Yahoo Finance: Dr. Ornish Says Lifestyle and Diet are the Keys to Decreasing National Healthcare Costs
Photo Credit: David Goehring, via Flickr Creative Commons
In this segment, Dr. Ornish offers a solution for lowering the nation’s skyrocketing healthcare costs: Lifestyle medicine.
Dr. Ornish offers a solution for lowering the nation’s skyrocketing healthcare costs: Lifestyle medicine.
He tells The Daily Ticker that “limitations to high-tech approaches are becoming clear.” Randomized studies have determined that traditional treatments do not prolong life or prevent heart attacks, he notes, and lowering blood sugar with drugs “doesn’t work nearly enough as it does by getting it down with lifestyle.”
Health care spending in the U.S. rose 3.7% in 2012 to $2.8 trillion or $8,195 per person according to The National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). National medical costs affiliated with obesity a rising epidemic in the U.S. and around the world — were $147 billion in 2008, or $1,429 more per person compared to people of normal weight. More than two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight.
“Three-quarters of the $2.8 trillion that we spent on health care costs last year were predominately ‘sick care’ costs,” says Ornish. “If we can treat the underlying causes, which to a large degree are the lifestyle choices we make each day, we can make better care available to more people at lower costs, and the only side effects are good ones.”
Watch the segment here.
