Three steps to lower health care costs in Kansas

Roderick Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, gave a lecture on methods to reduce health care last night in the Memorial Union Kanza Room.

“The event is being hosted by the public affairs club,” said John Barnett, assistant professor of social sciences. “I took a group of students to Washburn for an event and some of the students in the group were part of the public affairs group. We were impressed with his talk on healthcare and thought it would be a good idea for him to speak at ESU.”

About 30 people attended, including faculty, students and community members. Bremby began by asking the audience what they believed was driving healthcare cost nationally. Many mentioned pharmaceuticals, paperwork and misuse of resources.

Bremeby said, however, that increases in health care costs are due primarily to people being treated for conditions caused by failure to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

“Our health status is determined by how we live,” Bremby said. “That includes our behaviors and environment. Our genetic makeup and access to health care are not nearly as important factors as people believe.”

One comparison Bremby made was how much longer Americans live compared to other industrialized countries. He said that Americans spend 12.1% of their lives in poor health even though they spend more money than almost any other nation on health care.

Bremby also said that last year Kansas spent more than $16 billion on health care and health related issues and that 125 million Americans have some type of chronic condition such as glaucoma or coronary heart disease.

Three modifiable behaviors that promote better health and a longer lifespan are becoming active, improving diet and quitting all tobacco use or exposure. According to Bremby, studies have proven that all of these behaviors have almost direct correlations to stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.

“The lecture was a more down to earth, more adult version of the movie ‘Supersize Me’,” said Stephen Krauska, freshman secondary English education major. “I’ve been trying real hard to quit smoking but I always seem to start back up again. After this lecture I’m going to try again and even harder this time.”

Bremby said that taking care of the condition after it happens is a waste of money as a state and a nation we should focus on preventing the problem instead.

To do this, we must create a culture that promotes responsible behaviors and adoptive lifestyles that are conducive to healthy living. This can be done by the promotion of healthy choices.

However, Bremby presented a 2002 Nestle statistic that said that the US Government’s spending on health promotions advertisements from the previous year equaled one fifth of the budget of Altoids mints.

There are several factors that contribute to our poor choices as a society, including fast food, technology, the current health care system, school system, churches and even city planning.

Bremby said that we can’t just blame ourselves and a lack of willpower, because buying fattening foods is generally much cheaper than fresh produce and when a city doesn’t have nice sidewalks for individuals to walk on that makes it difficult to take the initiative to walk.

“The most important and cheapest action that college students can take is to focus on the three modifiable behaviors,” Bremby said. “For example, if a student likes to go out on the weekends they should try and pick a location that is smoke free. A student probably depends on walking a great deal but they should maintain that habit throughout life. Finally, a student should try and eat as many fresh fruits and veggies as possible.”

Bremby also compared the current cost of health care in Kansas to the cost of universal health care and found that the cost of insurance coverage was significantly higher.

However, his solution was to promote universal health care with a single payer, claiming that it would save Kansas $800 million per year.

Bremby acknowledged that some people think that, to have universal health care, certain services would have to be removed, but he assured the audience that this was not true. He compared this idea of a single payer universal health care system to Medicare and how that works since it is operated solely by the government.

Right now, the KDHE has a campaign called Healthy Kansas. The program focuses on Kansans making a pledge to work on the three modifiable aspects of behavior in order to decrease health care frequency and costs.