The Six Billion Pound Challenge -- How a Focus on Driving Outcomes can Improve Health Faster and Better than Legislation

I commend the administration for shining the light on the need to improve health in America! While I want to be optimistic about change, I’m skeptical about how much real improvement we will really see under the guise of healthcare reform. Like I’ve noted before, the national conversation we are having -- which bill will pass, a public option or not, an abortion amendment or not, which party is winning -- is just the wrong conversation. Imagine if we were to take all the TV time, print space, blogs, and so on, consumed by the political debate and use it to advance an audacious goal like improving the state of our health! Imagine what we could accomplish with a big sustainable campaign across schools, employers, state governments and the media -- just imagine!

Today’s reality is that more than 75 percent of America’s healthcare costs stem from six chronic diseases. About 133 million Americans -- nearly one in two adults -- live with at least one chronic illness -- and the numbers are forecasted to grow unless we do something differently. Realistically, the only way to maintain some fiscal responsibility under any reform scheme is to address the controllable elements of chronic diseases.

What if we were to focus on a couple of conditions like obesity and diabetes? Two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight, leading to chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and other conditions. Currently, obesity alone costs the health system $147 billion a year! What’s more, obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for developing the six chronic diseases that drive the majority of direct and indirect costs to our system, including diabetes ($218 billion), cardiovascular disease and stroke ($437.5 billion). Not to mention childhood obesity with equally alarming statistics (one in six children are obese), the most alarming of which is that children who are obese have a 70% chance of being obese as adults. Yet, obesity is completely within our control to manage/prevent. 

According to CDC, the average American adult (age 20 and 74) is 5’6 ¾”, weighs 177.65 pounds and has a BMI of 28 (Note: an adult who has a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight and an adult who has a BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese). To achieve a BMI of 24, America needs to lose 29 pounds per person. With the U.S. adult population at 205,639,360, that means 5,963,541,440 pounds…almost six billion pounds.

If we were to collectively lose this weight, we would have a direct impact on obesity and as a result, diabetes and other conditions.  Healthier diet and exercise are things we can immediately start doing -- without legislation. Not to sound trite, but losing weight can be the “quick fix” for our health problems and rising costs. Obese individuals incur an 42% more in medical expenditures -- about $4,800 for per person per year -- compared with normal weight individuals, who incur an average of about $3,400 in such expenses. And little things matter -- for example, walking half an hour a day, five days a week cuts the incidence of diabetes by 40%. Think of the impact we could have on costs and the economy!

I know losing weight is hard work, but letting the growing waistlines of America continue unchecked will only doom us to continue the cycle of out-of-control healthcare spending. While I’m not sure I agree with Japan’s approach to legalizing waistlines, it does seem to have an impact. If we can send a man to the moon, create 200 different versions of yellow sticky notes and other wonders of the modern world, we can figure out how to lose a few billion pounds!

And it should all start with a public education campaign. Even though this is fundamentally marketing, it does belong in the domain of government action. It doesn’t take much to create a great ad campaign, viral marketing and so on. Look at the popularity of shows like the Biggest Loser -- now there’s a whole line of products and services. There have been a lot of one-off “celebrities” championing the cause of weight loss -- Mike Huckabee, Valerie Bertinelli, and others. But these have been isolated. Imagine if the government organized a group of great marketing companies -- Nike, Apple, Proctor and Gamble -- and got them together to create a campaign about obesity and health -- and involve popular sports heros or celebrities -- in a sustained way over a period of time. I’d bet there’d be some impact. Another great example of something that could easily and inexpensively be rolled out to schools nationally is the preventative childhood obesity program driven by the Columbus Research Foundation. These folks thought deeply about how to influence middle school students, and developed a program focused on education around diet/nutrition and exercise -- including a virtual cross-country competitive walk (students used pedometers connected to the Internet via HealthVault to track their progress). Ten middle schools were involved with nearly 1000 participants.

Real reform in healthcare isn’t solely the responsibility of government. It’s about individual responsibility and how we, as consumers, embrace our part of the current situation. I hope that reform will include changes to the payment system to enable and reinforce changes in behavior and stimulate innovation, but we don’t need to rely only on legislation to make things better. We can all individually start making better choices.

I understand that neither 'health reform' nor legislation are easy. As many have noted, whatever legislation passes will not include a 'silver bullet solution' to either goal 'bending the cost curve' or improving the value we get for our healthcare spend. Simple things can make a difference. By taking more responsibility for our own actions, we can impact the healthcare costs of our nation.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2009
  While I am certainly in favor of prevention, more than encouragement and marketing is going to be required to get people in shape. The combination of feeling good from eating food and feeling bad from being overweight/obese, out of shape, and generally discriminated against has many in the population in a vicious cycle that really requires medical intervention. Simply knowing that you are out of shape, at risk of disease and death has hardly been a motivator so far. Likewise, showing some sports figures, actors or models with amazing abilities and bodies is hardly going to motivate most of us to get active when we don't contain that internal motivation already. Programs widely exist for nicotine addiction, narcotic addiction and alcohol addiction, but the prevalence of food addiction programs isn't as widespread even though it has some very similar characteristics. Its time to treat obesity as a medical condition for which doctors recommend and manage treatment.

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2009
  Not a word about all the corporations that sell the food that is the cause of this obesity? How come?

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed