The rapid rise in preventable chronic diseases -- such as obesity and heart disease -- over the last 20 years is hurting U.S. economic productivity, escalating treatment costs and causing unnecessary suffering, a new report says.
That's the bad news.
The good news, according to the report by the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute, is that the trend can be turned around with healthy doses of prevention and early detection.
The report comes amid a national debate over healthcare, what it should include, and who should pay for it -- including government, private insurers, individuals and employers.
The Milken report is part of growing pressure at the same time to allocate more health dollars for prevention and early detection -- rather than just treatment.
Currently Medicare, the government's health insurance program for seniors, and private insurers tend to pay more for surgeries and treatment procedures than for prevention counseling in a physician's office.
Such payments are rooted in the healthcare needs of the population when the payment plans began decades ago.
The Milken Institute, a private economic think tank, joins a growing chorus of researchers and public health experts contending that such a system no longer serves the nation because the population is aging and because the incidence of obesity and preventable diseases among Americans of all ages, including children, has risen alarmingly in recent years.
The Milken report is one of the most ambitious attempts to quantify what is at stake in economic terms.
It says a reorientation toward prevention could avert 40 million cases of seven chronic diseases -- cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions -- in the year 2023.
That would reduce anticipated treatment expenses associated with the seven diseases and improve productivity by $1.1 trillion that year, it says.
The report does not put a price tag on prevention and early detection efforts.
But the authors suggest that the economic gains and reduced treatment costs would more than pay for such efforts.
"Good health is an investment in economic growth," said Ross DeVol, director of the Milken Institute's Center for Health Economics and the lead author of the report, titled "An Unhealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease."
