How to Fix Obama's Health Plan Before it's Too Late
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These policies and initiatives are necessary for healthcare reform that addresses the true causes of our chronic disease epidemic and exploding costs.This new way of thinking about health and disease is the biggest secret in healthcare today, yet it is the most effective model to address the current drivers of cost and chronic disease. To spread the word, the Institute recently published a detailed white paper called "21st Century Medicine: A New Model for Medical Education and Practice." The same week the white paper was published, I testified on integrative and functional medicine before Senator Edward Kennedy’s Senate working group on healthcare reform, alongside other leaders in healthcare including Drs. Dean Ornish, Mehmet Oz, and Andrew Weil. The full testimony is available for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, "Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation." I also met with key policy makers in the White House. and was heartened by their openness and willingness to find a way to true healthcare reform. More recently, at a retreat center on the edge of a Minnesota pond, I was privileged to be part of a think tank sponsored by the National Institutes of Health on "whole systems research." It was an international gathering of systems biologists, mathematicians, physicists, geneticists, physiologists, psychologists, researchers, and doctors from a dozen countries and diverse backgrounds—Palestinians and Jews, Chinese and Iraqis, French and Germans -- all exploring very important but neglected questions that hold the solution to our epidemic of chronic disease. In this isolated place, the thinkers with their fingers on the pulse of the future all suddenly came to the same conclusion. The way we do research doesn’t help us understand how things really work as a whole, integrated system. In other words, the current model of studying one drug, chemical pathway, or gene for one disease doesn’t give us useful answers to how we get sick and how we can get well. What everyone at the conference understood at that moment is the same truth we need to come to as a nation ... The old, conventional model of medicine and scientific research is simply outdated. It must give way to a new way of thinking about health and illness and a new method for medical practice. A 9-Point Plan for Real Healthcare Reform I believe that real healthcare reform is now possible because of a perfect storm where alignment of economic, scientific, and moral imperatives provides us an opportunity to do well as a nation by doing good, through fundamentally changing the kind of medicine we practice. But to achieve that goal will require the collective imagination, intention, focus, and action of healthcare providers, consumers, industry, and policy makers. A coordinated effort across government agencies and industry sectors focusing on health and wellness, incorporating what we already know, is urgently needed. We also need leadership at the highest levels of the White House to successfully create a culture of health and wellness and transform our healthcare system. The 9-point plan below, while not at the center of the healthcare debate, is essential to create real change and avert disaster. Just as horse-and-buggy makers gave way to the automobile, and 8-track tape manufacturers gave way to the iPod so must conventional medicine give way to a new way of practice. Yes, some industries will fade, as funds are allocated toward policies and initiatives that prevent and treat chronic disease through dietary, lifestyle, and community interventions instead of expensive drugs and medical technologies. But other industries that promote health and wellness will flourish in their place. These policies and initiatives are necessary for healthcare reform that addresses the true causes of our chronic disease epidemic and exploding costs. These are the changes that must be made if we are going to fix our broken healthcare system:
- 1. Change reimbursement to include payment for healthcare teams focused on lifestyle treatments for chronic disease and the use of functional medicine, not just for expensive (and often unproven) procedures.
- 2. Improve research by comparing existing drug- and procedure-based medicine to changes in lifestyle, diet, and other functional and integrative approaches.
- 3. Transform medical education by including nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental factors as core components of the education of health professionals and physicians.
- 4. Establish an Institute for Functional Medicine at the federal level that would develop the educational curriculum for medical schools, residencies, postgraduate education, and other health professionals.
- 5. Improve food policy, agriculture policy, and school and community environments to encourage health by prohibiting food that is known to promote obesity and disease and providing whole, real, fresh foods for our children. Obese teenagers have the same risk of premature death as heavy smokers. We wouldn’t feed our dogs cola, burgers, and fries -- so why do we feed them to our children?
- 6. Conduct projects in community health centers that demonstrate how offering inexpensive, nutritious meals (including takeout), recreational facilities, lifestyle counseling/education (like cooking classes), and healthcare based on functional medicine at one location can dramatically improve health outcomes.
- 7. Impose limits on pharmaceutical and unhealthful food advertising. More than $30 billion is spent on marketing junk and fast food to consumers, including $13 billion targeted at children, and more than $30 billion is spent by the pharmaceutical industry on marketing drugs to physicians (about $30,000 annually per physician). Direct-to-consumer drug advertising also drives prescribing practices based on preferences induced by commercials rather than science.
- 8. Develop a system of electronic medical records that facilitates 21st-century, systems-based, functional medicine. We shouldn’t simply transfer 19th- and 20th-century medical records-keeping systems to an electronic format.
- 9. Create a White House Office on Wellness, Health Promotion, and Integrative Health as a way to develop an ongoing vehicle for coordination of strategy and policy. It should focus specifically on coordinating and developing policies and programs for lifestyle-based chronic disease prevention and management, integrative health care practices, and health promotion.
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