Rights, Responsibilities And Health Care
By Star Parker
June 1, 2009
Page 2 of 2
At our annual health care bill of about $2.5 trillion dollars, savings of 1.5 percent would be about $40 billion.
Let's consider how much of our $2.5 trillion health care bill are costs resulting from behavior that individuals choose.
Googling around and totaling up, I come up with about $240 billion, about ten percent of our total health care bill. This is roughly the total reported health care costs associated with obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS and sedentary life styles.
Worth noting is that these occur disproportionately in low income groups who get their health care free. More than half our spending on HIV/AIDS, for example, is out of Medicaid. Can it be accidental that the huge health care costs related to lifestyle issues are most pronounced where individuals do not personally bear the costs of how they behave?
How can our health care problems be solved by more entitlements and bureaucrats when this is what is causing the problem to begin with?
Viktor Frankl had it right. At the heart of the solution for our health care crisis is personal responsibility. This means more freedom and more markets.
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Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker(at)urbancure.org
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA. >> Back -- Page 1 2
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