept from public health/environmental health that says that the waste produced by a community should not be transported out of that community, but dealt with by it. This avoids the out-of-sight-out-of-mind phenomenon.
The average healthcare consumer doesn’t see how their use of resources affects the rest of their community (or at least risk pool).
Employers are feeling it.
Society as a whole, however, does not. (It still boggles my mind that there are people that can’t figure out how the uninsured and underinsured and high-deductible insured ultimately raise costs for everyone!)
“I want freedom, but I want others to pay for my poor choices.” That ain’t democracy dude.
I guess the study that proved that unhealthy behaviors do not increase total costs given the money saved by shorter life expectancies just didn’t happen.
I must have dreamed it.
Either that or fundamental groundless beliefs are unimpeded by something as trivial as evidence.
Yes, the evidence you refer to is true (it’s not rocket science, which makes me wonder about the logic behind funding the study).
However, if the only outcome variable is total costs, then you’re missing the point.
It’s about value. Value incorporates both benefit (outcomes, service, etc.) and cost.
If the only variable of relevance is total costs, and if it’s cheaper to let people die sooner, then why are we even talking about health care?
Yeah, a dead person cost less. But dead people are also aren’t very productive, unless used as props.
Moronic, irrelevant, and poorly designed study = conclusions of the same quality.
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